Category: Terry’s Free Game of the Week

Logjam

by Robert Yang.

Logjam is a lumberjack simulator – logs appear for you to chop, and you chop them, TWACK! Sometimes other things need chopping too. There’s a little timing challenge in chopping things just right, which feels really satisfying to master.

This is the newest game in Robert Yang’s series of games about gay sexuality – a series which includes, among other things:

  • Cobra Club: A dick-pic simulator about privacy and body image.
  • Stick Shift: A driving simulator about sex in videogames.
  • The Tearoom: A cottaging simulator about censorship and police surveillance.

These games are smart, funny, and incredibly well made! If you haven’t played any of them before, you’re in for a treat – I recommend checking out Robert’s blogpost about this one after you’ve played it.

(Content warning: This game has a penis in it, and you can see the penis.)

[Download for Windows/Mac/Linux (itch.io)]

Different Strokes

by Scott Steffes, Rincs, Jasper Stephenson, Cless Aurion and Alucard.

Different Strokes is a multiplayer collaborative art gallery. Anyone can come along and draw a picture – or modify an existing one. Visitors can also help out by curating what’s already there – voting pictures up and down.

The gallery is a wonderful space to explore! More and more wings pop up as you walk around, and there’s some really impressive artwork hidden away in there. The drawing tools are fun to use too, and the gallery feels like a really nice space to be in – full of cutesy NPCs who claim to be friends of the artists or who are haunting the gallery. I’ve visited a few times now, and I really love seeing how work I recognise evolves as more and more people make edits.

There’s a system in place to protect pictures with enough up-votes from vandalism, and remove bad stuff from the gallery – but in a game like this, the time to penis is zero, so unfortunately, all you can really do is delay the inevitable. Which makes it a really smart take on the most recent Ludum Dare theme, I think.

(content warning for, uh, user generated content.)

[Play online (itch.io)]

Washware

by BuilderAtWork.

Washware is a hyper realistic clothes washing simulator. Incredible. I cannot fully convey how excited I was to discover that my virtual wash cycle was going to take 12 actual real world minutes.

There’s no particular reason this game had to be made in Roblox, of course – you could just as easily make a realistic clothes washing simulator in Unity, or Godot, or anything else. But this game perfectly demonstrates the thing that makes Roblox so interesting to me: the idea that every game can be multiplayer. Even when that game is a clothes washing simulator. What would games look like in a world where that was the default design paradigm?

[Play on Roblox (account signup required)]

(via G.P. Lackey, thanks!)

Give Up the Ghost: a puzzle checklist

by gate.

Give Up the Ghost is an excellent new puzzle game from the creator of last year’s delightful puzzle-platformer Control the Body. It’s especially good as thinky puzzle games go, which is saying a lot these days – the genre’s having a bit of a renaissance right now.

What I really like about this game is the sheer volume of weird mechanics it plays around with, which include:

  • A very elegant lock and key system
  • Portal blocks that teleport you around, and can contain other levels, Patrick’s Parabox style
  • Cloning tiles that make copies of whatever you push on them

…and a few more besides! The first couple of levels sort of just throw all these mechanics at you, and it’s fast and playful and fun and for a while I thought that’s what the game was going to be. But after you’ve had a chance to warm up, the game reveals itself to be something much more devious – slower and more deliberate, with excellently designed lynchpin style puzzles that require careful thought. Highly recommended.

[Play online (itch.io)]