Tag: retro games

Retro Horror Games on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

My annual roundup of free-to-play retro horror games on Itch.io is now on Sidequest. There’s a gritty mix of fresh blood and decayed favorites in this year’s creepypixel harvest, from the recent haunted forest simulator Bloodbark to the Tumblr-favorite Flesh, Blood, & Concrete to the first game created by Deltarune artist Temmie Chang, Escaped Chasm.

You can check out the post here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/10/15/retro-horror-games-on-itchio/

And there’s also my lists from October 2024 and October 2023, which are somehow even more liminal and retro.

I’m overjoyed to have commissioned a banner illustration from the shining Teller-of-Tragedies, who shares gorgeous and immersive dreamcore pixel art on Tumblr (here) and on Instagram (here).

Essay about Deltarune on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I recently had the immense pleasure of writing an article about the latest chapters of Deltarune for Sidequest. This piece features some story analysis and theorizing, as well as a personal anecdote about an extremely awkward moment during my job search in my last year of grad school, but it’s mostly about the joys of retro media and the lost art of having fun. Here’s an excerpt…

Nostalgia is a difficult subject to approach. Cultural nostalgia, which often takes the form of a glorified version of an earlier decade, is a hallmark strategy of conservative political movements that attract sympathy by engendering a fantasy of a time when, supposedly, things were better. Nostalgia for childhood media can be fraught as well, especially when we view the more problematic aspects of this media from an adult perspective.

Still, nostalgia has its uses. When approached with care and attention, indulging in nostalgia can be an exercise that facilitates a rediscovery of play. In its celebration of the television and video games of an earlier era, Chapter 3 of Deltarune invites introspection into the aspects of play that a younger version of yourself understood to be “fun.”

You can read the full essay on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/08/04/deltarune-remembers-how-to-have-fun/

As an aside, my corner of video game fandom spent the month of July going wild for the character Tenna, an anthropomorphic personification of a CRT television who plays a central role in Chapter 3 of Deltarune. Tenna’s status as the Summer 2025 Tumblr Sexyman is partially due to his eye-catching visual design and flashy personality, but I also get the feeling that his near-instant popularity was due to the way he speaks to a particular type of cultural malaise.

As a consequence of the concomitant collapse of social media platforms and the proliferation of AI-generated “content,” everyone is exhausted by the effort it takes to wade through (and compete with) soul-numbing machine slop. What Tenna represents is an era of media that, though it might not have been “good,” was at least intentional. My essay doesn’t touch on specific issues relating to gen-AI, but I was directly inspired to write this piece by the very enthusiastic reception of the recent chapters Deltarune in online creative communities. There’s definitely something interesting going on there culturally, I think.

Crow Country Essay on Sidequest

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I’m excited to share “Crow Country Is a Game about Climate Change,” an ecocritical analysis of one of my favorite indie games of 2024. This essay also serves as a kind of “Ending Explained” story breakdown that was inspired by a few Reddit discussion threads that missed the point of what (to me at least) is a clear, powerful, and compelling artistic statement. How do we process the reality of climate change, and how can we face the challenges of the future?

Crow Country borrows heavily from the visual design of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, and I argue that it provides an interesting meta-commentary on their themes as well. Specifically, I think Crow Country uses its retro aesthetics to remind players of the political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when environmentalism was considered an important bipartisan issue in the United States.

In my essay, I put Crow Country in conversation with two books, Colette Shade’s Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (2025) and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2017). I believe that Shade’s discussion of the “lost environmentalism” of 1990s media like Captain Planet and FernGully can be expanded to video games, and I explain how Crow Country plays on that cultural nostalgia. Meanwhile, Wallace-Wells discusses a “crisis in storytelling” about climate change that positions its victims as cute animals instead of actual human beings, but Crow Country subverts this narrative impulse by demonstrating that its “zombie” climate refugees are none other than ourselves.

You can read the essay on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/04/22/crow-country-climate-change/

Crow Country (on Steam here) is an incredible game, by the way. I enjoyed writing about it, and I enjoyed playing it as well. It takes about four hours to finish, and there’s an optional “no combat” mode that allows players to focus on exploring the space while engaging with the story and puzzles. If you’re interested, I posted a no-spoiler review of the game ( here ).

ETA: This essay was featured on Critical Distance (here). What an honor! I hope a wider audience gets a chance to read this piece, if only so that more people can appreciate the nuanced but powerful message of this incredible game.

I Am Setsuna

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I Am Setsuna, which was published by Square Enix in 2016, is a twenty-hour JRPG set in a beautiful fantasy world blanketed by snow.

You play as a young man named Endir, a member of a secretive tribe of masked warriors. Endir has been hired by a mysterious third party to assassinate Setsuna, a young woman who has been chosen as the sacrifice whose death will hold back the tide of ice and monsters plaguing the world for another decade. When Endir finds and confronts Setsuna, she tells him that she is willing to die, but she requests that he accompany her on her journey to the sacrificial grounds so that her death will have meaning.

The structure of the game follows a standard JRPG progression. As he follows Setsuna on her pilgrimage, Endir travels between an alternating series of towns and dungeons. Each new town has slightly nicer weapons, and the money gained while fighting monsters allows these weapons to be purchased. The player can also purchase accessories that can be customized with various materials dropped by defeated monsters, thus granting characters new and improved battle abilities and magic spells.

I am Setsuna takes its inspiration in equal parts from Final Fantasy X and Chrono Trigger, meaning that its combat system is simple, easy to pick up, and fun to experiment with. Your characters gain levels quickly, so you’ll never have to worry about grinding. To help keep battles engaging, the combat employs an optional system of timed button presses that enable attack bonuses.

About ten hours in, the game becomes more challenging. Enemies take longer to defeat and often damage your characters before they die, while the dungeons become twisting labyrinths of indistinguishable corridors. It shames me to admit this, but I had to buy the Japanese strategy guide to find my way through an endgame dungeon filled with teleporter traps. In addition, I’d have to say that the game’s story begins to lose its threads well before the ending, which is remarkably unsatisfying.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that I care far less about finishing any given video game. The moment a game stops being fun, I put it down and move on to something else. This is less about frustration and more about appreciation. Even if I never beat a game’s final boss, I can still be grateful for the parts of it that I enjoyed. Once I’ve seen everything I want to see, I can feel satisfied.

For me, I am Setsuna is a perfect example of a game that’s wonderful to play until it stops being fun. Although I’ve finished the story twice in the past, I was happy to enjoy about a dozen hours during my most recent playthrough. I suppose that I could keep going and power through the segments that necessitate a walkthrough, but I don’t particularly want to. And that’s okay.

Over the course of the first twelve hours of I am Setsuna, you’ll traverse snow-covered forests, venture into mountain villages beset by blizzards, and explore sparkling ice caves. Along the way, you’ll fight winter-themed creatures such as snow rabbits, arctic foxes, walruses, and bears. All of your characters are bundled up in warm and comfortable clothing, and it’s a pleasure to spend time in the villages chatting with NPCs by the fire while admiring the dried herbs and patterned quilts hanging from the walls.

I’m a fan of I am Setsuna, but I’d recommend it in the same way I’d recommend an actual retro game like Ocarina of Time. It’s absolutely worth playing I am Setsuna to experience its atmosphere and charm, but no one should feel bad about walking away when it becomes difficult and awkward.  

Afterdream

~ Kathryn ~ 1 Comment

Afterdream is a 2D horror adventure game with puzzle elements and lo-fi pixelated graphics that takes between two to three hours to finish. It’s on Steam, but I played it on Nintendo Switch and had a fantastic time. Afterdream drops you right into the story and immediately grabs your attention, and its pacing is impeccable. The horror is mostly atmospheric, but the game features a great set of jumpscares mixed with short segments of heightened tension.

Afterdream isn’t for people who can’t tolerate horror, but I’d happily recommend it to anyone else who’s interested in trying out a short, original, and creative story game. The puzzles are fun but not too difficult, and the environmental design is really something special.

You play as a woman named Jennifer who wakes up in a filthy derelict room wearing a suit she doesn’t own. During the intermittent frame story, Jennifer relates this situation to an older man who seems to be a psychiatrist, claiming that she’s experienced an unusually realistic nightmare.

Within this nightmare, Jennifer’s job is to navigate a series of haunted houses while finding a series of objects for a series of NPCs. There are no Professor Layton style puzzles relating to number games or spatial arrangement challenges; rather, Afterdream’s puzzles are mainly fetch quests reminiscent of old-school adventure games in which a certain object needs to be applied to a certain environmental obstacle, like a key being needed to unlock a door.

The challenge, such as it is, lies in being able to form a mental map of each area and remembering what goes where. The game mechanics are extremely simple and intuitive, and there are no inventory limits or menu screens to distract the player from the immersive environment. It’s always clear what you can interact with, and the in-game text isn’t cryptic about what needs to happen.

The haunted houses don’t reveal their secrets willingly, but Jennifer is aided by a Polaroid ghost camera that she can use to scan her surroundings. The oddities exposed through the camera’s viewfinder become real once photographed. You might hear an odd ticking sound, for example, in which case your camera will reveal a ghostly clock on the wall. It’s a neat game mechanic, and it’s put to good use in a nice variety of situations.

Jennifer begins in an old and rotting apartment building and then progresses to a fancier but similarly ruined mansion, wherein a helpful ghost tells her that she’s been given an opportunity to make contact with the spirit of her recently deceased father. In order to summon his ghost, Jennifer must first find a special “portal object” hidden within the liminal space between life and the afterlife. Unfortunately, no one can say what this object looks like or where it’s hidden.

Still, Jennifer has no choice but to keep moving forward through progressively spookier areas. As a special present to me personally, there’s a dark and grimy sewer level, and it’s wonderful. There’s also a “creepy little town” level, and it’s beautiful and I love it.

Even though the game is divided into discrete stages, its story isn’t formulaic. To lighten the heavy atmosphere, the writing employs humor at key moments, with both Jennifer and the NPC ghosts occasionally poking fun at the absurdity of various situations. I really enjoyed the instances when I thought something horrible was going to happen but everything actually turned out to be perfectly wholesome. The pacing is excellent, with plenty of fun character interactions and chill periods of downtime between the creepy bits and jumpscares.

Afterdream is the perfect length for its story, and its gameplay goes from strength to strength as its setting becomes stranger and more disturbing. It might not be to the taste of people looking for more action or more explicit horror, but it was perfect for me.

One final thing: When I first saw the game’s trailer, I was like, “This looks cool, but I hope you can turn off the strobe effects.” And thankfully, you can in fact turn off the strobe effects. It’s always nice when game developers take this sort of accessibility issue into consideration.

Trinity Trigger

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Trinity Trigger, an action JRPG published by Xseed Games in April 2023, is essentially Secret of Mana with a fresh coat of paint. The story is simple. The combat is simple. The dungeons are simple. There’s a rudimentary crafting system, and it’s simple as well. I love this simplicity, which allows you to enjoy the game in the same way that you might enjoy scenery from a train window. Not everything has to be complicated, and Trinity Trigger is a wonderful title for people who play games to relax.

You control three heroes, each of whom can wield a set of weapons chosen via a ring menu, just like Secret of Mana. Some enemies are vulnerable to certain weapons, but these vulnerabilities aren’t a big deal outside of boss fights.

Unlike Secret of Mana, you don’t need to grind for weapon upgrades, which are unlocked automatically at the end of each dungeon. There are a few sidequests that involve backtracking in order to fight a slightly stronger enemy variation, but these aren’t necessary for staying ahead of the gentle difficulty curve. Trinity Trigger is slightly more complicated than I’m giving it credit for, but not by much, and it’s no trouble to figure out the various character optimization systems as you go.

If I were to offer any criticism of the game, I might point out that the AI of the characters you’re not directly controlling isn’t great, but this doesn’t really matter. The voice acting isn’t great either, but you can turn it off. There are a few short anime-style animated cutscenes, and they don’t include English subtitles if you’ve got the voice language set to Japanese. This is an unfortunate oversight, but it’s not as if the cutscenes contain important information about the story, which is largely immaterial.

This story, such as it is, involves a pair of deities enmeshed in an endless war. In order to avoid decimating the world, they’ve agreed to fight through human proxy warriors. The factions of both gods want this cycle to end. Your main viewpoint character, who has been chosen as one god’s proxy warrior, is therefore joined by two warriors from the opposite faction.

Even if they never intend to fight anyone, your party still journeys from one dungeon to the next in order to collect mystical weapons. These dungeons are actually giant weapons once wielded by the gods, and their magic spills out into the environment, causing diverse biomes to exist in close proximity. The snowy mountain biome is right next to the desert biome, for example. The game is fairly linear, so you progress from one biome to the next while wondering what climate is going to be around the next corner.

In many ways, Trinity Trigger reminds me of I Am Setsuna, a game I also enjoyed. The primary purpose of I Am Setsuna was to recapture the simplicity of the combat system of Chrono Trigger, which felt especially satisfying given how complicated and arcane JRPG combat systems had become in the 2010s. In the same way, Trinity Trigger is all about creating a frame for the basic combat loop of Secret of Mana while adding a few small quality-of-life updates.

Along with the simplicity of its combat, a significant part of what made Secret of Mana so lovely was how beautiful and green its world was. As an early Super Nintendo game, Secret of Mana didn’t have great writing, nor were the characters even remotely well-developed. In Secret of Mana, an evil empire wants to cut down a magical tree, and you must save the tree. The evil empire is evil, of course, and they must be stopped. The empire is never presented as a real threat, however. The reason you keep going in Secret of Mana, and the reason you care about the Mana Tree, is because the world is filled with gorgeous variations on the “forest” environment. There are sunlight-drenched peaceful forests and dark labyrinthine forests and lush autumn forests and sparse alpine forests and fantastic mushroom forests and glittering winter forests and forests with pink cherry blossom petals floating on the breeze.

Like Secret of Mana, the writing in Trinity Trigger is passable but not worth remarking on. Instead, the storytelling of the game is broadly conveyed through its environment. What would it mean if the natural environment stopped following natural patterns? What would it look like if lakes and rivers dried up and forests disappeared? What if natural disasters became an everyday occurrence? In Trinity Trigger, an environmental apocalypse is underway, but it’s happening very slowly. Your characters are doing their best to stop it, but that’s not really the point. Rather, what Trinity Trigger wants is for you to enjoy how the wind rustles the leaves and how the sunlight sparkles on the sand.

Basically, in Trinity Trigger, you run around colorful environments and attack colorful enemies with colorful weapons while watching various sets of numbers go up. There’s not much to say about the game save that it’s uncomplicated and fun to play, and I enjoyed the twenty hours I spent with it. I have nothing but respect and appreciation for a solid and well-made 7/10 game that knows what it’s doing and does it well, and I’m always up for saving some trees.

Lily’s Well

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Lily’s Well
https://pureiceblue.itch.io/lilys-well

Lily’s Well is a lo-fi horror adventure game with a charming top-down NES aesthetic. You play as an anime girl named Lily who hears a voice calling for help from the well by her isolated cabin in the woods. Your job is to explore the house and its surroundings while collecting materials to make a rope. Depending on how many materials you assemble, you’ll be able to descend to a different level of the well. Each of the ten levels is its own horrible ending.

There are ten “good” materials and another five “bad” materials that you can find. If you incorporate a bad material into your rope, it will break. Lily will die, and you’ll have to start over again from the beginning. The game doesn’t signpost which materials are good or bad, so you have to go through them one by one and figure this out for yourself using the process of elimination. I got very frustrated very quickly, but this could have just been me being impatient.

I found the guide (here) to be extremely useful. This isn’t so much a walkthrough as it is a list of materials and a FAQ, and you’ll still have to put the pieces of the game together yourself. While using the guide, it took me about three hours to get all of the endings.

If you use the guide judiciously, you can finish the game in about 45 minutes. This involves spending 25 minutes to get to the bottom of the well, and another 20 minutes to explore what’s down there. Every other ending is an instant gruesome death for Lily, while the bottom of the well is essentially the second half of the game. In all fairness, the game’s true ending has a much better payoff if you die a few times first, and there are all sorts of fun little secrets to play with between runs, including certain events that only trigger on multiple playthroughs.

I said at the beginning that Lily’s Well has an NES aesthetic, but it’s really more of an early 1990s MS DOS game. The graphics are primitive, but the game uses them extremely well and puts a lot of care into the adventure elements. There’s all sorts of text for anything you care to interact with; and, if you’re patient, it’s possible to figure everything out on your own without using a guide.

The adventure game elements of Lily’s Well were hit-or-miss for me, and what I really enjoyed was the game’s dark humor. It was fun to see this cute anime girl die in all sorts of fun and creative ways, and I loved how over-the-top gruesome each ending is. I kept playing to dig deeper into the lore and see just how gleefully horrible Lily’s world could get under its placid surface, and I was not disappointed.