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-seven more games I have not played.
571/ Titanium Court
A surreal strategy game for clowns and criminals.
Crash notes: This game was a total secret – except to the 283 indie developers who sang its praises as soon as it got on the IGF noms. And then it took the Grand Prize! And then it got released!
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Just released
572/ HYPNOS
HYPNOS is a first-person adventure and exploration game, set in a lovecraftian megastructure fever dream. Enter the Nameless City at the edge of Dreams. Follow the trail into the shadow of the Holy Mountain. Embrace your destiny.
Crash notes: The trailer shows off some divine sights. What this is, I cannot tell you.
Windows | Steam Link | EA
573/ I Saw a Flying Saucer
An interactive fiction about a man who lost his wife and goes in search of a UFO that shouldn’t exist.
Crash notes: Says it’s a “cinematic experience with short playtime and a single ending”.
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Unreleased
574/ Dap
Dap is a horror-action-adventure about gathering and protecting a pack of fragile creatures called Daps. Lead your Daps to safety through an eerily beautiful world, fighting off threats, solving puzzles, and avoiding the infection that twists your companions into something alien and terrifying…
Crash notes: This looks intriguing but also stressful! Reviews suggest that you probably need to play through this twice.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Sep 2021
575/ a permanent echo
Uncover Sabotage, Conspiracy and Counter-Revolution in this cyberpunk detective mystery. Using a mind-probing interface, you explore and act within memories, collect facts, meet agents of change and enormous corporations. Build your case against a person torn between idealism and turmoil.
Crash notes: From Three More Years who made Mini Mini Golf Golf which was an IGF Nuovo Award finalist.
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Unreleased
576/ Hocus Focus
A cozy gamified focus tool to help you work, study, or relax to soothing tunes. Customize your space and summon your focus with productivity tools. You’re a student in a magic university – control time and weather, unlock new locations, collect cute Mitzkins, and level up in-game and in real life!
Crash notes: Meant to be a focus tool as you can set your own task limits and timers in the game, but I’m wondering if fiddling with your ‘magical workspace’ and collecting cats might prove too distracting?
Windows, Linux | Steam Link | Unreleased
577/ Quite a Ride
Pedal through the fog, but never look back. Trapped in a constantly shifting horror, you must ride, conserve your phone’s battery, and decode cryptic messages to escape. Explore, survive, uncover the truth.
Crash notes: Someone described this under the trailer on YouTube as “Pacific Bike”.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
578/ Eclipsium
Longing for light, a sunless world begins devouring itself. Every step shifts the landscape beneath you as you search for what remains of her.
Crash notes: Surreal but also somewhat graphic – sign me up.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Sep 2025
579/ Planet of Lana II
As greed and power divide the tribes of their home planet, Lana and her little companion, Mui, must stand together against the forces reshaping their world – struggling not just for survival, but for the soul of their home.
Crash notes: Okay, it’s been three years but somehow this sequel feels like it’s out fast? I mean, I haven’t played the first one yet! It was featured on Crashbook #18.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Mar 2026
580/ Memory’s Reach
Memory’s Reach is a first person puzzle-adventure metroidvania. Explore labyrinthian megastructures, solve mind-bending puzzles, and wield fantastic alien technology in a quest to reveal the legacy of a doomed civilization.
Crash notes: Beguiling but I have this nagging feeling I’ve seen a lot of games that have a similar vibe of hygenically clean SF environments integrated into an alien world (Subnautica, Claire de Lune). I’m getting old. This kind of thing used to be my jam.
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Unreleased
581/ 1 Billion Spells
Can a freshman wield the power of magic? Enrol in the academy and create your own crazy, fancy, weird, and powerful spells. Battle rogue magical creatures in this strategic arena survival roguelite.
Crash notes: From Icedrop Games (developer on LOK Digital) this arena shooter looks like you have to construct spells from components and see how they work? The teaser comes off more like an auto shooter.
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | Unreleased
582/ DEMON DUST
DEMON DUST is a Survival Horror Dungeon Crawler with a unique, mouse driven interface. Gain knowledge to survive and reach deeper and deeper floors.
Crash notes: Looks like a dungeon shooter with exploration elements – a lot of hidden stuff to find. But the reviews cite all sorts comparative experiences from Ultima Underworld to King’s Field.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
583/ CiniCross
CiniCross is a dark fantasy roguelite where nonogram puzzles meet dungeon crawling. Solve increasingly complex puzzles, choose your path through a branching dungeon, and bend the rules using powerful artifacts. Each room is a puzzle. Each boss, a deadly challenge.
Crash notes: Good to see a new puzzle combat mashup, although the first comment I saw on Steam said it got too difficult. MAYBE THEY JUST CAN’T SOLVE PUZZLES
Windows, Linux | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
584/ Astro Protocol
Astro Protocol is a high-stakes, turn-based 4X space strategy game distilled into intense one-hour matches. Six factions, randomized maps, tech trees, and anomalies ensure every run is unique. Victories are earned against challenging opponents that play to win.
Crash notes: A 4X game in which a session lasts an hour? Now you’re talking.
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
585/ Crisol: Theater of Idols
Crisol is a survival horror adventure set in a twisted version of Spain. As a soldier captured by religious dogmatism, you must use your own blood as ammunition, without draining to the point of death. Explore the cursed island of Tormentosa, uncover dark secrets, and battle horrifying enemies.
Crash notes: Art direction here is off the scale.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
586/ Key Fairy
A hand-drawn, pacifist, folkloric, bullet-hell. Grapple and dance around monsters to collect their shattered stars, weave your way through twisting paths, encounter strange folk, uncover ancient magic, and evade forgotten gods in this frenetic 2D action-adventure.
Crash notes: Looks absolutely stunning. I must underline the words bullet hell for the aging gamers amongst us.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
587/ Relooted
Reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums in this Africanfuturist heist game. Recruit crew members, plan escape routes, acquire the precious cargo, and bounce out of the joint as fast as you can.
Crash notes: I love the conceit.
Windows | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
588/ The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu
In up to four player co-op, form a group of explorers searching for treasure. In this cursed jungle, danger is everywhere and monstrous creatures alter reality. Stay clear-headed and tame the jungle before it devours you…
Crash notes: A new one from ACE Team with some writing from Team Kyratzes.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
589/ Dreams on a Pillow
From an award winning game designer, Dreams on a Pillow is a folk tale based on the true events of the 1948 Nakba. Play as Khadra, a young woman fleeing a massacre in this stealth-puzzle adventure game. From Palestine to Lebanon, join her journey as she endures invasion and perceptual distortion.
Crash notes: As a Palestinian game, this has been going through it recently. When the crowdfunding went live, BlueSky immediately marked the developer’s account as spam. (Fortunately, reversed now.)
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
590/ Derelict Star
A precise momentum-based platformer that emphasizes exploration and navigation puzzles. Run and jump your way through a wide variety of obstacles and challenges as you explore an abandoned derelict freighter. Be careful: getting in is often easier than getting out!
Crash notes: Raigan Burns (N++) really thinks this is special. Absolutely not for me but I’m pretty sure some of you will love this shit. (Someone is going to point out my love for Super Cable Boy and I am going to delete that comment.)
Windows, Mac | Steam Link | Just released
591/ Xenonauts 2
Wage a global war of resistance against an alien invasion. Command turn-based tactical battles, build a network of covert bases, directly control your fighter wings, and achieve strategic victory in a simulation of asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior foe.
Crash notes: One of these days I will play, properly, an XCOM style game. Although playing anything would be an improvement right now, *giggle*.
Windows | Steam Link | Just released
592/ Neofeud 2
An ex-military robot turned go-go dancer teams up with a refugee goth hacktivist revolutionary and a billion-year-old socially awkward alien — unlikely partners in a struggle to overturn the chessboard, shaking the social and cosmological fabric of the universe(s)…
Crash notes: The original Neofeud emerged nine years ago, a point-and-click with a homegrown vibe. I never played it, but I do have a copy lying around here somewhere… Anyway, Silver Spook has finally delivered a sequel after many years of work.
Windows, Linux | Itch Link | Just released
593/ LOVE ETERNAL
Wander a castle built of bitter memories in LOVE ETERNAL, a psychological horror platformer with devious trials and an unsettling, experimental narrative. Find a way out – or live in Shelter forever more.
Crash notes: Yow, beautiful work. Absolutely not for me but I’m pretty sure some of you will love this shit. (Someone is going to point out my love for VVVVVV and I am going to delete that comment.)
Windows | Steam Link | Released Feb 2026
594/ Stardream
Stardream is a story-driven investigation game set in a retro 60s-inspired space ark. As Darlene, a taxi driver turned into a pressured investigator, uncover a hidden truth that could shatter a perfect society.
Crash notes: Definitely not No One Lives Forever but that 60s styling and trailer narration really made my NOLF spidey-sense tingle.
Windows | Steam Link | Unreleased
595/ Labyrinth.os
Before dying out, the smartest of the world from before left a machine, A machine with the power to restart the world, The Thirteen Architects who were built to maintain this machine dubbed it: The World Egg.
Crash notes: Well, I know sod all about this, but
Windows | Itch Link | Just released
596/ Moves Of The Diamond Hand
Immerse yourself in a first-person urban RPG, powered by dice and intrigue. Along the way, you might even shape the fate of a city. Become a Master of Disguise, a Master Sandwich Maker or … something else. Whatever it takes to get the gig, right?
Crash notes: Cosmo D is back.
Windows, Mac, Linux | Steam Link | EA
597/ The House of Hikmah
The House of Hikmah is a fully voice-acted, narrative-driven 3D adventure game exploring grief, legacy and the search for answers after profound loss. Solve puzzles, encounter historical scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, and uncover timeless lessons in a beautifully imagined House of Wisdom.
Crash notes: An Islamic fantasy game.
Windows | Steam Link | Just released
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congratulations! after 35 crashbook pages, we have finally turned to one where i know none of the games listed!
That is a shocker! I felt like Titanium Court was… courting so much attention on Bluesky that it felt like a wasted entry.
Derelict Star is hard, yo. The designer is very nice on the discord.
I can confirm as well, that having started making my way through Love Eternal, I have had no desire to open it for a second session, despite being hooked quite well by the story. The precision platforming stuff melts me a bit too much
Thank you Matt and William for confirming what I suspected.
I recently tried out Daniel Linssen’s “Print Gallery Of An Artist” which is really clever but the final level was just too much for me. I think I spent over ten minutes on it and ragequit. And this is probably milquetoast compared to the titles listed here!
Oh, hey, I know one of these – pretty well, as a matter of fact.
I backed Xenonauts 2 in their crowdfunding campaign… IDK, eight years ago or something? I played it through very late in the alpha period (got too impatient) and liked it. Since the 1.0 release, I’m playing through on a harder difficulty and it certainly is tough.
It’s very solid and entertaining, and very trad X-COM with its time units and its brutal deaths for your soldiers and its strategic/tactical split. It’s a big step forwards from the original Xenonauts, too. The campaign is better paced with more interesting events and plot unfolding than the original X-COM games or its immediate predecessor. The tactical battles can take a few hours each – if you’re me, at any rate – and reward understanding the game’s systems and utilising various tools at your disposal. Mistakes are cruelly punished; I try to avoid habitual save-scumming, but I certainly do it at times.
It’s not without flaws. The air combat minigame is the best anyone has managed so far, but I think it still ultimately boils down to who has the major tech edge, and there’s no amount of clever manoeuvres that will outperform that disparity – so most of the time you may as well just autoresolve it. And in tactical battles, the accuracy of your opponents on higher difficulties is… well, you opted for a challenge, right, but it is frustrating sometimes when basic enemies will reaction-fire your guys on a dime and oneshot them with unerring accuracy. The answer, typically, is flashbangs and smoke grenades and thrown explosives to open new sight lines, but you can only carry so many…
I recommend it, at any rate, unless you are Joel, in which case I gently suggest the time investment it represents may not be for you. 😉
always look forward to the crashbook. don’t think there’s a better source of finding new and interesting games, preferably the short ones. i am very out of the loop otherwise. titanium court looks awesome! hope you’re well
“Oh, Joel mentioned a game that is a total mindscrew. Let’s open it.”—the same impulse that caused me to buy a platformer on the recommendation of Daniel Linssen and Raigan Burns, who is known for N++. Now the world is spinning. Don’t think I made it to the final level, I quit quite calmly on the level where flaming things are coming out from the center.
Derelict Star has a lot of innovative mechanics in the movement, and no wall-jumping (I hate wall jumping), and it made me think of the essay on jumping feel that Amanda Lange said she wanted to write one day. Aside from Mario which is the platonic ideal of jumping feel I guess (and which I haven’t played that much) it seems to me that a good feeling jump will let the player accomplish something big when they hit it right, in a way that feels natural and gives them feedback instead of being just “learn to hit this button at the right time, all games are rhythm games.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with a rhythm platformer but that’s a very different kind of groove to get into.)
Sometimes this means having two things to do, like Celeste’s jump-then-dash, or Knytt Underground’s jump-then-become-bouncy or jump-then-trigger-powerup, or Fishbane’s jump-then-toss-the-spear, where getting down how to time your jump and toss together so you wind up surfing at the right height is very satisfying. (Though not always, Cave Story has a little boost at the end I think and VVVVVV is about air control and timing sequences of flips and Nightsky gives you no air control at all but the physics are so satisfying that you can get good jump feel by spinning around properly. Oh speaking of VVVVVV it wasn’t necessarily the first thing that Love Actually made me think of because VVVVVV is so very much not about Angst Hotel but about helping your smiley-faced friends who you are in a band together with in the credits scene.)
Sometimes Derelict Star pulls this off extremely well. After hours of practice spread across a few days and a little coaching from the dev on the discord on one of the trickiest parts, I just pulled off a sequence of jumps and takeoffs that had me absolutely soaring across about ten screens. Then I used the assist menu to see what the next challenge was and… I might be declaring victory and getting out of there.
[Though another thing is that it has an open structure with a lot of branching and a fair amount of hidden bits, not to mention “wait you can jump over there?” bits, plus a very generous checkpoint/warp system. I might warp somewhere else and see if I can apply any of the tricks I learned.]
ShaunCG
Appreciate the capsule review of Xenonauts 2! I do so much want to invest in an XCOM genre game at some point, but, you know me so well. I have only time to spend a zillion hours on Blue Prince.
Prebbles
Thanks! I added Titanium Court way back last year thinking Crashbook would go out earlier and it had only just got public visibility. I’ve even bought but I couldn’t install until I published Crashbook otherwise it would void its inclusion…
Matt
Print Gallery of an Artwork: I can’t remember but you’re not too far away. That level you got stuck on drove me mad until I realised what you were supposed to do. I guess I was still mad afterwards but it was more doable than it seemed.
After Burns and Linssen both praised Derelict Star I was intrigued to try it out, even though I know I’m gonna suck the most suckiest at it. I haven’t tried it out but the urge is still there. And you haven’t dowsed that urge in cold water, despite how it has turned out for you. Thank you for your service.
Of course I have warped to another spot and was like “Oh hey, I can do this first screen! [checkpoint] …I’m supposed to do what.” Just taking deep breaths of “this is all optional, go play a round of Shogun Showdown.”
I loved a lot about Relooted (especially, of course, the conceit), but I did find it was a little clunky in a few ways.
I loved seeing all the history presented from a less dusty perspective, and the heist planning and escape running is excellent overall, I just wish they let you get on with it.
About 70% of the way into the game, you’re still being made to go through long, unskippable (and, to me, rather unnecessary) tutorial levels.
I’d like to have seen the characters be a little edgier – they feel a bit too safe and digestible.
It’s a great game, and I support its message, especially against the nasty hate comments it attracted, I just wish it’d been a harder hitter on its own terms.
I find the idea of Hocus Focus intriguing. It seems to be mimicking the aesthetic of the hand-animated, edutainment-focused, multimedia-hyping entertainment centres and adventure games of the mid-’90s. (With perhaps just a dash of cynically entrepreneurial ‘how can we cash in on that girl with the headphones on youtube?’.)
That aesthetic still holds a power over me – probably because I associate it with the sheer wonder and novelty of the computer at an impressionable age, when such games were placed on prominent display in computer stores to sell parents on the idea that a £500 beige box would “be good for the kids’ homework”.
But there’s also something ineffable about that style, the sense of artistry and pains taken with it, the use of colour and composition to create environments that don’t so much welcome the observer as rush out and drag them inside, the idea that the likes of Disney make more money than ever and yet could never go back to taking that level of trouble and care.
I guess it must be the same feeling evoked in some people by hand-carpented furniture and other pre-industrialised objects of manufacture. Which can quickly spill into borrowed nostalgia and retro-fetishism, sure, but I think there’s a certain truth worth acknowledging simply in that we don’t do this anymore.
As a productivity tool, though? Like you say, it seems precision-engineered to provide anything but the stated effect!
Titanium Court is the first instance in which an “ok” review made me buy a game. PC Gamer called it “smarter and funnier than it is fun” and I immediately went to buy it, knowing only of the match-3 mechanics. After 9 hours (and being… well I don’t know how far from finishing), I can’t say I disagree. At the same time, I don’t remember the last time I was this engaged and curious to see where a game was going. Yes, the main loop is a match-3+tower defense roguething, with juuust enough satisfaction to carry you from run to run. But the narrative framing is very interesting and the game as a whole gets a surprising amount of mileage from twisting both the frame and the gameplay elements. Also, the humour might not be for everyone, but it sure is for me.
DEMO REVIEWS
Memory’s Reach: Metroidvania puzzle sounds like my thing. However the demo takes literally five minutes to launch on my Macbook and makes it run hot. There is a warning about lowering graphics settings but it would take me the aforesaid five minutes to launch it again and lower the settings. I played through the introduction which was decent enough–there will be panel puzzles–and got far enough to be relieve relieved that the whole game isn’t set in “everything is catching yes everything is catching on fire,” but was not quite intrigued enough to battle through the performance issues. There are many games.
Lorenzo: sounds like my experience with the Titanium Court demo. Love the humor and style, not totally sure I love the match 3 and then tower defense gameplay.
oh the “nonogram roguelike” does not appear to be a game in which you control an @ sign that moves around a continuous procedurally generated space fighting monsters and avoiding traps that are given by nonogram clues. grrrrr