They found it in the gloom of a forgotten loft, pressed into the dirty blanket of foam glass insulation. In his final years, the old man had scribbled down every strange idea, every vivid dream, desperate to save these treasures of the mind. Twenty years after his passing, they uncovered the Crashbook.
A new page turns, revealing twenty-six more games I have not played.
518/ Bernband
A sci-fi exploration sim for people who like to wander. Get lost in an alien city, hang out with locals, see some sights. There’s no goal but to stroll. Where will your feet take you?
Crash notes: We all know I’m a big fan of the original Bernband especially as it featured at the end of Into the Black. Well Tom van den Boogaart is remaking it as a “full size” game!
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Unreleased
519/ Hotel Infinity
At Hotel Infinity, every detail has been prepared for your arrival. Every corridor leads somewhere you’ve never been, and no room is ever quite the same. Explore at your leisure, but don’t wander too far.
Crash notes: Manifold Garden follow-up set in Hilbert’s Hotel? Unfortunately, for most of us, this seems to be a VR exclusive.
Meta Quest, PS VR2 | Official Site Link | Unreleased
520/ Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils
Curse Crackers is a fast-paced acrobatic platformer where you bounce, vault, and fight your way through a whimsical world with the help of your loyal companion. Eat snacks, collect items, and travel the world to stop Bonnie and her band of troublemakers!
Crash notes: Another recommendation I picked up from Campfire Burning who described this platformer as a title that blends “Klonoa and classic Treasure mechanics with Sonic speed”. This is not the developer’s first rodeo either, they had already released a similar retro-styled title in 2020.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Aug 2022
521/ Cyclopean: The Great Abyss
Cyclopean: The Great Abyss is a small scale, mechanics driven CRPG\/Roguelike in a retro, monochromatic style, that takes place in the underworld of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands.
Crash notes: Honestly, look at this.
Windows | Steam Link | Just released
522/ Xenopurge
Xenopurge is a tactical auto-battler where you are a Commander tasked with purging the Xenos threat. Operate from a remote command center, issuing indirect orders via multi-screen interfaces. Plan routes, set priorities, and adapt as missions escalate and feel the true weight of being in command.
Crash notes: Curious about this Duskers style tactics game where you’re fighting against a awkward interface as much as a horde of bloodthirsty monsters. A review of the recent demo on PC Gamer suggested it showed promise but the demo itself was too limited.
Windows | Steam Link | EA
523/ ZaciSa: Idle Defense!
A Tower Defense game mashed with Idle Clicker mechanics set inside a wonderful world of crayons. Build out your defenses, go grab a snack and watch your forces take on enemy units. Be as active or idle as you want!
Crash notes: I come out in a rash when idle mechanics are in town, but this looks adorable.
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | Unreleased
524/ Alterspective
Alterspective is a perspective swapping open world adventure. Use your unique abilities to navigate an intriguing land full of colorful characters and mind-bending challenges.
Crash notes: Perspective-switching with, what looks like, a focus on parkour movement. I have to admit to being wary of how natural this will feel in practice but someone is giving this a go, so let’s keep an eye on this.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
525/ Ghost Town
Ghost Town is a single player VR puzzle-adventure from the makers of The Room. London, 1983. Edith Penrose is a ghost hunter, busy exorcising her way through the city’s restless spirits. But after her brother goes missing Edith must draw upon her wits & supernatural talents to unravel the mystery.
Crash notes: Obviously I don’t do VR but I have to include this as The Room was so good. I had less kind words for The Room 2 and The Room 3, but they were still good.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Jul 2025
526/ s.p.l.i.t
A short psychological horror game, where you attempt to gain root access into an unethical superstructure.
Crash notes: From the developer of Buckshot Roulette.
Windows, Linux | Steam Link | Just released
527/ Mythmatch
A Greek mythology anti-capitalist merge game about the power of community over authority. Challenge the Gods. Inspire the Mortals. Rebuild Ithaca.
Crash notes: There’s a lot going on in the trailer and it doesn’t seem to be just a series of match puzzles.
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Unreleased
528/ Birdigo – bird word game
A word game about migrating birds – inspired by Wordle and Balatro. Play cards, build your deck, trigger combos and guide your flock. From John August (Corpse Bride) and Corey Martin (Bonfire Peaks).
Crash notes: A Balatro-style game with Corey Martin on the team – okay, I’m game.
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Just released
529/ Arctic Awakening
A first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.
Crash notes: Looks interesting but I’m going to take offence at the “world-class voice acting” cited in the description. Also, “your only companion” seems a bit disingenuous as the trailer shows you talking to the co-pilot incessantly over a smartwatch?
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Unreleased
530/ Future? No Thanks!
Future? No Thanks! is a narrative-driven, open-world adventure set in an ecosocialist utopia. You’re old, bitter, and scheduled for euthanasia. Enjoy your last day in a future that works for everyone but you.
Crash notes: Molleindustria!
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
531/ Stacklands
Stacklands is a village builder where you stack cards to collect food, build structures, and fight creatures. For example, dragging a Villager card on top of a Berry Bush card will spawn Berry cards which the villagers can eat to survive. Play your cards right and expand your village!
Crash notes: Three years old but only just drifted across my radar but I suppose I should just make Sokpop Collective a permanent addition to my radar. Apparently this is “very good”.
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Released Apr 2022
532/ SOVIET SPOOKY TALES: Green Eyes
A nonlinear pixel art visual novel set in the 1980s Soviet Union, inspired by Soviet children’s spooky stories.
Crash notes: Obligatory horror game.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
533/ Simulacosis
Simulacosis is a survival centric RPG game with a primary focus on, building, crafting, questing and base management. Its gameplay is intended to be casual/cozy to tactical with emphasis on storytelling and relationships.
Crash notes: I suspect this is way too ambitious for its own good but enjoy the graphics. There’s also some interesting discussion in the comments on the game design document.
PC | Itch Link | Unreleased
534/ Tezzel: The Tilemaker’s Tale
Tezzel is a cozy, colorful, and crafty puzzle game where every level completed becomes a colorful tile that gets added to the mosaic Wall. Discover mind-bending mechanics across 100+ handcrafted levels.
Crash notes: Looks like a riff on The Witness puzzle template where you have to connect points of the same colours with a continuous line but there might be multiple points in each colour and the points can move… and… and…
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | Unreleased
535/ Beyond the Doors
An atmospheric horror, exploration and automation game all set in the dim halls of an apartment building
Crash notes: Love the wires hanging free through the corridors, less sure about the eight-character alphanumeric passwords.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
536/ Dissimilar
Dissimilar blends together semi-open exploration, a narrative laced with mysteries, and an engaging turn-based battle system.
Crash notes: Two-person French team. Current trailer shows off some decent production work.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
537/ Öoo
A Bomb Caterpillar’s Big Adventure! “Öoo” is a charming yet mysterious exploration puzzle platformer where you discover creative ways to use bombs!
Crash notes: Follow-up to ElecHead. First time I’ve seen a disclosure on the Steam page like this: “The text on this store page is automatically translated by AI.”
Windows | Steam Link | Just released
538/ Carceri
A cozy, first-person explorer, full of dazzling sights, a charming story, cute creatures, and a living landscape that you Art Direct, as you bop about with a world-altering camera. Enjoy your virtual vacay!
Crash notes: From a self-described “AAA vet”. At times, the visual look made me remember Eskil Steenberg’s defunct Love MMORPG. Don’t be fooled, though, I don’t think any game – including this one – has produced anything like Love‘s painterly graphics?
Windows | Steam Link | Released May 2024
539/ Chronicles IV: Ebonheim
A classic dungeon-crawling CRPG with nuanced character building and brutal, turn-based tactical combat. Explore a fully non-procedural world that changes when you die. Progress on the backs of your past-slain heroes by using their gear and memories to carry onward.
Crash notes: The talk of brutality in the gameplay might make this my jam.
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | Unreleased
540/ Neverway
After quitting her dead-end job, Fiona starts over on a farm and becomes the immortal herald of a dead god. Make friends, fight through horrors and pay your debt in this nightmarish life sim RPG.
Crash notes: Elevator pitch? Picture, my friends, Stardew Valley – but set on an evil island! And with music from Disasterpeace.
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | Unreleased
541/ Crabmeat
A short first-person-point-and-click-survival-horror game set in a future Antarctic fisheries region where you are a prisoner tasked with crabbing for the priceless southern King Crab.
Crash notes: From ex-Samurai Punk developers.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
542/ Tokyo Underground Killer
Dive into the neon-drenched deep underground of Tokyo as Kobayashi, a deadly assassin who harnesses the power of blood energy. Use your sword, mystical abilities and powerful weapons to assassinate highly dangerous maniacs and stop the invasion of the brutal Flatliners terrorizing Tokyo.
Crash notes: Yes, I took a look at the screenshots and I was like: sure.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
543/ Heartworm
Pass through the threshold and enter a world born of memories. Defend yourself with a camera while solving death’s mysteries in a reverent evolution of 90’s survival horror, integrating both fixed cameras and over the shoulder perspectives.
Crash notes: A demo for Heartworm was originally released as part of the first Haunted PS1 Demo Disc. Fixed camera survival horror.
Windows | Steam Link | Just released
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“CRPG\/Roguelike”
[Moomintroll brandishes knife]
“As of Version 0.9.936, you can now opt to play Cyclopean: The Great Abyss as a roguelike game with perma-death.”
[Moomintroll sheathes knife]
the link for Arctic Awakening is incorrect; it is actually the link for the next game in the list, and this appears to be true all the way from there to the end.
Matt, as always, ready with the knife.
vfig This is very embarrassing. I’ve just had to redraft all the entries by hand. This happened as my master control spreadsheet didn’t have enough entries for this bumper version of Crashbook and I kept inserting rows… but this didn’t fix the links properly on the new rows. *sob* I really have to find a way to tighten up this process. It’s really unacceptable in this day and age. It’s not the first time this has happened…
But all fixed now, thanks for the raising the support ticket.
You aren’t going to believe it, but I didn’t notice the in-game cat in Tezzel until the end-of-demo screen promised that in the full game you can pet the cat. Anyway, I would say not really a riff on The Witness template; it’s about moving things to get places, and often it boils down to “make the lines go from A to B,” but sometimes it doesn’t. In some ways more like Baba Is You without rule manipulation than The Witness without rule discovery, which is to say not much like either of those things.
I had a couple of quibbles, that it can be visually a bit confusing, the interface a bit clonky, and some of the puzzles have too many steps, and also I’m concerned that in the end the big wall is going to look like a mess. But there were some clever puzzle ideas in there, enough for me to play through the demo! I wishlisted it.
I’ve played some of the Mythmatch demo (I think from a Bluesky rec?)–there’s a sort of puzzly overworld mostly turn-based bit and then I unlocked a timed match-three and I don’t know. Not sure I need a timed match-three that’s not You Must Build A Boat. YMMV. Heart seems to be in the right place and it’s definitely not bad or anything.
Lightning round of uninformed reactions!
Bernband: Bernband!
ZaciSa: Aren’t tower defenses usually kind of idle? Cute! Hard to spell!
Future? No Thanks!: PITTSBURGH MENTIONED
Stacklands: Dang look at that second video on Steam, which is not about Stacklands. Bernband!
Carceri: Damn now I want to play Love except it’s Proteus. Really Carceri sounds like kind of my thing, if it’s a no-combat Soulslike. But, of course…
Chronicles IV: Ebonheim: Intrigued by this fully non-procedural dungeon. No really. Also one of my vaporware ideas is a r****like where level transitions involve time passing instead of staircases, so intrigued by that too.
I enjoyed Stacklands when I played it a few years ago. Seemed like a game in the Cultist Simulator design space, where clever mechanical details can make up for visual simplicity, and where both of those make for a game that can become quite mechanically complex.
I think. It’s been years.
I forgot my Birdigo comment, which is that I love Corey but I don’t see any Wordle there? To me Wordlelikes are about some kind of progressive guess and feedback mechanic but everything I saw in the trailer was about making words from your letters which is just plain Scrabble? I’ve avoided Balatrolikes so far so I can’t tell if that bids to be a good Balatrolike, let me know.
I don’t want all the Electron Dance comment love to go to Blue Prince, so maybe it’s time I added a few words of support.
Tezzel: Matt, I saw the trailer looked like you had to draw continuous lines between endpoints and that’s how it figured for me. If it feels different, that’s probably a bonus.
Carceri: Randomly, but this was originally called Carceri Zero on release. I had a tab for it and my brain went, “huh, what’s this Carceri game, I don’t remember this” so the name change did it’s job and got me thinking about it a second time. I’d had it tabbed for months before deciding it should be on Crashbook. Yes, I have some sort of standards for Crashbook entries that I barely understand. It cannot be codified or written into law. But 50% of the rules are “horror” I think.
There are so many of these damn games I want to play. Been working through Strange Jigsaws which is just lovely and I kid you not harder than 20 Small Mazes.
Stacklands: This came into view after someone gushed a glowing comment about it recently. And I’d never heard of it before! James, your ambiguous description dredged up from memory sounds as good as my Crashbook descriptions, all vibe and no specifics 😀
Balatrolikes: I was so in to Balatro for a few weeks and then I just felt like I was throwing endless hours into it for no… point. It’s a strange thing to say but there was an emptiness about it, like it’s a top-dollar addiction machine without all of the normal decorations we associate with upgrade-o-rama titles. Fuck, I’ve got an ranty article to write about this. But I have to finish my Twine first. Anyway, when I sense a Balatro-like, I’m instinctively wary now, hence I’ve not rushed to Birdigo.
Oh, oh, OH. Aren’t Tower Defence games like idling games? A hard disagree on this. A good TD title asks you to figure out the chinks in your armour, to figure out what kind of towers you have to put down, when and where. A bad tower defence game is just numbers go up clown game. Also known as an idle game. I write this here but I haven’t played a TD game for years 😀 It was probably Immortal Defense, the TD game to end all TD games… well, I guess it did end them all for me!
Tezzel: Yes! To belabor the point, on a lot of the levels, you have pieces that leave behind colors, which block pieces of different colors, which means that some of these puzzles are isomorphic to line-drawing with various twists. But there are other mechanics like “this piece moves as far as it can” and “this piece falls if it can” which means that besides line-drawing puzzles you can also have Unitied-style puzzles and you can combine them, etc.
Tower defense: I beg your pardon! What I meant was, isn’t the deal with tower defense that in the classic ones you set them down and your tower fires automatically? Which is probably different from idle games. In Immortal Defense I’m given to understand that frantically moving your cursor is also important. I’ve never played Immortal Defense though at this point… ah jeez, I’m not even sure I could buy a DRM-free file and see if it runs under Wine. I also am just not drawn to tower defenses. Only one I’ve really tried much is Fieldrunners where I was like “100 waves?!! and I’ll probably screw myself with a bad choice at the beginning???!” Though Fieldrunners is maybe very basic? This hasn’t stopped me from vaporwaving a non-violent tower defense (you place various advertisements in a shopping mall to break down the psychic resistance of the shoppers who flow through; like almost every nonviolent reskin, this makes more sense of “defeat an enemy and get coins” than the violent one did).
Stacklands: This is one where the blurb and trailer are so underwhelming that I’m like “This must be really good if people like it.” James’s description adds to that!
Some reverse-Crashbook, which is games that I (not you) have played (not not played)! I picked up Cipher Zero because it was in a bundle with Linelith and LOK Digital and Strange Jigsaw and I have the first two and can’t play Strange Jigsaws and it is… OK so far? Like it’s not really very rule-discovery, there is so far a bit of rule discovery at the beginning of some worlds and then puzzles where you apply the rules which is fine, I guess, and also it is completely linear AFAICT which hasn’t been a problem so far, but I think I would really like a game that was exactly like The Witness except that I didn’t hate it. Linelith though! Linelith is amazing! It is incredible how much discovery it gets out of a simple and logical set of rules! It’s by Patrick Traynor and it seems unfair to other games to compare them to it!
Also I played TYPE HELP which is a find-things-in-the-database game that makes it into an explicit puzzle and is very good. It’s being remastered on Steam as The Incident at Galley House, with voice acting and a visual novel presentation from the Roottrees team, both of which I have tentative mixed feelings about. Earlier today I had taken my wife’s phone because mine was charging, and I texted her on my phone to say that I was buying bagels, and I reflected that earlier I had texted someone else from her phone to say that it was me, not her, and that this would make the puzzle fair for the eventual player.
I don’t mean that James’s description of Stacklands is underwhelming, I mean it adds to my confidence that it’s good, because it explains why a good game would wind up with such an underwhelming blurb!
Also part of the moral with Cipher Zero is that, though I really like John Walker, our tastes in puzzle games don’t quite line up.