Rynling R&D

Dr. Signal’s Strange Machine
https://caramel.itch.io/strangemachine

Dr. Signal’s Strange Machine is a sci-fi narrative adventure game with a runtime of about 12 minutes. You play as Dr. Signal, who has just perfected a machine that allows her to talk with dinosaur fossils. She’s chosen a t-rex as a conversation partner, and she’s interested in how it managed to survive the end of the world.

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Project Kat is a short narrative horror game that’s free to play on Itch.io (here) and on Steam (here). A playthrough culminating in the game’s “true ending” will take about half an hour, but adventurous players might spend another fifteen minutes experimenting with paths leading to a premature death.

You play as a high school student named Kat who stays late at school one night to undertake an occult ritual of unknown origin and with unknown consequences. Kat has attempted a number of similar rituals, all to no avail. She claims not to believe in the supernatural and seems to be performing these rituals as a hobby. Unfortunately for Kat, this ritual is different.

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Escaped Chasm
https://tuyoki.itch.io/escaped-chasm

Escaped Chasm is a 25-minute dark fantasy narrative adventure game created in RPG Maker with a mix of retro Game Boy graphics and anime-style cutscenes. Originally released in 2019, it’s the first stand-alone project of Temmie Chang, a longtime friend and collaborator of Toby Fox who contributed character designs and graphics to Undertale and Deltarune.

You play as a young teenage “Lonely Girl” who doesn’t leave the house and lives vicariously through her dreams and art. Her parents appear to have gone missing, and she doesn’t know what to do. To make matters worse, she’s tired all the time, and a strange man has started appearing in her house.

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Flesh, Blood, & Concrete
https://waxwing0.itch.io/fbc

Flesh, Blood, & Concrete is a free-to-play RPG Maker adventure game that bills itself as “an apartment building exploration simulator.” During its 45-minute playtime, the game delves into themes of isolation, mental illness, and existential dread within the confines of a decaying apartment complex.

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As an aside, I was just thinking that I’d love to see more games set in Eastern Europe. Flesh, Blood, & Concrete is a universal story, but the specificity of the game’s Russian setting adds a unique and interesting flavor. I also appreciate that this “apartment exploration simulator” takes the darker aspects of mental illness seriously but still delights in the playfulness of its morbid style of creative expression. It's one of the more intriguing RPG Maker horror games I’ve encountered, and I’d recommend giving it a shot if you can handle the (literal) viscerality of its imagery.

Apartment Complex
https://kinerus.itch.io/apartment-complex

Apartment Complex is a short and free-to-download narrative exploration game set in a mostly abandoned apartment building. The only human occupants of this building are its two landlords. You play as one of the owners, who is middle-aged, jobless, and depressed. In an effort to do something with his life, your character takes it upon himself to check in with the tenants, who are not even remotely human.

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From its eye-catching color palette to the dry tone of its humor, Apartment Complex makes me nostalgic for Welcome to Night Vale in the best possible way. This is a chill and creative game about monster friends and postmodern malaise, and honestly? It’s super relatable.

Blackout
https://freshgames.itch.io/blackout

Blackout is a Halloween-themed point-and-click adventure game that you can play in your browser or download for free.

You play as a teenage witch who falls from the roof of a house while trying to snatch a feather from a crow. She loses her memory during her tumble to a second-floor balcony, and she’s surprised to find that the house is filled with corpses. The electricity seems to have been cut, and it’s too dark to see anything clearly. Your job as the player is to guide the witch through the haunted house and get the lights on so she can figure out what happened.

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Good Lord! Everyone at the Reunion For My Religious All-Girls School Is a Trans Man... And They're Hot?!
https://whatnames.itch.io/good-lord

It's been 10 years since you graduated from a private Christian all-girls high school, and you decided to head to the unofficial reunion hosted by your old bestie. It's a weekend retreat at a fancy vineyard you photograph happy couples at all the time, but when you get there... Everyone you went to school with is a hot guy now??

This game is free to play, and it looks like a lot of fun. I'll probably give it a shot this weekend.

A note of caution: It's probably best not to look at the comments. 🫠

Usurper Ghoul
https://evandahm.itch.io/usurper-ghoul

Usurper Ghoul is a nonviolent Game Boy adventure game that aims to achieve the “ruined kingdom” vibe of Dark Souls. I tend to think that Dark Souls is marred by needless difficulty; and, in the same way, some of the gameplay elements of Usurper Ghoul are needlessly annoying. The nonlinear exploration-based gameplay of Usurper Ghoul is on brand, but it’s not for everyone. Like Dark Souls, Usurper Ghoul becomes more interesting the more you engage with it, but the beginning is rough.

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For me, the payoff of the endgame of Usurper Ghoul was worth the small frustrations of the gameplay and the occasional Dark Fantasy Generator™ writing, but your mileage may vary. It’s also impossible to say how long this game takes to play. I used (this walkthrough) to smooth over some of the rougher bits, but I still spent about two hours with the game. There’s a lot to explore and experiment with in this world, and it’s definitely possible to spend more time discovering its secrets.

A Man Outside
https://litrouke.itch.io/a-man-outside

A Man Outside is a short vocabulary quiz game. This twist is that, while you play, a creepy man watches you from outside your bedroom window. You’re tasked with doing three sets of ten vocab cards as spooky ambient sounds play in the background, and you can look out of the window at any time to see if the man has gotten any closer. Between quiz sets, you can text a friend to complain and get help.

I hope it doesn’t spoil this game to say that there are no jumpscares. The vocabulary gets progressively creepier, though, and there are fun distortions in the quiz interface. The vocabulary game itself is quite good, even without the added attraction of the creepy man. Necrophagy is my new favorite word.

Based on what I’ve seen in YouTube playthroughs, your vocab score doesn’t matter, and the choices you make simply add a bit of extra flavor. In order to get the true ending of the game, you have to play it from start to finish three times. Each run only takes about seven or eight minutes, but I don’t think the second or third ending is anything special. The first ending is perfect.

As an aside... As someone with ADHD, I often have to pretend that someone is watching me in order to get past executive dysfunction. I used to “have someone watch me” by going to coffee shops, but that only worked in Tokyo and DC, which are beautiful and walkable and filled with cafés. Philadelphia is not like that. Now, if I’m having trouble sending emails or whatever, I have to conjure an amorphous imaginary person who’s standing in the room like some sort of sleep paralysis demon. So, for me, playing A Man Outside was kind of comforting. Cozy, even. Honestly, this might actually be a decent way to study vocab.

Rental
https://smarto-club.itch.io/rental

With the spooky season upon us, Smarto Club decided to take a break from being wholesome and turned spooky with Rental, an eerie game about the risks of renting beach houses.

Rental is a 32-bit game about a family of cute bunnies who rent a vacation house in the woods. This isn’t a horror game, necessarily, but it’s strange and lowkey creepy. I’m going to say it takes about fifteen minutes to play, although it might take longer for people who are out of practice with PlayStation One style 3D spatial navigation (such as myself).

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There are no jumpscares in this game, and it’s not challenging. Probably the best way to describe Rental is to say that it's a short but spooky treat for connoisseurs of perfectly normal houses that are ever so slightly larger on the inside.