Quarantine Circular is this week's pick for Bithell Games' Legacy Celebration and follow up to last week's Subsurface Circular. Quarantine isn't a sequel as such, though it's implied to take place in the same world. They're linked by the same dialogue framework rather than the same world or story - a bit like two different TTRPGs that use the same base system.

Bithell Games, headed by Mike Bithell, is the studio behind Thomas Was Alone, Volume, and the recent TRON games. They're currently running a legacy games celebration, highlighting a different one of their older games each week. This week (starting Monday gone and ending today) is Subsurface Circular, a short narrative game released back in 2017. Next week (starting tomorrow!) is its sequel…

Pay what the temperature is: 16.3°C = $16.30!

In some ways, this is a rip off of this excellent (if slightly unhinged) video from Shut Up & Sit Down. In it, Tom Brewster reviews every single Railroad Ink expansion and version while progressively losing his grip on reality. What makes my review different is: 1) it's in written form, not video form; 2) i've split it in half; and 3) i have better different opinions.

While i was playing The Roottrees are Dead a couple of weekends ago, and because i can only concentrate if there are at least two different things going on at once, i decided to rewatch Double Fine's PsychOdyssey. It's a huge 32 (now 33) episode documentary covering the 6+ years of development of the studio's game Psychonauts 2. And it's completely free, in full, …

If you're as tuned in to the indie gaming scene as i am, you probably don't need me to introduce The Roottrees are Dead. It was pretty well-reviewed, and gained an enthusiastic following through word-of-mouth recommendations. It's a mystery game that has been compared to the masterpiece that is Return of the Obra Dinn, which is high praise that, in my humble opinion, it absolutely lives up to.

As you might have picked up from the title, Duckett & Dyer: Dicks For Hire is not a serious book. It's a fantastically funny, indie-published novel about two childhood best friends and adult fuck-ups who somehow get dragged into acting as private investigators and also saving the multiverse. That's quite a lot, so lets break it down a bit more slowly.

I used to be the sort of person that point-blank refused to watch a book adaptation before i'd read the book. I still remember my Mam having to cajole me into going to see The Golden Compass when it came out, because i hadn't read Northern Lights. (I did enjoy the movie (i was 13), and it convinced me to read the book trilogy, which i went on to have mixed feelings about.) I'm much more relaxed about that kind of thing now; in fact, i might have swung too far the other way.

Stardew Valley has a huge modding community. I know Nexus Mods isn't the be-all end-all of modding, but Stardew is the sixth most popular game on the site, rubbing elbows with the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series plus games like Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, and Cyberpunk 2077. Modding Stardew is pretty easy, too. If you're unfamiliar, read on for a quick guide; if you already know what you're doing, you can skip the next few paragraphs.