Manifesto Jam 2026 (itch)
The Manifesto Jam is one of my highlights of the year. Using the gamejam format to encourage people to write fervent, disorderly little proclamations on the art of games is awesome, and this one has a lot of great entries. Some are extensive and thought-provoking while others are red hot flashes. Here are my three favorites!
The Game Where You Let People Starve: What if “farming games” were actually about farming? Or even just growing things? Nature? Cultivation, resources, feeding people? What if you could fuck everything up? There are so many interesting ideas in this. Even the smallest could spawn entire games and systems and that the biggest haven’t is kind of a travesty. (Although it does remind me that I should play Besmirch which at least paid service to some of these darker ideas in its demo.)
ARTISANAL GRUEL: A series of all-caps precepts, like the opener, “STOP MAKING BORING SHIT,” or “VIDEO GAMES SHOULD SHUT UP,” followed by the author’s short, dialogic expansion on each one. Dang if I haven’t tried to express some of the same things with way too many more words. Warning that this one plays music, which was very loud for my setup and needed to be muted.
i actually think games should be fun tho: This one isn’t at all what I expected from the title but I’m glad I took the time to read it; it is deliciously harsh in a way that speaks to my own sensibilities, given that it’s a hateful “stinkpiece” which is nevertheless about kindness and being a social creature and making things.
Big Walk (Steam)
I may write something longer on this when I have the time but I dunno. It’s just okay, which has led me to think much more about multiplayer games in general than Big Walk itself. It’s a deliberately simple game so there’s a lot of downtime to think about this kind of stuff, especially if you’re playing with people who you already talk to regularly.
Denshattack! (Steam)
There’s really nothing here unless you’re a big ole weeb. The game surely includes every flavor of (pointing) Cool Japan!!! it can muster. There are taikos and torii gates and tanukis; sakura blossoms and a mahou shoujo gyaru gangu; yakuza and katanas and onis and the worst Black hair I’ve ever seen in a video game. Why would you intentionally write all these crappy, kiddy trope characters and then make them talk all the time? There is so much talking. You could watch every single cutscene in Jet Set Radio by the time it takes you to finish the first chapter of Denshattack!, and that’s because of the characters’ constant anime prattle. Worst of all, I was shocked to find myself, earnestly, a little disappointed with the music. It can be pretty generic and forgettable outside of the boss tracks, which are usually great, but are, naturally, infrequent.
It’s a complicated game in the sense that there are a lot of verbs to do and bright lights to look at, but the gameplay itself is shallow. Being a skating game that’s on-rails, it plays like a series of QTEs — complete with giant on-screen prompts — and all the player needs to do is react. Any complexity feels separate from the actual gameplay and more about the absolutely deranged default control scheme or disconnective quirks, like dedicating the bottom face button to starting the train at the beginning of the level, or right trigger to honking, which is an arbitrarily mandatory action. Boss fights are, to keep things simple, Sonic-y. Skate along parallel rails while the boss throws track hazards down. Jump or move out of the way of the hazards as you advance. Hit boss. Repeat twice more and then there’s a themed free flight section and then you punch them real big. Beh.
Roman Sands RE:Build (Steam)
I’ve been waiting on this game for a long time and it didn’t disappoint! It’s definitely unusual and messy in places, but it gave me a lot to chew on over and past its runtime, which is somewhat of a rarity. The game is split hard into two acts: Act One is an arcadey snowbird management sim set in a glittery, vaporwave resort, while Act Two is a contrastingly no-dopamine, story-focused puzzle section. I won’t say much more about Act Two here and would recommend avoiding other reviews as well as the Steam store page if you’re interested, as they tend to give the whole thing away.
The game is split into two acts, but not two halves. Act One is the beefier of the two, with four old bastards to serve and a big chunk of a resort to puzzle around in. Despite some of the intentional two-dimensionality of the four guests, I found their dialogue genuinely entertaining and intriguing. And maybe it’s the sparkly gacha game UI talking, but I liked running their errands and figuring out their different mini- quest and narrative paths, too.
Act Two is where the Neon Genesis Evangelion influence intensifies, both within and beyond aesthetic choices. Some of it is slow and weird in ways that compliment Act One’s slick, frenetic pace. The rest is slow and weird in ways that are very boring. It’s critical to understanding the story beyond a thematic level, but that’s imparted in frequent and disruptive expository dialogue. Now fully voice acted, these lines are delivered at an excruciating pace and tend to repeat or plainly state what’s already been implied (sometimes as far back as Act One). It’s got ideas, but drags to the point that it feels more like an unedited epilogue than the second in a two-act play.
Doggy Don’t Care (Steam)
This game is cute! It’s about a little pug terrorizing the world wherever he goes, starting with home and proceeding to three other levels, all of them small but fairly tight with a variety of mischievous activities. It’s pretty barebones in some ways — the music is a noticeable shortcoming, with goofy, simplistic loops liable to drive you insane — but, yeah, it’s a cute game and a good way to spend a couple hours. It could do to let the player skip dialogue and disable pop-ups (doubly so on New Game+).
SPLOOB (itch)
I didn’t get to as many Falling Block Jam entries as I would’ve liked but SPLOOB was the absolute standout of what I did play. While it’s a falling block puzzler like all jam entries, SPLOOB smushes a number of ideas together — irregular shapes, bouncy physics, rising water, and a harsher clear — to make something totally new. The game pieces are jelly cells which come in five shapes: green circles, red triangles, blue squares, purple pills, and yellow pentagons. The goal is to stack strategically enough that a single shape type can stretch horizontally across the field without any gaps, which equals a clear. These shapes do not stack nicely together, and their gummy consistency has them contracting, expanding, and bouncing all over the place. As time passes without any clears, the water level rises, altering the overall consistency of the pile and allowing more wiggle room, but shrinking the actual play area. So, so fun.
RADIOSOL (Steam)
Disclaimer! The developers state in their AI disclosure on Steam that they used generative AI to translate the game into languages other than Russian and English.
RADIOSOL is the most visually arresting game I’ve seen in a while. It’s a post-Soviet, post-apocalyptic world desertified by the encroaching sun and littered with massive buildings, industrial artifacts, and mechs of all shapes and sizes. The sense of scale is just unbelievable. Although interiors are in short supply, the entire world is traversible, as this is an exploration-focused adventure game. Really, most of the game is spent holding “W” as the player character — a spidery mech of dubious humanity — skitters up buildings and darts between shadows before the sun fries its circuitry. There’s also a beautiful, strange, and criminally underutilized radio interface, as well as an operating system screen used for a couple puzzles and other interactive bits. RADIOSOL is so heavy on atmosphere and so sparse on everything else that it can be difficult to understand what you’re supposed to be doing or where you’re supposed to be going, which is further exacerbated by the poor writing (which seems to be an issue across all languages, including the original Russian). It’s not as big an issue as negative Steam reviews might lead you to believe, but it does feel amateurish in these moments and is a roadblock for the easily frustrated. Speaking of negative Steam reviews: a number of them gripe about the game not being “finished,” as RADIOSOL ends with the reveal that it’s only chapter one of a larger story. Uh… whatever. It felt like a substantial and complete experience to me; I spent a little over seven hours on it and would estimate a more direct playthrough to take around five.
It certainly seems that development of the following chapters will continue, given the relative success of the first installment and its ongoing updates, and I wish the developers the best of luck. But it seems that the genAI usage will continue, too, so it’s a pass from me. I’m sympathetic to the budgetary struggles of small and non-Western teams, and the language I play in was unaffected, so I was happy to at least try RADIOSOL. I remember thinking “Why didn’t they just use Google Translate?” before remembering that that’s genAI, too, and retracting the thought; options are slim for low budgets and I tend to agree that launching in English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and French is important for financial success. Moral quandaries aside, RADIOSOL’s text just isn’t well-written or integral enough to justify its own existence, let alone shoddy genAI translation. Radio stations and signage remain in Russian. The game and its marketing are covered in these hieroglyphic cybervirus aesthetics as well as diegetic UI. RADIOSOL has seen success, and it’s done it with some really crappy text input. It’s a bummer to see them kneecap themselves by not investing in manual translation.