The Indie Gaming Cookie

The Philippines is a country that's almost impossible to love. It is perhaps the embodiment of wasted potential; worms ate the country inside-out, and now it's exiting the global sphincter as a massive piece of shit.   This can be seen in the country's gaming ""industry"". Despite brimming with talent, the nation as of yet still sees 'gaming' as equivalent to 'gambling sites' and 'offshore' or 'outsourced work'. As the country's potential economic growth gets continuously squandered by political powers, the potential of the country as an artistic forefront is squandered by the overwhelming cultural powers brought by the globalized world. The path that a creative must walk in this nation hangs in the balance. It is our imperative to pull ourselves forward by the bootstraps. Therefore, as a Filipino game developer myself, it is my prime mission to seek out, participate with, and contribute to the local gaming scene, one ...

What to you has been a year, for me is but a second and a lifetime. 2025 is wrapped finally in festive jolly and acute melancholy, so sit with me by the chimney fire as I make my annual lamentations and ludic recommendations.   This year had been, like a coaster, fit with the twists and loop-de-loops of occurrences. Even in my final year of high school, I had managed to slot myself into multiple friend groups, get rejected, be confessed to, fall in love, enter the college of my preference, get all my shit robbed and stolen, and have my body almost give out on me on two occasions. "No rest for the wicked," so said this year, and on this front it afforded me little.  But you do not read on to hear my life story, interesting and chaotic as it had been, nor are you here to wallow with me in my regrets, celebrate my joys, and listen to my wishful desires for the next revolution of this Earth. No, you're interested in what I—Big Gaming's Greatest Slave!—have been up to all ...

  Make your own universe with two ingredients. You add a cup of coffee. Your universe is warm. Steamy and calm, it is a perfect heater for a rainy day. The cup is not to be drunk in one fell swoop. Rather, it is to be sipped slowly. You let the vast expanse wash over your tongue. You add a twisted vine. The vine has been cut from   a larger specimen. It is writhing and entangled. Climbing down your throat, its pin pricks you with excitement at first, but it quickly chafes and scrapes your airways. Thorns and shoots stay within. You are left voiceless, perturbed.   The mad (and possibly confused) alchemist that you now are, you may have just concocted Tmesis Studio's  Universe for Sale  (2023) .  The sci-fi, cozy, dystopian visual novel follows the journeys of Lila and Master, as the former struggles to stay alive under the immensity of a tyranny that disallows her space to grieve—only getting by via selling universes of her own creation—and Master, a renown...

Just finished the True Ending(-ish) of Billy Basso and BIGMODE's  Animal Well , and I found it to be perhaps the most unique video game I've played this year, if not this decade. That is because  Animal Well  is not a game.  Animal Well  is a crypt — a deeply buried treasure trove of delicately designed secrets and ciphers, all under the guise of an impossibly compact, albeit somewhat basic metroidvania. When it comes to the game and its ludic elements,  Animal Well  is not like your typical metroidvania. It does not involve the traditional "powering up" and overcoming foes. Instead, you play as a weird, powerless shit-blob that can only run and jump. There is no combat; any unconventional item you find along your journey — be it a yo-yo, a bubble wand, or a top — serves the primary purpose of being "keys" of sorts that allow you to solve puzzles you would otherwise be unable to solve. Because there is no combat, most of  Animal Well 's "challenge...

       I played  Garden Story  a few weeks ago now and I couldn't help feeling its intended experience was so similar to the cozy games of its time. Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and all these titles blew up in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic era, when everyone were confined in their homes, looking for respite in media. What better way to achieve that than through some relaxing, simple cozy simulators? It made sense, at least to me, that Garden Story, a 2021 RPG by Picogram, would draw heavily upon the needs of the average players at the time. However, the sticking point here was that Garden Story was not just a simulator, for it was also, to great extent, an action-RPG . Garden Story, through the box in which it had fit itself, had to now face a challenge: create a fleshed out, exciting, thrilling combat system within a video game also meant to be relaxing. The game attempts, in a contradictory phrase, "cozy combat", to interesting results. ...

"The Witness is a game all about perspectives." – Joseph Anderson I love The Witness. Typically, this sentence would be followed by "I also hate The Witness," and while I certainly do see merit in the critiques of its flaws, unfortunately, I do not share the same sentiment. I love The Witness, period. However, for the longest time, I had spent wondering why people were so conflicted about The Witness. I have seen countless reviews, thoughts, and opinions online, coming from people so clearly torn on this game and how they feel about it. At first, I chalked it up to "gameplay good, narrative bad," as is the dichotomy in many things with mixed reception, and it held up for a while — the puzzles were creative, enticing; the narrative was pointless, pretentious, with no payoff. But something kept tugging on my mind about this shoddy explanation I had pieced for myself. It felt off . The puzzles weren't always creative or enticing, for in some cases they ...

Sometimes, I get bored and I pick out an interesting looking game to pass the time. Most of my selections don't end up sticking with me for long, likely due to a general lack of interest, but sometimes, I find diamonds in the rough, needles in the haystack. In Stars and Time was one of those lucky finds — a real goodie bag that had in it a fine, black-and-white silk robe, a wizard hat, a frozen clock, a star, an orrery, and a long-lasting scar which now penetrates my soul. In Stars and Time had already been recommended to me by a friend or two before then, but I had decided to play it on a whim just a few weeks ago, and even as I write this, I still cannot forget it. In my 20 hours of playtime, I had grown to genuinely love this ensemble of fictional characters, all of whom were written with so much care and attention-to-detail it's almost impossible not to be engulfed in the story with them. Odile was the first character I truly admired: she's the quick-witted, mature, y...