A section where I share anything made by others that I find worth sharing, often along with personal notes on what it is and what I like or dislike about it. With JavaScript enabled, you can filter links via tags I gave for each item.
More info about this section
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You can hover your mouse over
(or press and hold on mobile) most links to read a variety of things about the linked thing, like "What's the purpose of it?", "What kind of content does it have?", "What did I specifically like or dislike about it?", "Are there any hidden gems on that site I want to highlight?" or "Do I have any stories or experiences to share about it?" - Sometimes I made a dedicated page for some things I linked to here because I just had too much stuff to say β either find them through below or visit the "Notes on..." subsection to find them all!
- Most links are visualized through pixely images. That is because this page first started to only link to personal websites which tend to host website buttons for others to use. I also like pretty things and find that images are a good and compact way to quickly differentiate between 100+ entries.
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For things that don't have dedicated buttons for linking, I drew one myself or used other images
(like the favicon of websites, or the icons of games) . - See this as a springboard to jumpstart into the waters and swim towards the sites that interest you. Most sites in the Personal Websites section have other Links/Neighborhood sections that also link outwards to even more sites as well, leading to a lot of rabbit holes you can stumble into if you so desire.
- If you're feeling a bit more adventurous than usual, you can even visit the sites linked in my Graphics Gallery! There, I don't check their contents and link to them based purely on how cool their button is, meaning it contains lots of links to random sites and the like.
Images to link to me with
If you have a website yourself and any inclination to link to my website, here are some buttons for you!
1st Version
These 1st version buttons remind me of the style of the Nintendo DSi, even though I never owned one. The slow hovering also reminds me of the menues of the Nintedo Wii.
2nd Version (preferred)
I made these after I made the 1st version since it bothered me that it had no button with my full username on it. I now prefer these ones over the version above.
Websites
The Living Web
Personal Websites
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turd.neocities.orgJust a small personal site. The thing I like most about it is the log as it just feels rawly human and offers comfort in the sense that others go through struggles as well.
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Gwern.netDetailed essays about niche topics. Most topics are not really part of my interests, but I can grow to like some of the ones whose titles sound interesting to me. Although I only rarely visit this site, I like that the style of writing forces me to read slowly and therefore encourages compehending & thinking about each sentence before moving on to the next one - something I'm somewhat bad at.
I also get to learn and think about a few things through the many links and thoughts Gwern puts into his essays, like...
- ...the Swiss Cheese model
- ...resources like the website LessWrong
(which I also rarely peruse) or Mnemosyne(A tool for spaced repitition learning)
Other stuff:
- The subtle humor in many of the texts I've read adds character.
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Bryan BraunThe primary draw of the website are the many Blog Posts that are short and focused. They each relay an idea effectively and are quite like a snack of knowledge that you can eat within 5 minutes to have some interesting thoughts to chew on.
Secondary draws include the Projects Page, Book Summaries and About Page
(especially sub-sections like the Principles page) ...So, essentially, the whole website is full of valuable thoughts to me.Some things that I ought to highlight- Lunch Lessons: An interesting idea where, over the course of lunch, Bryan and his wife would teach bite-sized lessons to their children with the help of a whiteboard. They post the resulting whiteboard + lessons on an instagram account plainly called 'lunchlesson'.
- This feels like such a... humane, or casual way to teach general life knowledge, and potentially something I should strive for when I have children as well.
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valentines / Love CentralI like the Scary Stories section. The little snippets of text for each section are really effective at being intriguing/foreboding/interesting, similar to the abnormality descriptions in Lobotomy Corporation when you get to pick between three of them.
I also just generally like the slightly crazy personality of the writing, images and bunny character and just the general style of the website is quite visually pleasant with things like the colors, header images and the simplistic bunny character.
She has a blog, a scary stories section and an art website called haii2u which I only found about a year after I discovered the site since it's well hidden
(it's a small button on the homepage) . -
Haii 2 UThe art site of Alexis, the mind behind valentines / Love Central.
I quite like the styling as with valentines, and it was nice looking at the OC pages. Has a lot of archived art ranging back to 2012, so that's quite the visual feast.
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freckleskies -
β° π°π΅ππ°π΅π°π»π¬ πΊπ―πΆπ¨π³πΊ β±The previous, probably abandoned website from the mind behind NightDrift
(as seen from the "SHOALS REFACTOR" goal in the plans section, which mentions βSHOALS β also probably abandoned as the last status.cafe update was in 2022-04-02 and his last MelonLand Forum post from 2022-02-08) and HazardSigns(features the same mascots present in βSHOALS β currently just a splash page that doesn't lead anywhere β quite the quantum entity, this fellow!) .Despite the fickle and fragmented presence of THE WEBMASTER, he designs good looking websites as you can see with this one, INFINITE SHOALS. It is mostly style over substance, but the style and "physical" site structure of this little coastal town is definitely worth a tender stroll for those with an eye for visual delight. The news announcements are also quite fun to read through!
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AegiI like this website mainly because of it's pixel art and just the way it dressed up it's content, and probably to see how it would develop over time!
(This website doesn't seem to have had any noticable update for like a year or two, but according to NeoCities the last update was a month ago, so it might be possible it's tinkered on in the background in secret) . Even if not full of content, it's nice to take a quick glance at it just for the atmosphere! -
EGGRAMEN -
[cyuu@cat]# _I had some phases where I irregularly checked up on the site to see if a new post was published. I generally liked the personality that eminated from the style of writing, but some posts managed to strike a resosance within me whilst others are so incredibly niche and specific that they are intriguing, but hard to bring myself to care about.
Sadly though, on November, the 13th, hard news were brought to the table:
The Homepage>> November 13, 2025 update: It was a good run!
Hmm. I think the site got a bit too edgy. Or something in me changed. I don't feel too motivated to write for this site anymore. It's hard to explain, but this site has such a specific tone that writing something outside of it is extremely difficult.
When cyuucat.moe's domain expires in August, I will not be renewing it. I'll keep the site up till then, since I hate when sites just drop dead overnight without a word.
See you around! And thank you for stopping by!
My favorite Writings- Quick & dirty hedonism notes β This really resonated with me
- What is rape about β An interesting way to cover this topic β half fiction, half based in reality
- And the cat screamed β Fiction
- The Bell Jar & The Magic Mirror β Follow Up
- A brief conversation with the forest
- A "quick" guide to moral theories
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laika's lonely planet(voyager) -
β±Ώeus' StadtMainly here for it's gallery page
(which features a surprising number of good looking, self made graphics) where I nab a good number of them for my Graphics Gallery. Extremely stylized after an OS.To make matters more complicated, an older mirror of this site is also available under "zeusofthecrows.neocities.org", but it was last updated 26th September, 2022 β 3 years ago from the time of writing this!
(2025-09-26) . It features a neat design based off of some ol' version of windows! -
Like HomeA small, quaint website with not a lot on it. I like it because of it's minimalistic visual style and the "Other" section, that, while not a lot, still includes some neat resources. One neat thing is that the home page periodically changed it's style every handful of months
(it sadly seemed to stop with the design for Summer 2022) - I found it nice to browse through the style archives one time. -
vivarismContent Warning!This website can be quite intense depending on what you read, and I talk a bit about those spicier topics here
(misandry and, uh, healthy gender noncomformity) . Only proceed if you're in the mood for it!A website I find interesting because it touches on topics I've never really come into contact with. There are two things that I want to use as an example for this. Firstly:
Her disapproval of certain things in the trans community β stuff like "you can't change who you fundamentally are
(as in male of female) , and if you want to do things that don't conform to your gender, instead of denying your true sex and doing harmful therapies and operations that modify your body in ways it shouldn't be modified causing irreperable damage and major pain(read the "Gender Nonconformity =/= Self-Harm" section in "Friendly Reminder That I'm A Feminist "Killjoy"" for more info on that!) , you should learn to accept that you can indeed be one sex physically while still doing what you want mentally". She wants the gender noncomformity(anyone should be able to do anything regardless of the social idea of what that person is supposed to do) whilst preventing people doing dangerous therapies that don't really do anything except cause harm. This is something I fully agree on, and one of the reasons I wanted to share this site!The other example is that she's a misandrist β this quote should highlight it perfectly:
Let me tell you all a secret. When I write about "everyone," "all people," "human beings" ... that never includes males. They're subhuman. Thoughout these posts I've been writing "penis-haver" specifically because it is dehumanising and insulting. "Penis-people" would be more fun and alliterative, but I don't want to imply these things are actual people. They're not. They're stupid, ugly goblins who ruin everything. I'd tolerate moidfolk more if not all of them were rapists, porn addicts, and aspiring child molesters. But they are. If even Gandhi was a rapist, where does that leave us?
'Feminist "Killjoy" Interlude: Replying to Some Comments', near the bottom of the page - 23. Sep, 2025It's interesting to see a living example of a misandrist because it seems so detached from what I see in my world. Sure, I'm not a female or a rape victim, but if the thesis is "all men are inherently evil", I can point to examples like Louis Rossmann or myself that strive to use their power to make their corner of the world a better place. Just because some males are the pioneers in human depravity doesn't mean that we all are, or in other words: Being good or evil has nothing to do with your sex.
Other Things
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Neat website design that is bright, color- & sticker-ful. It's a bit... oversized though. The crass contrast between the cheery style, idea and theming and some of her writing
(like the misandry quote up above) is interesting. - She also also has a Yumejoshi section where she fantesizes about a romance with sans from Undertale. It definitely put & still puts me off every time I see it.
All in all, quite an interesting individual that just seems to want what most of us want β a better world.
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Neat website design that is bright, color- & sticker-ful. It's a bit... oversized though. The crass contrast between the cheery style, idea and theming and some of her writing
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KalechipsA page I had in my bookmarks. I believe I just generally like the mood of the website's theming as well as the webmaster's writing style.
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ShishkaI first had this button sitting around here as a comment before uncommenting it July 2025. During that time, the site had a major visual redesign and it's really good β It's wild, stylish, has it's own charme and identity and looks really pleasant!
Also the mind behind 'No Follow', a neat visual novel with an eccentric cast of characters that live in a world where everyone has their own personal website. It's themed around the web of old and as such, has a bunch of nods to it. It's also just as stylish and detailed as the main website!
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Lazer-Bunny -
Derek SiversThe personal website of Derek Sivers, featuring writings mostly about his life, life lessons, philosophies of life and generally just many intriguing writings that most can in some way relate to their own lives. It's a really raw insight into a human's thoughts, which I find is rare in the websites I browse. The site existed for at least 15 years now, and in "Come and get me" Derek mentions that he wants his writings to live on β to both help the future of others and to be built upon by others. That kind of feels like it's an indirect call to me
(as I'm somewhat still young and am currently interesting in the art of archiving things and how to best sort information) ... The feeling I get from that thought is some mixture between happy and sad like some sort of melancholy, potentially because it's related to the thought of life and death and the sadness of realizing that it's time to pass on the torch to the new generation(even though I'm not even the one passing the torch around!) .One neat feature of this site is that each article has a comments section with other often insightful criticisms and surprising angles. Another interesting thing is that he has written five books that, while you could buy them both digitally and physically, are also
(at least partially) available for free on the site. Simply open his books, under the "Contents:" heading β essentially implying that his books are a sort of highligh reel stringing together his single blog posts he values most.Highlights- Blog: A list of +450 writings β some small snippets, other stories with life lessons and other-others chapters of his books β all in a chronologically jumbled list.
- Book Notes: A section that is overflowing with notes of 430+ books Derek read. An absolute insane amount of writing.
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His Books: As of 2025, Derek wrote five books. While any can be bought physically or digitally, every book
(except "Useful Not True") also has a table of contents further down it's page that just links to what feels like summaries for each chapter. They're essentially "Book Notes" about his own books that distill the most important points down into his bite-sized articles that probably inspired the book in the first place. And you even get the comments section for every chapter summary offering potentially additional perspectives!
Nevertheless, buying the books is probably something I'll do if I ever dig further into the things he writes about(especially now that I have a disposable income) - How to Live β 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion: Derek's masterpiece. I'll let the reviews speak for it because some of them perfectly encapsulate my thoughts about this book:
Lucas VilelaβHow to Liveβ is an absolute piece of art.
I started hoping that it would teach me the secrets of how to live. But no, in the middle the conflicting messages led me to the real message: that there is no right way to live. There are pieces of life that we gather from everyone, to build ours.
Some insights are phenomenal β like βmarriage is for when youβre not in loveβ β took me like a punch.
It changed my way to think about people, I see as everyone is a chapter and we get better at seeing the chapter about others, therefore understanding them better, not judging and only taking what resonates with us.
I've been re-reading almost every single day and the message keeps getting clearer, like a good wine.
I'm about to become a dad and I can say that I will be a better guide to my daughter, providing inspiration, not instructions.
A lot of hours and a lot of knowledge were put into this book and I'm very grateful to have access to it.
Every chapter seems to be written by a different person, a wise grampa, a dad, a psychologist, and a banker.
It is a big inspiration.
Victoria FinebergThis book is infuriating because diametrically opposed ideas make perfect sense and I can pull examples from my own life for both extremes.
This book is stimulating in forcing me to recognize the fundamental contradictions in my life and helping to navigate them.
This book is difficult to read because it's so concentrated that I need to stop and think about every sentence.
This book is practical in helping me fit my own decisions to different approaches to life.
This book has no stories.
This book helps me to understand and rewrite my own stories.
This book is eternal. I'll be re-reading chosen in random chapters to see how they fit my changing moods, circumstances, and decisions.
In ancient Greece, various schools (Stoics, Epicurians, Hedonists, etc.) each offered their own philosophy for how to live your life. This book is the closest thing Iβve found to a modern version of that. Each of the 27 short chapters makes a different argument for the right way to live. The chapters blatantly contradict each other and while your instinct is to ask, βso which oneβs right?β the bookβs ending gives you a better way to look at it. (I wonβt give it away!) I ended up buying the ebook and reading it slowly over the course of several months, taking dozens of pages of notes along the way. I felt like I was trying on each philosophy like an article of clothing to see how it fits. It was a lovely exercise, and one Iβd recommend to anyone.
Bryan Braun(Hey! I recognize that name!) -
Andy Matuschak's NotesA sub-section of Andy Matuschak's website where he's experimenting with a novel note-taking style. Some of the notes there that described the design decisions behind it resonated with my own observations from organizing my own notes and file system
(like how files, notes and generally a lot of thing in life can be categorized in a multitude of ways, making it hard to sort your digital files into a file tree structure or sorting your real life documents into folders because you have to lock in on one specific categorization, and that might make it hard to filter files after specific properties that you might care about. Tags, searching & filtering after metadata are ways to "hack in" multiple categories to such single category sorting systems. While it may not work for everything, a system where each note can link to any other note seems more dynamic and intuitive since everything you link to is directly related to the topic at hand) .This website inspired me to revive a similar idea I had for TiddlyWiki where I'd create a "Database of Life" where'd I
have a backlog of all my concrete thoughts, concepts, feelings, advice from other people and situations that serve as examples for those feelings that I can then access and interlink
(from my TiddlyWiki entry here) . I've created it in Obsidian instead of TiddlyWiki now(since it has syncing between PC and phone, is something I'm used to, is extensible & has a normal, timeless file format) under the name of the "Evergreen Database".Other topics/concepts included that I find interesting-
One topic is about creating a knowledge database that grows over time
(instead of using notes as a drop-off for "write and forget" notes that don't accumulate to anything) - "Working with the garage door open" β Showing the process of how something is done instead of just showing the result. A nice and memorable metaphor.
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One topic is about creating a knowledge database that grows over time
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Solaria's WebspaceThis primarily is here because of the excellent articles on accessible website design
(see Beginners Accessibility, Web Accessibility and Dyslexia Design Tips) that I've referenced multiple times while tinkering away on this website. -
stephvee.ca -
Josh W. ComeauA blog about CSS, React, SVG and generally making websites. He also offers expensive courses to learn all of his tips and tricks, but the blog posts are already a great resource to learn about things
(and can probably be seen as a kind of demo to experience the way he teaches things) β they're informative, comprehensive, link to additional tools and fun facts, don't shy away from easy to comprehend metaphors(like the kebab thing in the flexbox article) and have little widgets that you can play around with to help foster the things he writes about. Most articles explain things I always wondered, but never looked into, in an easily comphrehensible manner that I adore!His whole little philosophy about teaching is also quite nice, where he tries to emphasize learning the way CSS works behind the scenes instead of using template effects
(a rather basic idea that should still be instilled) To top it all off, the site also features visual pleasantries all around such as very charmingly animated icons with
(toggleable) sounds for like everything! He goes into details in articles like A Million Little Secrets and i have to agree that I adore this weave of whismy and fun layered into every animation and detail!I recommend taking a prod through the post list and opening any that interests you in a new tab.
Recommended articles-
A friendly introduction to SVG & An Interactive Guide to SVG Paths: These posts
(especially the first one) opened my eyes to the possibility of animating single SVG properties via bog-standard CSS animations, which is just a wild thing I didn't think was possible before reading it! -
Color Formats in CSS: Generally neat summary on color formats, color spaces and stuff. Even has neat tidbits such as "the reason
darkgrayis lighter thangrayis because named colors are a hodgepodge of colors taken from different sources, rarely including even stuff like a heartbreaking memorial". - How to Learn Stuff Quickly: Little tips, tricks and takes on things like tutorial hell, growth mindset, memorization and other topics related to learning things. I like the distinction between guided and unguided learning as it feels like it applies quite well to my experience of tutorials as well.<--,but all the other advice sounds sound and practical as well.-->
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An Interactive Guide to Flexbox: He finally explained the nebulous
justify,align,contentanditemswords used in flex properties likealign-itemsin an easy-to-understand way using kebab and cocktail wieners!
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A friendly introduction to SVG & An Interactive Guide to SVG Paths: These posts
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Right to the Ultraviolet, -
Museum of Alexandria -
Exclave CityIntriguing navigation menu. Also tube map based, so an instant recommendation from me.
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InvisibleUpThis is mostly here because of the idea of giving each article it's own wide cover image β it's quite charming!
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a tiny space in space...A page I had in my bookmarks. I just like the style of it and it has a neat little resources section on it with a few shareables I nabbed for my own site :>
It's also a rare few of the sites that employ an animated favicon!
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at the bus stopA page I had in my bookmarks. I liked the ASCII art images and the theming of the navigation around bus stops. Other than that, there's not a lot to discover here β the favicon's pretty neat though!
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arlitaA page I had in my bookmarks. I'm generally intrigued by the navigation menu
(it's basically just every section listed in a row one after the other) since it's simple, dynamic(one can just add, move and remove sections as they grow and change without depending on any other section β seems quite powerful!) and because I haven't really seen it on a lot of other pages. -
GioCitiesA page I had in my bookmarks. While the kind of writing isn't really my cup of tea, there's still something attractive to me about it β just seeing that long list of long blog articles combined with the pleasant styling is just really nice!
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Steph Ango / kepanoThe site of Steph Ango, who is most notably the current CEO of Obsidian. It features a writings section with really nice and concise articles about how he uses Obsidian himself and just general life stuff and ideas that are worthwhile to read and ponder about for your own life. It's similar to Bryan Braun or Derek Siver's website, if you're familiar.
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ispod dot cool -
NEΓNbandit Street -
STARBREAKER.ORG -
delovely -
Linwood- I like the webmaster's hobby of nature and plants. It's something I just rarely see and adds a bit more variety to this NeoCityscape
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Mister Chad -
Nosy Cat StudiosI wanted to put this here are experiencing the classic annoyance of "I need this one resource I found while randomly stumbling through pages, but I can't remember where I found it on!" about 2 times
(I love the fact that browsers keep histories) . That is to say, the resources section is filled with good stuff!The contents of writing also interest me, and the fact the site is split up into a cluster of multiple small sites makes it a bit more interesting browse through β although I haven't taken the time to have a proper look.
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Life can be (a) dream
YouTube Channels
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Louis RossmannA channel I discoevered years ago, handling a variety of topics such as life advice, right to repair, repair streams, consumer rights β all related to his life and his own Rossmann Repair Group Company, a repair service for Apple products.
The most important videos for me back then and still today are from the "Core philosophies & rants" playlist, where he would explain concepts or thoughts that were on his mind that day and underline them with exemplary situations that happened to him or saw happen to others.
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Rage Quit HeroesAn abandoned german-speaking channel led by the duo Sepp & Simon during the years of 2013 and 2014. As you can guess by the age and obscurity, it was a channel I discovered as a child and have fond nostalgia of. The main content was classic gaming Let's Plays, but they rarely also did some fun stuff such as the "Paper Wars" video
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ArloA blue, fuzzy monster that talks an awful lot about video games with a special focus on Nintendo. Besides videos about games specifically like reviews or impressions, he also talks and theorizes about the decisions game companies like Nintendo are making as well as having the odd video about other gaming-related topics like microtransactions, review scores, video game movies or reactions to presentations. It's fun to hear someone else think about, be excited about and just generally be interested in video games and the companies making them.
Besides the content though, Arlo also has a charming personality that is first held up by the blue fuzzy hand puppet he uses as an avatar and secondly by the way he talks and thinks - that being family-friendly, but still direct and sincere, with a few jokes sprinkled in that often manage to make me chuckle, smile and/or laugh. The thoughts he presents in his videos are well-structured, understandable and thought-provoking. He also is a very affectionate Pikmin
(and Metroid? I don't really watch his Metroid videos) fan. -
JulesBasically the german equivalent of "Internet Historian". Topics often include the abstruse, funny, weird and sometimes disturbing stories the internet writes, and most videos are just crammed to the brim with funny jokes and memes.
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XiutecuhtliA channel that's mostly about insanely long, ardous and repetitive challenges in games on Roblox. I don't know why I exactly like them and I only watch to the first to second hour of their videos at maximum.
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Kurzgesagt -
Limealicious / LaimuShe generally seems quick-witted and observant, quickly grasping ideas or
Discovered through a stream together with Vinesauce & Friends - Super Mario Party
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DerKegyA german streamer with a confusing history of older YouTube channels.
The thing I like most about him is his personality. Although I can't exactly pinpoint it, his thoughts, humor, attitude and specific reactions to stuff round him out to a person I enjoy watching, whether that be more non-casual stuff like No Death runs or hard or grindy games, stuff like "Freight-Tag" or indie games he's playing or reactions to stuff like the MΓ€dchen WG or Dingo Pictures movies
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VinesauceAlthough there are a good number of things I can't really siphon any value out of, mostly related to either inside-jokes or the many times he talks about shows, movies, albums or other stuff you wouldn't really know much about if you haven't already experienced yet - and seeing that I pretty much never really watch any movies, series or know much about bands or albums, I just can't
I watched a video about him being on a panel at like PAX or something and it's really impressive how he's always being able to squeeze out something funny from a question someone's asked!
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JoelOne thing be told - this man can think of the stupidest shit and laugh himself to tears about a lot. It can be genuinely annoying if you actually want to see gameplay that isn't interupted by a random topic followed by absurd scenarios and jokes and then infectious laughing. This makes watching Joel good for small doses while it feels fresh to have someone laugh so often, but I just can't watch him for too long.
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GameMaker's Toolkit
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hackerling
Discovered through a stream together with Laimu - Salmon Run
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Andy NanamiIt's nice to watch a channel that's a bit rougher around the edges than a typical channel. It seems to have a more human and casual side to it, more similar to just hanging out with buddies in a voice call.
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SovietWombleA channel that mainly uploads montages of funny video game clips that happened to him and his mates in the ZeroFucks Clan. The funny clips themselves are supplemented with hand-animated subtitles that sometimes enhance the humor and visually just flow really nicely. Besides those montages, he's also currently dabbling in making long essay videos based on video games which I can also recommend watching.
Since it takes weeks to subtitle his normal videos
(and even longer to make his essays) , he uploads quite infrequently, but that is mildened by the already large library of videos to binge.He also streams on Twitch
(which I uncommonly/rarely watch) , has a knack for fishing, a little bulldog named Lulu and just generally has a funny personality.Other Links- His Twitch Channel
- Soviet's Closet, his Stream Archive
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3Blue1Brown -
JuxtopposedA YouTuber that, as of recently, mostly redesigns the UI of various software alongside a nice sense of humor. Also has a bit of a backlog about general UI design that is nice to peruse through.
Recommended videos(a.k.a. any video I've seen before adding the channel here) -
WheezyWaiter -
CirquetRelaxing video game ambience and (generally) chill gameplay
A channel I mostly watch for their video game ambience videos where it's just literally the ambience you would hear if you just stood around at certain spots in video games. The repertoire mostly consists of old Nintendo games like Super Mario 64 or several older TLoZ titles, but it also rarely features other games such as Dark Souls or Portal.
I find I sometimes listen to such ambience when I'm in the mood for listening to something to fill the ears, but no song strikes my fancy
(like everything's distracting or something) .Some quick faves- Super Mario 64 β Outside Peacch's Castle β it just sounds pure.Someone in the comments mentioned that it sounds like heaven, and I have to agree.
- Majora's Mask β The Moon
- Majora's Mask β Stock Pot Inn (Night)
However, one day, during a curious gander, I discovered that there's actually a really big archive of streams
(a few in the life tab on her channel and a 271-item strong Live streams playlist) where she justs plays games along with a co-host. -
LEMMiNO -
Nexpo -
CGP GrayVideos I'd recommend -
Sapphiet γ·γ£γ€A channel mostly filled with high-quality 1 hour extensions of TUNIC's soundtrack, each recorded in-game and mixed with the ambience that plays in that song's area. Since the recordings feature like every location in the game, it could spoil some of the fun of discovering things. It could also do the opposite, making you go "What the fuck is that? I've never seen that in my playthrough!" and more curious about things you've missed, so uh, spoiler warning/curiosity I guess?
Quick Links- 1 Hour Ambience Tour β Every ambience video in somewhat random order
- "Prefer to go in order instead?" β Every ambience video in roughly the same order you discover the locations in-game
Bigger Websites
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LessWrongA website that's similar to gwern.net in terms of writing style. It's a forum where people can publish a specific idea or concept they had in mind, specifically with a focus on ideas that help us to be better, or in other words, less wrong in the way we approach life.
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NeoCitiesNeoCities is the service I use to host my website. It's name is a reference to GeoCities, an older, now retired web service where people could host their own personal websites for free. It has a few extra features like update feeds, view counts or finding websites with specific tags, but you can ignore all of that if you want to. Regardless, I think it's a solid, available way to gain some experience with web development with the added bonus of being a bit on the radar, compared to just buying a domain and hosting it silently without anyone knowing of it's existance.
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nekowebNekoweb is a website-hoster that is pretty similar to NeoCities. To me, it looks like "NeoCities, but it actually updates every couple o' months". There's a good article that compares NeoCities and Nekoweb written by Azure/Bede from ballonlea.net, but here are my key takeaways to what makes nekoweb speshual:
- It's branding is more "brunt force internet culture" rather than NeoCities' "subdued, calm and professional, yet still homely" vibe.
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The free tier doesn't have any file type limits, so you can freely upload .mp3, .mp4, .zip, .exe and whatever else there is for free
(which isn't possible on NeoCities) ! The supporter tier is also cheaper($3/month compared to NeoCities $5/month) . -
It has more customization
(you can give the little browser previews that appear in the Explore pages custom CSS, graphics, hover effects etc.) -
Probably better file editor than NeoCities
(which isn't hard to top) -
Random cool feature: You can see the mouse cursors of other logged-in users as they navigate the same page in real time and even chat with them!
(and you can even upload a cursor.png to your website and have a uniquely styled mouse cursor!)
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MelonLand ForumA forum with a smaller, but open community. It holds a variety of topic that I sometimes like looking through, and even more rarely perhaps even add my own two cents to. I like the idea of forums and communicating with longer messages that go more in-depth / cover every thought one holds.
The Forum closes on Mondays for following reasoning:
My site closes on mondays as a reminder that nothing lasts forever and its important to step back, slow down and appreciate the time we have - so much of the web tries to make us feel like we always have to be online and connected, and I wanted to do the opposite!
The topic "Mondays!" on the ForumWhile I can kinda understand that, it was also annoying when I remembered that I read an interesting topic about something that I'm now thinking about only for it to be unavailable because that thought came on a monday.
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Super Mario World Central(SMW Central) A forum primarily about hacking & modding the game Super Mario World. Here are things I recommend checking out:
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The Music section - it's a large library of .spc files
(music files for the Super Nintendo) that is comprised of both covers of other songs as well as original compositions. You'll need a tool that can play these files(I personally use Audacious) . - There are some ROM hacks and events I recommend checking out, namely:
- VLDC10 - The Vanilla Level Design Contest 10 is a level-making competition in which every submitted level then gets put into a final romhack. The highlight for me is just the overworld of this!
- Super FamiCompo - A contest about making .spc-files.
- Overworld Design Contest - This is a bit more of a personal favorite, but I've always liked the idea of designing my own overworlds in things like Mario games, and this is a competition solely about making a cool looking overworld.
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The Music section - it's a large library of .spc files
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32-Bit Cafe -
32-Bit Cafe β Discourse Forum -
Nightfall City -
CodewarsAn online platform where you can create and complete programming challenges to improve your programming skills. I've only tried it a bit a few years ago and haven't found it too useful, but the general idea behind it sounds solid and the pricing model seems fair and so I figured it might be more helpful for someone else.
The hover effect for the icon here is also pretty cool due to the middle being transparent so there's also that, I suppose!
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Internet Archive
Webmedia
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OceanfallsA webcomic I've read on-and-off again. It has background lore of the world you can dig into if you want
(which I partly do) , but it also has many fun and serious interpersonal situations with applied morals and a good chunk of humor thrown in. I like the characters, especially those that make me want to hug them sometimes.Every page also has it's own comment section which also brought me to laugh multiple times. Even the author
(nicknamed "Nights") herself often writes little jokes or relevant things(like updates on the upload schedule or notifying when the next page is entirely decided by the choices of the comment section) into the comment section, leading into some moments where a dramatic story beat happens and then you see a ridiculous comment if you accidentally scroll too far, like a joke or the author commenting "i like capes" or something silly and somewhat unrelated.I genuinely recommend reading it! It has a lot of pages, but once you're through them and have to wait a week for the next time, it's a bit excrutiating depending on how far you've fallen into the story and characters and just want to know how it continues!
One thing to note is that you can see the subtle growth in writing and graphics throughout, so while it may seem a little low-quality in the beginning, it gets better! You can look at a few of the newest pages to get a feel for how the style develops and if it potentially is something for you.
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corru.observer -
no-follow -
Short TripA page I had in my bookmarks. A nice little interactive illustration about driving a tram line around a charming world sketched onto rough paperback. Made to unwind after a day of great tribulation alongside a nice soundscape of chirping birds and tram noises. Also has a Steam Version available for 2$, but the web version is perfectly fine as-is.
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Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle CollectionA page I had in my bookmarks. A collection of little logic puzzlers, all of which playable in the browser using JavaScript or additionally downloadable as .exe files. I have no idea how this ended up in my bookmarks, but the web is mysterious and links to everywhere are scattered in the most unlikely places imaginable.
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* signal 3 _ *A nice little 30-minute read where you look through someone's computer in a future where humanity developed to a space-faring civilization and is now spreading across the solar system. It was sadly last updated 8 years ago
(2017-11-21) at the time of writing this.
Webtools
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musicbox.funA music tool with which you can compose songs that can be played using DIY music boxes
(or just played in the browser if you don't have one) . If you are interested on the background of this website, click the very small, hard to see "About" and "Guides" page in the bottom left corner of the page! -
DON'T YOU LECTURE ME WITH YOUR THIRTY DOLLAR WEBSITE πΏA meme-y music maker
(and I also don't get the reference with the name) . -
vClockA simple timer, stopwatch, alarm clock and world time website.
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BoxentriqA big suite of en- and decryption tools for ciphers and other adjacent tools, data and info. Neat for times where secrets in games, ARGs or other things use ciphers and you don't want to learn all the 200 possible ways to encrypt a message, although I reckon that there probably is fun in trying to solve puzzles and activate your critical thinking.
Some sections that I would recommend
- Text Analysis: I first found this website by encountering a cipher in the wild wild web and not knowing a lot of ciphers to decode it. I thought that someone might've made a tool which automatically tries to detect what cipher was used, and my first hit came with this tool. It might misfire, but it's better than nothing!
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Other: More or less tributes to/summeries/logs of mysterious real life cases where a lot of cryptography
(or just general IT stuff) is involved. As of March 2023, it only contains Cicada 3011, the Zodiac ciphers and a short page on quantum computing. - Web Puzzles 1: A puzzle on the internet where you need to find codes through image, audio and whatever else files and enter them to proceed to the next page which presents more info to decode. I do not know how long it is.
Lastly, I think this quote is good to keep in mind while using this website:
Although tools can be helpful, there's a saying: "A fool with a tool is still only a fool". Good quality code-breaking puzzles can't be solved simply by using tools. It's your wits and creativity that matter, and the tools are just there to help explore your ideas.
Main page, most bottom paragraph - someday in the past... -
TerrasavrA simple and handy web-based tool to edit Terraria player files. It's really well featured and allows to tweak seemingly anything such as:
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Basic stats
(health & mana, difficulty mode and permanent upgrades) -
Inventories
(including stuff like piggy banks) - Research progress for Journey Mode characters
- Spawn Points per world
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Basic stats
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SteamGridDBA website that provides a user-created database of graphics tailored for games in your Steam library so that you can customize the appearence of them by, for example, changing the big banner image that shows while having a game selected.
This is especially useful for games that you add via the "Add a Non-Steam Game" option as they by default have no styling and look ugly.
It also has functionality to get the default styling of any game, including the game's icon
(a functionality I I often use to get icons for the Video Games section of this page) . -
Minecraft ToolsA website full of little tools for Minecraft, primarily for easily generating items using more or less hidden features that would be annoying to access purely in-game.
I personally used the Book Generator while I was working on an abandoned adventure map since there are quite a few hidden features you can use in books such as basic formatting
(bold, italics, strikethrough, etc) , color, tooltips, inserting keybinds or having clickable text that can open URLs, go to a specific page in the book or run a command. The only kind of bad thing about it is that the book's formatting on the website isn't identical to how the text appears in-game, meaning you need to test every tweak you make in-game to make sure that the text doesn't overflow off the page. -
easings.netA little cheat sheet of various easing functions, with visualizations for different contexts and a handful of different ways to implement them into what you're doing.
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Redstone EditorA little tool for quickly sketching out some Minecraft redstone contraptions in a 2D space. Once you're done, you can either share what you've done by sharing the URL (the "drawing" is included in it) or right-click on the main area and save it as an image.
I personally don't really have a use for it since I'm not too into redstone, but am keeping it here since it seems useful for the case I someday do get into it, or the case that others might find it useful.
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BitFontMaker 2A neat little webtool for making pixel art fonts that you can then use for yourself or share with others in a gallery hosted on the site. Any font shared in the gallery can have their own license/restrictions so check that before you use them for something
(although most cool fonts I found & downloaded were put into the Public Domain) .Fun Fact: The gallery has at least 500 pages worth of fonts, with each page holding 16 fonts leading to at least 8.000 fonts already made with this tool!
(as of June 2025) -
regex101A little sandbox where you can test out and write regular expressions with many bells and whistles such as:
- Built-in documentation of every
(?) special character - A parser that parses your regex in real time and describes each part of it in detail
- A field where you can insert a string of text to test how your regex parses it
This site makes writing regex actually bearable for me.
- Built-in documentation of every
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ACPatternsA web port of the "designs" feature present in "Animal Crossing: New Leaf" and "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" β basically an online pixel art tool made to emulate the toolset and features present in those games
(it even has that same pixel art smoothing filter that is present in the game!) . While it has some export & import options, I couldn't find an option to export the final image as a png or jpg with the final/smoothed pixel art, which is kind of a bummer for me.Very polished UI still!
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ThreatmixerContains
(mild?) Rain World Spoilers!Do note that the website will just smear the name of regions and their cover art
(and indirectly how many regions there are, robbing you of the wonder of what else you can find) right into you without hesitation, letting you guesstimate how many regions there is to the game(the game doesn't tell you that to always allow you to wonder how much more there is to discover) and in which order you'll likely visit them, so be wary if you're on the lookout for those kinds of spoilers and haven't played the base game or a particular DLC yet.A page for a very specific purpose. You see, there's this video game called "Rain World", and some of the music tracks in it are "Threat Themes" that're composed of layers that fade in and out dynamically based on how likely you are to die.
The purpose of this website is to mix and match these single layers from these threat themes, allowing you to hear it in configurations that aren't present in the official OSTs and custom uploads from people on YouTube. It includes every track from the base game, it's DLCs and additionally some fan-made threat music made for mods or vanilla regions that don't have one.
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JS PaintAn online port of
MicroSoftJavaScript Paint, the classic we all know from back in the days.It's a good wordplay!
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domino 2domino is a tool for collaging fragmentary thoughts and ideas without the friction of assembling them into linear writing
A kool tool that allows you to write little cards or post-it notes and arrange them freely on an infinite canvas. It has just the right amount of supplementary features to be dynamic whilst also not being overwhelming
(cards can have different styles, sizes, link to each other, be grouped, have quick links and basic formatting β and that's it!) While I haven't used it in any capacity, it seems like it can be useful!
(+ it's free, saves boards to your browser storage and can export to html files β quite a good deal if you ask me!) -
Time and DateA website with various tools related to time and dates. Useful tools for me:
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BroiderA neat little website where you can create pixel art border images that you can easily pluck into CSS and use for your own site. It also has a big gallery that you can scroll through and nab borders for yourself.
Note that once the image
(border) is generated, changing it's color seems difficult(although I could potentially imagine that there's a tool out there that lets you edit it somehow...) .Some personal favorites.pkmn { border-image: url('data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACoAAAAqCAYAAADFw8lbAAAA+UlEQVRYR+2Z2Q6FIAxE9f8/2i02gUrXSCA6vklKOp47LO1dl+ezsaG1EdNjSM3bEjG9UBJI4iXBfDxLl+dR85ZEpxcaJfSWZ0N5z6ShCUf8cKGWAMsaXq9K3pTmX3lLotMLpS/hxKTxqFUkUhbZSo+26qcVyoXRu/XlXm/yOMvzlRUjJ5NkjeFCe5H0knUThVCGVPIqiL69qEAUROlSktrXsviUGk3dDrWTCfso9tGbgHWxztoWJ1OWnFoTFUVj8zqJVR/A/h+Poma6CaSLO+/E3nV9s4uIbp5j1Yd+GXTzFKLR6yO6eQ57XiEW2e9387yksnHf+J9pB/jPpCPjz8OoAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC') 14 / 14px / 0 round; border-width: 14px; border-style: solid; background: white; color: black; }.broider { border-image: url("data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACoAAAAqCAYAAADFw8lbAAABB0lEQVR4AeyVgQrDIAxEt/3/P29p4EENu5U6K/RwpJ6JJi6vQl+Pm/zWHx39ohbRRfQHgXeszXjiGG0WdxSKtPmMyRVPlE2r52WQwYIozUARX3VOXKnKr/XZ16gVUTqDFD6q4qwrYkd55KdaEoUMmp3GgK80tjRW9zWLyrEkeupOKTIR76pjSTRgpHURycx2OFXHmmjLZZK3iI4GbUd0A8QXZZv/83TVsSQKxS4iJO/0VB1LonxJ0B2cnBJXmptiqOsROjZLoupOQUhhUXkq/rWOFdFKrJLAV1oJsY94rU+8UQuiqnMIjFLI1fOIp1oQzU5ioNOrNY7SZkVUtzlxZREdDfs2RD8AAAD//yW8XfEAAAAGSURBVAMA1xhkVQVEE14AAAAASUVORK5CYII=") 14 / 14px / 0 round; border-width: 14px; border-style: solid; background: #faebd7; color: #776955; } -
Learn X in Y MinutesA site that, for a bunch of programming languages, provides a source file that quickly explains the syntax of that language for those already familiar with general programming concepts.
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Online NotepadA page I had in my bookmarks. A simple browser-based text editor that saves your writings to your browser's local storage / cache. My mystery bookmarks also had access to a sub-page that is, like, the same text editor but with a different, more windows-like styling? Curious...
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petpet generatorA page I had in my bookmarks. A small tool to generate an emote where any given image is pet by a hand.
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Unicode ExplorerA page I had in my bookmarks. One of the many sites that allow you to search for Unicode Symbols. While I personally just command a search engine to search for "arrow unicode" and quickly windowshop for what I want, I included this entry here as a way to bundle UniCode-related resources to one item in here. Seems kind of hacky, but whatever for now. Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
- SYMBL β HTML Entities Table β A table of all
(or at least a very lot) HTML entities(y'know, these codes that are written like . Could probably be handy for someone.©in HTML and then rendered as © on the final page)
- SYMBL β HTML Entities Table β A table of all
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Clippy
A CSS
clip-pathgenerator. -
CSS Generator for Custom Corners
Directories
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Let's Get CreativeA site by Bryan Braun that lists tools and games on the web that are about creativity, recreation and learning.
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Tiny HelpersA listing of 500+ tiny tools and snippets that help with various aspects of making websites.
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32-Bit Cafe β "Resources List for the Personal web"A big list of guides, tools and assets for aspiring webweavers β those that create websites as a hobby.
Miscellaneous
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Philosophize This!A podcast that for most episodes, covers a specific somewhat known philosophical thinker and explains a few of their main concepts and ideas that they've expressed in their work. While most of the episodes follow that structure, there are a handful of episodes that are about general stuff, like emotions or logical arguments. I haven't listened to this podcast a lot, only to those rare "easily applicable"/general episodes.
TODO: Add liked episodes -
NeoLandsA project that sounds cool on paper, but that lied dormant for 11 months now
(or since Feb. 2023) . It's more or less a directory in which people are able to submit their websites to be included on a visual map. Specific images would denote a website; hovering over them would display a small user-suplied description, and clicking on it would link to the website in question. It's basically something like a button wall or this Links section in a more visual form.The whole thing is inspired by the Freelands section of the game "Hypnospace Outlaw", if you're familiar. I'm excited of how the end product will look, because to me it seems like this idea has a good lot of potential, but it's been a bit sad to see it dormant like that.
The creator last posted something 3 weeks ago
(~Beginning of Dec 2023) about how their computer was dead since the end of July and that that's part of the reason why no update came for so long.As an aside: Funnily enough, someone by the name of coshnaut tried to make their own version of this
(still visitable under "freelands.neocities.org") since it took too long for any update to happen, only for that version to lie dormant since end of Winter 2023(After which I discovered on the 11th May, 2024 that coshnaut's main website was deleted... So freelands.neocities.org will probably lie dormant forever) . -
Listen to WikipediaA small website that audio- & visualizes every edit made to Wikipedia in real time. It's a cool way to put into perspective how many people from all over the world are doing something right this moment. The harmonies that sometimes emerge can also sound nice and calming sometimes.
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HackerTyperA small, silly website that aids in making it look like you're hacking into something. Probably fun to use for budget film-making. You can inspect the website and remove the footer
(which really is just ads) to make it fit the browser window perfectly. -
Living Worlds in HTML5A tech demo bringing a series of animated pixel art back from an very old program called "Seize the Day". To quote LikeHome on the matter:
LikeHome's Seize the Day page - 2025-09-24Seize the Day is a virtual calendar, personal organizer, and diary program originally released in 1994.
What makes this Seize the Day special are the real-time virtual "Living Worlds" that display when you open the application. These virtual landscapes are synced up to real time and are continually moving and changing. They also make use of color cycling technology to produce mesmerizing animations. Seize the Day also includes a journal that provides daily quotes and inspiration.
The website is a partial recreation β some more advanced features like moving objects
(fishies) or events(fireworks) don't appear here. For that, you can either try running the old Seize the Day program in an emulator(details about that here) or buy the relatively newly released app which ports the backgrounds to iPhones and Android phones(you can even set them as live wallpapers! Although they're buggy on my android phone and keep disappearing after a few weeks of usage, having to reenable them again and again) .I also made 2 "Screensaver Wallpapers" out of this website by putting them into an iFrame and scaling it up.
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Wobble PaintA small PICO-8 game where you can paint pixel art that wobbles around charmingly. The icon you're hovering over right now was drawn by me using Wobble Paint!
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Your World of Text -
No PaintA little experimental art game where you paint a picture by applying or denying random effects. Each tool has it's own sounds and music, and the handcrafted feel of everything is quite nice to witness.
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Squares in SquaresJust a collection of images that show what square area you need to fit x amount of squares in it. Some solutions are hilariously dumb.
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Every Fucking Bootstrap Website Ever
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How Products Are Made -
Tips for Public Speaking β speaking.ioA link I found while sifting through the nooks and crannies of my bookmarks toolbar. Seems to just be a good collection of advice on planning, preparation, execution and reflection!
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the end of town
A nice little full-screen "art page" where you can stroll down a little coastal town at night, with a little somber song you can activate by left-clicking anywhere once.
Sites of similar nature where you just scroll to walk -
fireworks.jsA page I had in my bookmarks. I always wanted to find a really good-looking fireworks "Page Art", and this comes pretty close β even has a bunch of neat sliders to tweak things to one's liking! And since it's a JavaScript library, you can probably embed it into your own website as like a background somehow.
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emotional.codes -
.netA
( is a piece of toasted or fried bread, normally cubed and seasoned.)s are used to add texture and flavor to saladsβnotably the Caesar saladβas an accompaniment to soups and stews, or eaten as a snack food.
- Wikipedia
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Buried TreasureA small site dedicated to reviewing unknown indie games in hopes of increasing their reach. Seems neat!
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Stream of a streamA small site that recorded varius 2-3 minute clips of water sounds around streams and rivers in nature.
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Lucide IconsA nice collection of consistent .svg icons free to use for any project you want. It's my go-to if I need any icon β I even set it up as an browser search engine with
https://lucide.dev/icons/?focus=&search=%sunder@lucide! -
eighty eight thirty.one
The Dead Web
Some sites are archived via the Wayback Machine, and while that is a better alternative than literally nothing, browsing using that is more limited
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ππππ πππ₯ππππ£πArchival Status
Minimal traces of it's existance remain. The only valuable remains are local copies of the various RSS feeds that contain some full writings, the still-existing status.cafe account, random articles on some of his writings that went somewhat minorly viral and instances of the button on various button walls across the indie web.
bikobatanari's site was one of the first sites I ever visited on NeoCities
(which isn't surprising considering that it was one of the most top visited sites at the time) . I found myself returning to it quite a bit, mostly because of the solid backlog of writings he had along with a nice writing style(mostly direct and objective with light bits of humor thrown in) . I liked the writings as they were about topics that interested me, but even besides that his other sections were packed and sometimes also interesting to me(e.g. the Garden section, the Art Journal & Pandora's Box) .It was thus a bit sad to one day see that the site was suddenly deleted. At first I thought that maybe something happened to the server the site was on and I remained hopeful that it would be back up soon, but as soon as I saw that all other accounts and sites associated with the website
( were also deleted, it was clear what has happened. Even the archive on the Wayback Machine wasn't save from biko's spring cleaningYouTube on which he had OSU PB's, random one-offs ,(Video of a bug in a random racing game "into the shadow realm") and an recording archiving what he's done in his current Minecraft worldBandCamp He has dabbled in making ambient music and documented his experience creating it in 2 entries in the Writings section. I remember that the first thing he published was a small album ,Status.Cafe The way it's "deleted" is kind of eerie to me. Status.cafe allows for each profile page to insert custom css / styling. biko used that to blank out his page, setting the display value of most elements to none. Since the tab title displays the last status posted, he also pushed out a new status at Feb. 23, 2024 containing just "." as the message and having the ominous "Smiley without eyes" staring at you. ,mc.bikobatanari.art which was implemented relatively near the end of the site, replacing a long, single html document that was just his journal of what hes recently been doing in his minecraft world. It was relatively unpolished & unfinished, but an interesting idea for a sandbox game you plan on playing longterm , his contact form and evenlonering.neocities.org A satirical webring for people that aren't part of any webring, but still want to be part of a webring without being part of a "real" webring. Neatly enough, there's an Internet Archive page that hasn't been yeeted off into the void yet, so feel free to peruse one of the few snippets that's left of bikobatanari )(I noticed it's deletion on 2024-04-26) .At the time of deletion, I didn't really think about archiving the writings of other websites, and so I thought all writings were lost. That is, until I cleaned up my computer to delete unused programs. I noticed my old feed reader was sitting there unused and checked in on it to see if there are feeds and websites I might want to keep following. Luckily enough, the RSS reader kept the RSS feeds from bikobatanari that I subscribed to β and because bikobatanari typically published his full writings into his RSS feed, my feed reader had full copies of the posts he published in it! I was quite happy when I found that, but with that came a dilemma: Should I publish my archived writings here or should I honor biko's potential wish to have it all wiped off the face of the earth?
While I don't know the answers to it yet, I have backed up the snippets into my Obsidian Vault which is both synced with my phone and regularly backed up to my backup drive and a cloud backup storage server, which'll keep it around for a long while until I do know if to publish them.
I don't know if he announced this deletion beforehand or just did it without warning. I don't know if he wants to be remembered or forgotten. I don't know if he'll reappear later, either under the same nickname or as another pseudonym on the most isolated server known to mankind.
But regardless of all of that, I still want to commemorate this website since it was a bit formative and a big aspiration for me.Oh, and also...
...I found two screenshots I made years ago:
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Dainty EcoArchival Status(08. July, 2025) - Archive present on WaybackMachine
- Most smollpub journal entries seem archived as well
A website I mostly like because of it's blog. The website is split between...
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daintye.co - The main website with it's typical sections
(About me, projects & interests like pixel art, embroidery or steam deck modding and links) - daintyeco.smol.pub - Her blog that I'm drawn to because of it's writing style and topics she writes about
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nonkiru -
Crossing TimeArchival Status(2025-09-28) A simple website that links to the appropriate hour track from each Animal Crossing game.
I discovered that it's missing since 26. June, 2023. The latest IA capture is from 29. May, 2023, but screws up loading the YouTube iFrame since it automatically prepends the Wayback machine URL to it, making it try to load a Wayback Machine capture of the Youtube Video
(which doesn't exist) . Works when you remove it manually via inspecting the source. -
World Map BuilderA little alternative to Super Mario Maker 2's World Maker which sported a bit more design freedom
(smaller tiles, larger worlds, custom tileset graphics & decoration) and allowed you to do stuff like have levels that have multiple exits that each lead to a different level. Required registration.
Downloadables
Software & Apps
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AudaciousThe software I use to listen to my local music library on my computer. Instead of using the full-blown GUI I have set it up to only really display what song is currently playing. I select the songs themselves by just opening the audio files from my file browser. Other neat things:
- It's able to play .spc files. This is a very specific feature I make use of because SMW Central has a big section full of great originals and covers in this format.
- It has a pretty cool design that's compact and stylish and I just really like how it looks.
- It seems to be lightweight.
This is the theme I'm using
(what the hell is that song name?) :
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MusicoletThe app I use to listen to my local music library on my phone. It has all the features that I need, seems to be completely offline and seems to be lightweight and not really resource-intensive.
One niche feature this music player has is time stamps *(in the app it's for synced lyrics, but I exclusively use them for timestamps. Because it just seems like a waste of time to sync lyrics)*. This is useful in a variety of cases:
- Most tracks in the soundtrack from "Isles of Sky and Sea" consist of two songs back to back, and so the time stamps are useful if I just wanted to listen to, say, the second song of the track "Tidal Reef"
- It's good for internet compilations I downloaded β y'know, stuff like "π 1 hour of relaxing Animal Crossing Night time music (+ rain)"
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It's good for audio files that are multiple layers/variations of the same general song
(e.g. many HADES songs having an acoustic and rock variant)
One problem with this setup is that this isnt possible on my PC because I just use the file browser and opening mp3/ogg's with Audacious
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MusicbeeA Windows-only Music Library manager I briefly used while I still had Windows. It's very customisable
(which to me is it's biggest plus) and includes several features like visualizers, add-ons, music metadata editors and more. Therefore, it's a bit buggy and probably a bit more resource-intensive(but cooler) compared to most other music players. -
TiddlyWikiA software I found in my quest of searching for a thing that helps with keeping my thoughts sorted. Sometimes it felt like this software could truly help me with my many problems if I were to stick with it, so that in a year or so, I'd have a backlog of all my concrete thoughts, concepts, feelings, advice from other people and situations that serve as examples for those feelings that I can then access and interlink with a single search in the search bar - even now while writing this, it just seems like an insanely powerful tool that I should probably use!
Now, I just use Obsidian, though...
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AsepriteAn art program with which you can create pixel art.
My writings about Aseprite from the "About this Website" pageJust as a side-note: If you don't want to pay for Aseprite, you can completely compile it for yourself from their GitHub. According to the FaQ on the official website, you can still use your own compiled version for personal and commercial uses β the only thing prohibited in the EULA is sharing compiled copies online. This basically means you can buy the software if you don't want to compile it yourself and/or want to support whoever the money goes to, else it's just more cost-efficient money-wise to compile it yourself.
There is also a project called "LibreSprite", a fork of the last Aseprite version that was published under the shareable license
(General Public License v2) , that is maintained and probably updated with new features(although I don't know for sure since I didn't test it) and available for free. -
LibreSpriteA free branch of Aseprite.
My writings about Aseprite from the "About this Website" pageJust as a side-note: If you don't want to pay for Aseprite, you can completely compile it for yourself from their GitHub. According to the FaQ on the official website, you can still use your own compiled version for personal and commercial uses β the only thing prohibited in the EULA is sharing compiled copies online. This basically means you can buy the software if you don't want to compile it yourself and/or want to support whoever the money goes to, else it's just more cost-efficient money-wise to compile it yourself.
There is also a project called "LibreSprite", a fork of the last Aseprite version that was published under the shareable license
(General Public License v2) , that is maintained and probably updated with new features(although I don't know for sure since I didn't test it) and available for free. -
draw.ioFormerly called diagrams.net, draw.io is a very competent tool for making diagrams. It's free, doesn't require any registration, is apparently good in terms of privacy and I use it from time to time to visually map out my thoughts regarding something if I have trouble thinking about it, essentially just using it as a program where you can place textboxes on an infinite canvas and connect them via arrows that can optionally be labeled.
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XClickerA simple and easy-to-use autoclicker for Linux with a few customization options
(toggle hotkey; interval between clicks; which mouse button to click) . -
yt-dlp(Youtube Download Plus) -
My go-to tool to download videos/audio from YouTube
(like video game music compilations) . -
Just hit up the github and search for the options to assemble the command line arguments of your dreams.
(I wrote a list of my go-to's!) - I don't know if it works for other websites or is command line- or linux-only.
- No more sketchy yt-2-mp3 websites!
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My go-to tool to download videos/audio from YouTube
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Red NotebookA simple notebook I used to just briefly note down noteworthy things I did for today. It seems like it would be a nice since it gives each day a more memorable face and because I can then see what sort of things I did in phases where in hindsight I felt like "nothing happened" and "the weeks drifted by" and "I wasted my life". Here are some thing I write into it for more ideas:
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When I play a video game, I denote my progress
(For example, in Rain World I got from region -> region -> region -> region with this slugcat) . If something noteworthy happened like a really funny moment or an important story beat, I'll write it down as well since I'm more easily able to memorize those events and then connect them with a specific date with this entry - Important thoughts I had that felt worth preserving and were present multiple times in my day
- Things like that I cooked or showered. Since I don't do this regularely, it's more of an exception found noteworthy.
- Ideas for projects I got, progress I made on projects, updates to my music library...
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When I play a video game, I denote my progress
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GhostwriterA simple & free Markdown
(Markdown files are basically text files with more semantics like headings, quotes, links etc.) editor similar to the standard Windows Notepad but with a bit more features. It's really quite natural and intuitive to use! -
BlanketA simple application for Linux with which you can listen to a variety of ambience like rain, thunder, waves, campfire crackling, white noise, etc. It allows mixing these audio streams together by tweaking the volume of each one as well as importing your own audio files.
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KeePassXCSoftware with which you can create password databases locked by various security measures
(like a master password or a lock file) that can contain all of your other passwords. It's completely local, meaning you have full privacy over it with the tradeoff being that you're responsible for backing that data up(compared to password managers like Bitwarden that store your password on a server somewhere) .Other than that it works well, looks well, supports 2FA you'd normally use Google Authenticator for and has a solid Android counterpart called "KeePassDX".
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KeePassDXAn android app counterpart to KeePassXC, working with the same file format and offering the same feature-set under a different UI.
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VSCodiumA branch of VSCode that removes the Microsoft branding and telemetry present in it. Additionally, out-of-the-box, it doesn't have access to every extension available to regular VSCode
(because of some legal stuff or something) , but you can still access it through other means. My means were installing the vscodium-bin-marketplace package from the AUR β your means probably differ.Besides those differences though, it's still VSCode, and while it was too intimidating for me at the beginning, once I've slowly explored the basics of it, I've grown to really like it - how you can hide sections you don't need by right-clicking and removing the checkbox; The many extensions that probably cover one of your little nitpicks you'll come to discover as you discover the app itself; the built-in terminal and file browser. All that and more combine into something I've grown familiar with and that I've grown to like coding in.
If anyone is beginning to program and intimidated by the absurd amount of power user features, I recommend starting with a simple project and then slowly exploring the interface and features from there. A solid foundation and understanding of how you can write something that results in an end product
(i.e. a simple website made using html & css, or a simple python script returning something to console) is good so that you can spot what is necessary and what is fluff.Recommended Extensions- ToDo Tree β Adds a new tab to the toolbar to the left that simply lists all lines that have keywords like "TODO" in them. You can customize the keywords, what colors and icons they have in the list view and it's generally just useful for keeping track of everything!
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KritaA free, open-source piece of software for creating digital art. As a casual digital artist that only draws something once a year I'd say it's a fine piece of software.
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ReaperA Digital Audio Workstation for creating music. Haven't really dabbled into music making extensively, but I'll just list it here since it looks like a neat program.
The times I used this program on my Linux PC I had constant audio playback problems where I believe only Reaper played back audio and muted any other application, but I'd say part of that is me not doing my maintainance duty on my Linux.
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LMMSSame as Reaper: A Digital Audio Workstation β sometimes, I just like to collect the icons of software here even though I've never really used it. It looks quite okay, is free and has a cool icon
(can't argue with a cool icon) . -
Ardour -
Midinous -
ChipTone -
FamiStudioA Digital Audio Workstation that allows creating chiptune tracks that also work with the NES soundchip.
It comes pre-installed with a few songs that others made with it as a showcase of what's possible β the coolest one I found was an original piece by kawashin feat. H-Mister called "Pressure Burst" that is available on his YouTube channel as well.
As is usual with DAWs recommended here I didnt give it any more than a cursory glance and only included it because it looked neat and useful for those more in the know about that kind of stuff.
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Godot -
QuickBMS
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MnemosyneA tool to create sets of flashcards that each have a question and answer. You can then quiz yourself by letting the software show you a selection of your flashcards to you, making you think about the answer and fostering the info in your memory in the mean time.
Once you're done thinking about a card, you can rate how easy it was to remember it's answer. If it was hard, the card will be shown again soon β if it was easy, it will be longer until the card shows up in a review session again, testing your memory.
I don't use it myself currently, but it seems like a useful tool for potential future me and probably others that could be reading this.
Potential uses I could think of
- Memorizing data like telephone numbers, birthdays or facts
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Memorizing how to handle rare and dangerous situations
(giving someone first aid, what to do in a fire or mugging)
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ObsidianMy note-taking tool of choice that allows you to format your notes using Markdown and offers customization through themes and extensions to fit your note-taking style. It's free
("100% user-supported") , available for my PC(Linux) and Phone(Android) , and since it saves everything as simple directories and text files("File over app") , it's easily "exportable"(it can all be easily read even if Obsidian were to shut down one day) alongside being easy to sync between my phone and PC using Syncthing.The customizations through plugins and css snippets are just the cherry on top to tweak it all to your liking β I've included most of my customizations in a seperate "Notes on" page so you can peruse them if you want to, get a taste for what the app can do and snatch the things you like about my workflow into your workflow.
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DeckerA tool with which you can make something which I would liken to Windows PowerPoint presentations. Each deck
(presentation) consists of cards(slides) in which you can insert a variety of elements, like sounds, images, text or β with the help of a lil' scripting language β more complex stuff. While I'm not too motivated to really dig my heels in, I can definitely tell that it's cool and fun to play around with and might offer some value for those that spend some time tinkering with it.-
I recommend viewing the Guided Tour, which is the first link on the website
(labelled "right now") and then clicking on the Guided Tour button at the bottom right. - On the page at the bottom, under Additional Resources, you can download the program for offline usage from itch.io.
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I recommend viewing the Guided Tour, which is the first link on the website
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Wallpaper Engine -
YoWindow!A weather app with live wallpapers that change depending on the weather. I had this as an browser extension as a kid and loved it back then. It relied on flash, so it died then and there, but the website links to iPhone and Android apps that bring back the nostalgia for me. The site also comically mentions that it plans to release a new, non-flash version in 2024
(It's late September 2025 as I'm writing this) -
ArchipelagoAn unusual and interesting game randomizer with multiplayer. With normal randomizers, the items are strewn around randomly around in a singular game. With Archipelago
(when properly set up with multiple participents) , the items are strewn across the games of every player you play Archipelago with: Say you yourself play Game A and a friend of yours plays Game B. With Archipelago, you can find a item from Game B that your friend receives whenever you find it, or your friend can find items from Game A in Game B for you! This is mindbending and amazing when I first heard of it!Because this sort of black magic needs to be specifically implemented for every game, only a curated list of games are supported. Visiting a game's "Game Page" / "Info Page" is a good first step to see what it means for a game like [insert game of interest here] to be randomized, and what kind of things you can expect to be locked away, where you can find items for others and how it looks like when others find items for you.
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Bespoke Synth -
Zen BrowserA Firefox-forked browser that's more focused on style and minimalism. After a bit of testing, it's currently the main browser I'm using, and although I sometimes do wonder if I should steer back to a more normal browser that has it's tabs at the top, right now I'm pretty happy with it!
- It's a bit more lightweight than Firefox and so eats a bit less RAM
- It has pleasant visuals and animations for things like downloading something
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Very niche, but Zen specifically adds a keybind
(CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + C) with which you can copy the current page you're on as an Markdown Link(which is very nice if you use a markdown-based note-taking app like Obsidian to keep track of websites!) . - One cool keyboard shortcut I now use habitually is CTRL + T, which opens a search bar in which you can directly type in your destination.
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This is especially useful if you take into account that you can quickly open one of your bookmarks
(or bookmarklets) by inserting a*as the first character and then typing it's name out as normal, or type@to quickly search for something on a specific site like YouTube, Wikipedia, MDN, Lucide Icons, SteamGridDB, Steam etc.(after you set them us as a search machine in the browser settings) . - Using CTRL + T opens the result in a new tab, but if you press CTRL + L instead, your search query will open up in your current tab instead!
Customizations & WorkflowOne of Zen's things is that it's general user interface is a bit different. I customized mine to look like this:
A screenshot of the Zen Browser displaying a blank page, meant to showcase my styling. There's a slim top bar filled with the usuals you'd find in most other browsers. The bookmarks toolbar that can be displayed below it I usually keep disabled to save on viewport height. In case I ever wanted to quickly open the bookmarks, I could just press CTRL + CTRL + B or start a search beginning with the
*character.There's an equally slim side bar whose only purpose it is to list every open tab
(and show that I don't use the spaces feature) . It is quite similar to how I set up my KDE Plasma desktop, so I just seem to gravitate to such designs.I use both Zen Mods and a bit of custom CSS to achieve it all.
Zen Mods I installed
- No Sidebar Scrollbar #Usability
- Vertical Split Tab Groups #Usability
- Better Unloaded Tabs #Usability
- Better Find Bar #Style
- Better Letterboxing #Style
- Floating Status Bar #Style
Custom CSS
My CSS file assumes you have selected "Collapsed Sidebar" as the Browser Layout in your Zen browser settings. Follow the steps to properly install it:
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Follow the Live Editing Zen Theme Guide up to the point where you create a file named
userChrome.css -
Copy and paste the code in the file I linked to below into
userChrome.cssβ it should work now! If it didn't, perhaps restarting Zen Browser will do the trick for you. - In case you don't like specific tweaks, try removing the offending bits of code in the css.
TODO: Listing my custom search engines as inspirationTODO: Listing the keyboard shortcuts I regularly use
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SyncthingAn app with which you can sync files and folders between devices. Both devices need to be on the same network
(e.g. the same WiFi or router) to sync and it requires a bit of set-up on both devices(first installation, setting it up so it automatically starts on each device, linking both devices and deciding which folders to sync and if and how to keep backups and past file versions) , but the prize you get for setting it all up this way is that it's local and private.One big boon of syncing files in general is that I feel a little less worry since stuff like my KeePass Vault which contains all of my passwords is now up-to-date in two locations
(alongside the more irregularly updated backups I have on my local hard drive and online) and easy to recover from.Personally, I use it to sync files between my Linux PC and my Android phone, namely:
- Every .mp3 and .ogg in my Music Library. I can tag songs from one side without worrying about keeping it up to date on the other!
- My Obsidian Vault, which contains all my Notes
- There are some slight sync problems I've encountered with Obsidian, mostly with the Iconic extension where icons I change on one side are often overridden by the outdated version on the other side. I have no other solution other than manually copying the correct version from the
.stversionsfolder - My KeePassXC Database, which contains all my passwords
TODO: Tips for installation?
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BoxySVGA simple SVG editor that's paid on Windows & Mac and Free on Linux (for now)
Browser Extensions
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uBlock OriginA competent blocker of ads and html elements. One neat feature this extension has is the ability to define a filter list to block certain elements from certain pages
(I've documented what I used this for in my "Notes on uBlock Origin" page) . -
UnhookThis extension removes certain elements from YouTube like the "Recommendations" to the right of a video, the main page recommendations, the comment section etc. You can toggle what you want and don't want, and in general use it to prevent the "just one more video" cycle that might keep you hooked on YouTube for longer than you might want.
This is a double-edged sword as, while it does have the positive of forcing you to actually think about what kind of content you want to watch, leading to a more focused experience, it doesn't solve the root cause
(being unable to resist the draw of more videos) and also brings with it some negatives(you don't get to see new content you might like and thus it's harder to broaden your horizon to what's out there, causing you to stick to what you know) .
Video Games
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TeardownA really fun game in which you can destroy everything in a variety of maps. The gameplay consists of needing to collect objects and getting to an escape vehicle within 60 seconds, making you need to plan a route through the map with your destructive power. Other things:
- It's really fun to destroy stuff!
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The main campaign is kind of repetitive since it's mostly the same gameplay loop. The ability to skip levels if it feels too much like a drag
(or just taking a bit of a longer break) might help with that. - Features modding with which custom maps, useful tools and even new gamemodes have been made.
I was really surprised to find out this game runs on my PC. The best thing is that the Steam page specifically notes that "Intel Integrated Graphics Cards" are not supported, yet I exactly have one
(Inter UHD 630 with Intel Core i5-10400 - it might also just mean that it's more likely to not work and not get supported in further updates, not just being a complete end-all be-all "This will not run if you have this") . -
Rain WorldA game in which you're a small slugcat and need to collect enough food to hibernate between phases of deadly rain while also avoiding predators! Other qualities:
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Punishing
(needing to restart 5-10 minute long cycle upon death, which is easy to do. Dying also lowers a score you need to travel from region to region., which to me makes sense since you would need to master surviving in one region before moving on the next, pacing the gameplay) . - Driven by exploration and learning how the world works.
- Pretty and atmospheric world. I like the feeling I get while playing the game.
- Sometimes intense player-driven moments.
- Sometimes funny physics moments.
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It's fun slowly getting better at navigating
(map knowledge, better movement) through the game in modes like the Arena or in subsequent playthroughs, especially with "The Hunter" difficulty. -
I like the community of it, specifically the mods created and the events hosted
(Like the "Rain World Bingo Events" I recommend watching once you've played the game yourself because of spoilers) . - The devlog linked to at the bottom of the page is an interesting read!
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Some enemies are really effective in triggering the primal emotions of disgust and fear in me
( . It sometimes really feels as cold and mechanical as when some creatures in actual nature hunt.Centipedes ,that spitter spider thing that forcefully injects sedatives )
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Punishing
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Keep Talking and Nobody ExplodesA co-op game where one player has a bomb in front of them and another player has the manual that has instructions on how to defuse it. Both parties need to communicate to defuse it successfully.
I can imagine that it's pretty fun to play when both parties are new to the game and are learning a lot while playing. There are also some interesting videos on YouTube that show experienced players defusing bombs with like 100 modules over the course of more than an hour, although at that point it feels like it would take too much effort to practice for me.
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TheXTech(Super Mario Bros. X) Super Mario Bros. X was a Super Mario Bros fan-game which included a really nice default campaign
(The Invasion 2 - basically a whole 2D mario game!) as well as tools to make your own campaigns(like fully-fledged Level- and World Editors) . The game also featured and mixed the styles of SMB, SMB2, SMB3, SMW and a handful of things from a few other Nintendo games like Metroid of The Legend of Zelda(such as tilesets or even playable characters with custom mechanics!) .The original game
(SMBX) got discontinued in 2011 and a few fan-made projects sprung off, with the one's I've heard of being Super Mario Bros. X2 and TheXTech. TheXTech is a faithful port of SMBX, keeping compatability with campaigns made for the original as well as bringing the game to other OS's(like macOS, Linux and even Android, which I find peculiar) . SMBX2 tries to improve the original by adding slews of new features the original didn't have(although I didn't really play around with it and can't give more details on that) .I prefer TheXTech over SMBX2 since it's generally what I grew up with and because SMBX2 has a hint of unfinished- / unpolished-ness to me that I don't like
(although I didn't play it extensively and only tested it on Linux via Wine) .In terms of making your own Mario Bros games, I think that XTech's editor is quite/somewhat accessible for people that aren't too much into technical stuff.
And also interestingly enough: With TheXTech, the World & Level Editor got a complete visual overhaul, being now built into the game executable instead of being an entirely seperate program
(as it was the case with the original SMBX) ! I can't tell if this removed some of the possibilities the original editor had since I didn't use some stuff like events or layers(because I didn't understand them) , but I generally like the visuals & layout of it.Other neat memories I remember with SMBX are:
- Playing "The Invasion 2" with a friend back when I was like 10 or something. I remember that it was very fun!
- Watching a Let's Play of two german late-teens / early adults playing "The Invasion 2" together. I found it quite comedic, and while I couldn't find the channel for years, I finally found it again and was really happy!
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EdgeA small and simple game about being a cube rolling around obstacle courses, trying to get to the end while also optionally collecting collectibles that're scattered in every level. It's a lush and pleasant hazy memory by now
(since it's been years since I last played it, back when the Wii U was still the newest console by Nintendo, so around 2013-2015) , and has music that I like(especially one melody from the title screen music that starts 54s in is oddly memorable / reminiscent of something to me) . -
Madorica Real Estate 1 & 2A fun series of puzzle games in which you have to exercise ghosts from 20 properties using spells. The speciality of this game is that you'll have floorplans for those 20 properties that you can print out and fold, cut, draw on and so on to solve the puzzles each property holds.
I really like this idea and was full with glee when I first looked at the floorplans - there's just something about the cryptic, puzzly visuals of them that makes me happy and excited! I even like it so much I wanted to make two projects in honor of it: "MadoCraft Real Estate" is a Minecraft adventure map with some mods in which I would build and design my own properties and floorplans
(although that project is pretty unfinished) and one where I tried to turn my IRL apartment in which I live into such a puzzle that I would then show to my friends and would let them solve it(also pretty unfinished) !I really recommend looking at the floorplans of the games
(First Game // Second Game) to get a feel for them! Just seeing them and imagining how the properties would look and work in-game were a very convincing reason to me to buy both games!One thing to note is that both games originally came out for the Nintendo Switch and were only ported onto Steam later. This makes the Switch version, especially for the second game, smoother to play because the buttons used for spells are ββββ and ABXY.
First GameSecond Game -
I'm on Observation DutyA series of small horror games with a fun concept! You monitor a house using multiple cameras and over the course of the night, anomalies start to happen. These can range from furniture moving, paintings changing or the more extreme ones like intruders entering the home. Most of these anomalies are subtle, and your job is to spot them and file a report listing both the room the anomaly is occuring in and what type of anomaly it is to remove it. Once too many anomalies are active, you loose. You have to survive until 6AM.
It's a simple, but really fun idea that works well! Each game is a bit replayable since there are a lot of anomalies that could happen and
(to me) it's effective at building up the tension since any time you switch the camera there's the possibility of something horrible waiting for you, either blatantly or subtly.Note that I only watched Let's Plays of the first two games and thus can't really comment on later games.
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HexologicA small, simple puzzle game where you have a hexagonal grid of tiles and need to fill them in with the numbers 1, 2 or 3 while abiding limitations like "This row of numbers must sum up to 5". It isn't too difficult, but still pleasing to solve every puzzle. There's also a free flash game version of the game online on sites like ArmorGames containing the first half of the game
(45 levels) . -
LinelightA relaxing puzzle game about being a small line of light that needs to solve puzzles to move from screen to screen and collect collectables. The thing that make this game stand out to me is definitely the calming atmosphere created by the simple visuals and really nice music. Most puzzles aren't really too hard, but still require some concentration from you, making it a nice little journey.
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Papers, PleaseA game where you work at a border checkpoint, checking if the documents of people are valid and either denying or allowing entry - all while facing moral choices, terrorist attacks and a good number of other interesting occurences to keep you on your toes.
I haven't played this game, but seen a few playthroughs of it from others and can say that I do adore the game. Every element
(gameplay, visuals, story/writing, sound & music) comes together to create a really palpable atmosphere while also being interesting on their own. The gameplay consists of keeping up with overwhelming, constantly updating information on what person requires what documents and crosschecking everything to be correct. I don't really know why, but I really like the pixel art - it fits really well with all the documents. -
LocoRoco 1 & 2 -
Hypnospace OutlawA game about exploring a bunch of personal websites right as the "internet" was born and became accessible to the common folk. It captures a strong charm and mimics that in a pretty neat way. One thing that was particularly pleasant to me was revisiting every website every time you skip forward in time a little to see what has changed. It feels real because you get to see these characters and all of these subplots and details grow over time, making this world feel really fleshed out to me!
Story-wise you're working as a moderator, looking for websites that break rules of copyright, harassment etc. and reporting those when you get enough evidence. The story gets more interesting as you go on
(and made me cry) , but that's the basic premise. It's a story about the people you read about on their websites and what happens to them growing up. You form a deeper(one-sided, parasocial) bond with them as you are just an observer with limited power. -
RobloxI originally stumbled onto this game around 2015 when I searched for free games to play online with my best friend. The games on offer were different to whats now on the homepage, and I'm nostalgic for those old "classics", some of which sadly died and are no longer playable due to dead servers and privated games. Right now currently, it feels like you'd need to dig through some games until you find something creative, impressive and fun that seems of acceptable quality and which you'll return to.
While I have never developed a game for Roblox and don't have any claims for this, it also seems like a solid starting ground when getting acquainted with game development since it likely handles a lot of basics such as setting up servers, properly syncing basic things between clients such as player's moving and position, a basic character controller etc. so you could probably get more to what you actually want to create instead of finagling around engine bugs.
One word of caution I feel obliged to say is that I heard lots drama and criticisms surrounding Roblox, mostly:
- There are predators
(which isn't surprising about a game marketed to children) - I believe there were cases where Roblox avoided banning bad actors like said predators and instead banned the people exposing them, which... why?
- The idea that kids provide free labor working on games whilst Roblox earns money off of it with micro-transactions and Robux purchases
I mostly moved on from Roblox now and thus haven't really had to research any of those, so research it all if you need to and be cautious whilst playing!
(as one should generally be online, especially when interacting with other strangers or sharing personally identifying information!) All I can say is that even as a 14-year old there were some fun classics out there and that I had many fond memories playing all the neat ideas people had for games, some of which lived on in my mind and inspired certain projects of mine! Roblox is probably a good thing partly ruined by bad human behavior, and because the good outweighed the bad for me, I'm still recommending it.
TODO: List games I like! - There are predators
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MinecraftWhile the official direction the game's heading in with it's updates is kinda alright, the real gold of Minecraft still lies in it's simplistic core as a sandbox and the sheer gargantuan amount of stuff people have made from it. Building pretty buildings; making resourcepacks; creating adventure maps; tinkering with redstone and commands; serving public servers with minigames and communities and modding the game to fix it's issues and add new features big and small: Rarely has any game had any sort of community like that, and so Minecraft truly is one of it's kind.
As mentioned previously, one of the great things about Minecraft is it's modding community. Since the game itself is a sandbox and gives a lot of freedom, its easy to mold the world to fit your twisted desires. Fancy some resource management and assembly lines to the likes of Factorio? Perhaps you just want a generic FPS? Maybe a puzzle game? A 3D Platformer? An Adventure game? Using mods and building maps around those mods will grant ye these desires. Granted, some of those niches may not reach the level of quality that games dedicated to those kinds of genres can reach, but it's still quite cool how it's all possible!
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Terraria + tModLoader -
Outer WildsGod. I love Outer Wilds.
The setting, combining the cool nature of space, planets, time and science with the raw emotions of the whole setting and characters and folks you meet just make for a phenomenal game where the intrigue of discovery
(and the occasional annoyance of backtracking) stand on full display.The music absolutely helps with the emotional regard, starting with the heartfelt Timber Hearth that plays in the place you call home, then continuing on with The Museum, Space and Travelers as you make your way to your first launch into space, with all other tracks playing during key moments and grand discoveries, really hightening their impact compared to the normal, silent, ambience-filled gameplay of derping around.
Open Leads are ingeniously stored inside a Rumor Log so you can always re-read what you once learned and always have a list of things you still need to investigate, preventing the problem where you forgot what you need to do next, like after a longer break from the game.
The lore is unraveled piece by piece strewn all over the place, keeping you guessing and dwelling on the story as you also take in the environment and are able to think about what all happened here as you fly for a minute or two to the next planet in your space craft.
Many little cool moments and concepts are implemented using things such as the signalscope, quantum rocks, the concepts of each planet and major place you can travel too and more that each have their little tricks, discoveries and history to them, giving you an aha-moment once you learn about them by trial-and-error, reading about it somewhere or by observing how they work. So many of these thing are just so cool based on their coolness factor alone!
Even the best games can have periods where I mostly don't really know to describe how I like them, but this last period of time, rewatching multiple playthroughs from other people playing Echoes of the Eye like MythosOfGaming
(german) or SovietWomble and just relistening to the soundtrack made me make the blurb above me at midnight(best productivity times) .Other related Sites-
Outer Wilds Ventures: Interactive Ship Log β A quite faithful and cool replication of the fully completed in-game ship log as a website. Since the ship log details every plot point, this obviously spoils the entire game and should only be used when you completed the game and are hunting for the last missing tidbits of knowledge.
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Stardew Valley -
Garry's ModWhile Garry's Mod features a lot of fun and classic gamemode's to play with other people, the thing I love about Garry's Mod
(or rather the Source engine) is the immaculate atmosphere of the environments. Walking around maps all on your own with ambience and 2000-style SFX is just really effective at evoking a particular atmosphere.Some of my favorite maps- gm_snowyisolation_v3 β The night-time snow-ridden city-scene outside is just sooo good!
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A Hat in Time -
Hollow Knight -
Hollow Knight: Silksong -
UnpackingA game I didn't really find relaxing per se
(games and just activities in general that are often called relaxing don't really relax me) , but whose graphics and music I really like! I even just like looking at this 32x icon from the game icon itself! -
CelesteA difficult platformer that feels very nice to play and that just looks gorgeous! The story didn't really resonate to me, but the gameplay, UI polish and the optional collectibles just made it a fun game to play through!
Also has a fair few mods that add their own mechanics, chapters and campaigns. My personal favorites are definitely the "Strawberry Jam" and "Spring Collab 2020" campaigns!
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OMORI -
Noita -
Spelunky 1 & 2 -
Rhythm Doctor -
SuchArt -
Starbound -
Super Puzzle Platformer DeluxeIt's the deluxe version of a flash game I played and it plays like an arcade game where you have to get the high score across a good number of maps. It's pretty fun!
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Super Crate BoxA free little arcade-y game about increasing your score by collecting crates all the while surviving waves of enemies. Each time you collect a crate, you get a new weapon that you'll then have to use to traverse past the enemies towards the next crate.
Small and fun!
(and free!) -
Hades -
Instant DungeonA little highscore chaser in which you mostly need to get as much treasure in mazes of increasing size, monster numbers and decreasing visibility. Has quite a few different modes which make it fun getting the high score for each of them
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Crying Suns -
CrossCodeI discovered this game through window-shopping through Steam
I love the world, story and setting of this game where far into the future of humanity, a new kind of video game emerges where it's essentially Augmented Reality on a planet that is designed to be the game world. You play that video game and get to see both how the game is intended to go as well as how many things go wrong as you see behind the scenes and sometimes sequence-break yourself into different passages of the game.
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Alabaster Dawn -
Baba Is You -
Zuma's RevengeI remember playing this online as a flash game somewhere and liking it, and so it was only a matter of time before I purchased a paid game of the series. It's a fun and stressful arcade game where a line of colored balls slowly make their way across a path to a point. When they reach that point, it's game over. You play as a stationary frog shooting the same colorful balls, and if 3 or more balls of the same color are next to each other, they get destroyed. It's simple but still fun and to me quite challenging!
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Return of the Obra Dinn -
FEZFEZ is a game I first played as a 12-year old on my XBox 360 and something about that contributes to my nostalgia for it. It's a game that explains you the basic controls, tells you that you need to collect the yellow cubes and then just lets you explore a pretty world filled with puzzles and some really nice tracks by Disasterpeace. This premise of just pure exploration where you can find whatever the developers came up with is really strong and it's just fun to see when a path leads to a bigger landmark or other area. I have a regular desire to make my own game where you just explore a world filled with interesting locations, mysteries, moods, gameplay, events and puzzles and collect collectables along the way, and might one day make such a game.
Another draw was the atmosphere I felt when first playing it. Looking back, I felt like the entire experience was drenched in a cryptic and mysterious mood that I so want to recapture. Take this empty room with an ominous howling where it's just in your bones that there's some sort of deeper secret here.
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Thomas Was Alone -
Himno -
Broforce -
The Escapists -
Just Get Through -
Party Hard -
PixelJunk™ Shooter Ultimate -
Caveblazers -
Of Guards And Thieves -
Xeodrifter -
Mutant Mudds DeluxeA simple and small 2D platformer I remember playing and 100%-ing on my 3DS as a kid. Simple fun, but I can't remember much of it.
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Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc -
DanganRonpa 2: Goodbye Despair -
Shellshock Live -
Scrap Mechanic -
Streets of Rogue -
EverhoodI've only watched manlybadasshero playthrough, but through that I still enjoyed seeing what this game had to offer!
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N++A simplistic precision platformer with momentum-based movement and many different dangers that could kill you. It's quite hard, but it's movement can be fun. Feels like it has a lot of levels.
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Voices of the VoidA
(currently meaty demo of a) horror game about finding signal from space in a remote research lab, similar to Signal Simulator. The game emulates the style of the source engine and seems to have a general unique and interesting style through the things you can do, things that can happen and the things you can purchase.I didn't really play it because a) I'm a massive wuss; b) I get stressed out by the management elements of the game
(hunger & sleep, managing money, completing every task in a day, checking up on & fixing servers) andc) it doesn't run passably on my Linux machinery, especially in places like the base.Do note that this is still a demo and the changes between versions can be partially significant, with whole gameplay mechanics being added or tweaked and the game thus probably being a bit unbalanced. I remember that I played through 3 different tutorial levels over the years when I tried to play this game simply because they were remade multiple times.
I'm constantly afraid playing this game, like literally any time I open a door or do literally anything significant I fear triggering a random event. I literally quit out of the tutorial
(from v0.6.2aa) because there was a jumpscare that I screamed at and there is creepy random stuff happening(that all happened to me while I was in the first room for 10-15 minutes trying to get used to the controls) , like doors opening on their own(I reloaded the Tutorial map when a door opened up behind me when it shouldn't) or hearing faint sounds that sound like another player/entity is somewhere on the map(Fucking Footsteps, water splashes, objects being moved and colliding with walls and shit) - like what is this shit and why is it in a fucking tutorial
! I was too afraid to open the door downstairs and when I opened it after 2 minutes and saw the three ominous water slides, I just quit out of fear, not even approaching them and seeing where they might've lead because something scary might've happened.
Other "fun" features & things I found while cowardly hiding in the help menu:
- The power can turn off and you have to go outside of your base to fix it
- There are zombie deer or something for some reason, and you need to eat them to kill them
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Pausing, Saving and Sleeping is disabled during some events
(cruel) - Some things are [REDACTED] in the help menu, which is cool since it's scary but also fuck the developer since it's scary.
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Toki Tori 2+A cutesy puzzle platformer with a bird that can sing and stomp. The puzzles are based around observing how the environment reacts to those two abilites, all without any explicit telling you what something does, making it feel rewarding to figure out something all on your own.
The atmosphere of the game is nice as well with it being themed around nature, but the latter puzzles were quite a headscratcher and so I've never had the patience to finish the game
(although I do sometimes daydream about doing so) . -
Battleblock Theater -
PICO-8A virtual, imaginary video game console with strict limitions. It provides tools to develop games for it as well as an online library called SPLORE with which you can explore, play and look at the source code of games published by other people. While I'm not really interested in making games with PICO-8
(at least right now) , it's definitely fun to browse through all the games & stuff other people have created with these limitations - especially the Featured section is just stuffed with games and tech demos that explore fun/interesting/unique gameplay, visuals and audio!One notable feature is that game creators can export their games to HTML5 or standalone executables. These exported versions don't require the PICO-8 standalone
(which costs money) and the official website has a browsing feature to search for these kinds of exported games so that you can play them in your browser(seek the "Carts" section) ! -
CS2D -
Crypt of the NecroDancer -
Rift of the NecroDancerA rhythm game similar to guitar hero or dance dance revolution where you hit beats in the right moment but with a really cool twist β each beat is a different monster that has a different movement pattern β some move twice as quickly forward, others move their lane once you hit them, other others only attack you when they have a clear line of sight towards the bottom and otherly others require multiple hits to beat.
This twist is the main draw of the game for me β it's just a fun, novel, well-executed idea I've never seen in any other game and it feels like the right level of challenging to me!
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The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth -
TunicA classic and somewhat difficult Zelda-like top-down Adventure game with a healthy dose of mystery injected into it. The gameplay is nice and a few twists and surprises in the main story are delightful and disturbing, but what I truly adore is the world and first discovering and then solving the mysteries/puzzles packed within it.
One special and charming mechanic is that you can find pages of the game's manual littered across the game world β the manual is a fully illustrated delight that's written in a runic language with only some key words being in literal english, giving you the general gist whilst also withholding other information that you need to figure out via visual clues or cross-referencing. Especially the more cryptic parts of the manual are majestic in how they motivated me to figure them out. This combination of nice illustrations and the dopamine of more info made the manual pages an always coveted collectible, and I felt joy whenever I could collect another one!
Memorable things I did while playing the game-
For this game, I made it a habit to take a screenshot anytime I encountered something curious, mysterious, suspicious or something that was out of reach like a chest or manual page. This ended up being a really good way of keeping track of any secrets I could later backtrack to and keeping tabs on areas and mysteries I potentially forgot about!
(this was helped by the fact that I sometimes looked at my screenshots folder before playing to sort it into different categories/mysteries and deleting the ones I had found the solution for) -
Other things I did screenshots of were A) any instances of Runic Text
(in the pickup UI, area names, boss names, etc.) so that I wouldn't have to tredge back to any place once I started my pre-meditated attempt at translating the language(This, alongside the manual notes I kept on physical paper were quite helpful!) , and B) any mysterious place where I couldn't do anything yet but that seemed special. -
I tried translating the runic language by hand. For that, I first experimented with a digital infinite canvas to draw out each symbol as I came across it, but because a touchpen for a small phone that isn't made to be drawn on
(compared to like a tablet) isn't as comfortable, I resorted to pen and paper. The major problem with pen and paper is that it isn't an infinite canvas and that I can't easily reposition transcriptions later, leading to an charming hodgepodge of runic symbols from all across the game all across the page. If you want to take a look at them, beware of spoilers, but otherwise they are here! -
Sometimes, I used a specific game-note in Obsidian for certain things, like to write down mysteries I haven't solved yet
(for example, what does that "submerge this page in water for 60 seconds" note on this one page have to do with anything?) - Learning the runic language to the point of being able to sight-read it is an amazing feeling. It was even more amazing when I learned that someone made a font for that runic language, and even more amazing to learn that I could embed it onto my website and have it display correctly! I made a page dedicated to that font, so go check that out!
Other neat Links, but beware Spoilers!-
Sapphiet, a YouTube channel uploading 1 hour extensions of soundtracks + ambience, even including tracks & variations not really present in official OST releases
(Playlists contain heavy spoilers! β title and thumbnail openly name and show screenshots of every area, including secret and end-game areas β enjoy cautiously until well-versed in TUNIC!) - Some people made cool manual pages for other game mechanics in the same style as TUNIC:
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RadRingtail β Speedrun Tech
(spoils the final boss) -
FletcherIsAFurry β Speedrun Stuff
(spoils/gives a major hint on what the H oly Cross is) -
Amazing Randomizer Website
(that spoils everything) -
Livestream where the main developer played the randomizer
(that also spoils everything) -
Nice Speedrunning Guide
(that spoils a mid-late game boss by shoving a screenshot of it the first frame you load this website) -
Map where you can track every collectible
(that spoils everything)
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For this game, I made it a habit to take a screenshot anytime I encountered something curious, mysterious, suspicious or something that was out of reach like a chest or manual page. This ended up being a really good way of keeping track of any secrets I could later backtrack to and keeping tabs on areas and mysteries I potentially forgot about!
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SquishCraft -
Lobotomy Corporation -
Hardspace: Shipbreaker -
Viewfinder -
Pizza Tower -
Rhythm SproutA rhythm game that I watched being played through by a streamer named DerKegy
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yume nikki online projectA website with which one can play the original yume nikki as well as several fangames online in a web browser. Also has some neat features such as
(optional) multiplayer with chat functionality and support for save games.Yume Nikki is a unique type of game where it seems like you mostly just wander through big, surreal worlds with surreal imagery, audio and characters. I played it for a bit and it didn't really grab me, but it's neat to see that there's an easy way to play these games online and that it even has multiplayer!
And perhaps I'll even play this again someday and spend like 10 hours to see if I can immerse myself in the world and gain something from experiencing it.
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IntruderA game that seems to be best played with a large group of friends
(which excludes me from having played it) . -
MelatoninA small, calm and pastel rhythm game with little stages that are similar to Rhythm Heaven mini games, although here they're themed about dreams about the desires, hopes, regrets and worries that our main protagonist has.
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Superfighters DeluxeA 2D fighting game with what I remember were weird controls. I remember playing the non-Deluxe somewhere sometime as a teenager for free on a random website and liking it. It's fast, snappy, chaotic and features weapons and a somwhat manipulatable environment with breakable windows, moveable crates and fires that can stay on the ground. I also liked the atmosphere, with it just being ambient noise with no music playing.
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Knock-knockI remember watching Markiplier play this horror game back in like 2013-2014, near the time it came out, and liking it. Now I remembered it and rewatched it in 2023, and still do. One of the things I like the most is the main protagonist and the character he has through the style of writing - how it sets up this way of thinking and describing things in a direct way that seem to make sense, but also feels off, similar to how the world he lives in and the headspace he has seem off.
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I Wanna MakerA free game where you can create and play levels in the style of "I wanna be the X" games, which are basically precision platformers with a focus on difficulty, bullet hells and trolling.
You can either play through other people's level via the level browser or the various challenge modes or play through a really solid official campaign that spans around 50 levels
(that I really recommend! It's difficulty gradually increases and the trolling aspect basically doesn't exist) !The 1.0 Release Trailer on the Steam page shows the game off much better than I could do, so watch that if it piqued your interest!
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Last Seen Online
A small, free puzzle horror game about finding someone's computer at a garage sale and looking through their stuff.
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word factoriNote: I played the demo when it was out before the game was released β these were my notes on it.
I'm usually not really into these types of games too much, but I really like the aspect of discovering every way latters can be crafted and am interested at how the own letter art page in the encyclopedia will work!
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Furnish Master -
MakeRoomA room designer game I have my eyes on. It seems to strike a pretty well balance between feature-full and bare-bones so that it neither limits nor overwhelms.
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Haunted Chocolatier -
Deltarune -
Factorio -
Q.T.A parody of the horror game P.T., turning it into a game about cute stuff. It's short, but cute. There's also a fuller game now that, while it does cost money, also includes two new little games alongside Q.T. and a free soundtrack to boot! I haven't taken a look at the new game since I was mainly interested in this game during the time where only the free version was out, but I can probably estimate that they, too, are short and cute.
Two Fun Facts:
The name Q.T. is elegant in two ways.
First, the letters P and Q are direct neighbors in the alphabet. Secondly, Q.T. spoken out loud sounds like "Cutie", which fits the game quite well, while P.T. sounds like a tea made out of pee. -
Ultrakill -
Lego City Undercover"GTA for Kids" is a game I played as a kid on my Wii U and thoroughly enjoyed. Since then it also came out on Steam and other consoles and once I saw that it was on sale for like 5 bucks I snatched it up for my Switch. At the time I didn't realize, but these ports to newer consoles also came with the addition of 2 player co-op
(alongside shorter loading times and more bugs & crashes) which was perfect since my nephew was instantly enamoured by the game when he came over β it was the only game we played that weekend.The two player co-op works quite well! For example, in car chase sequences the other player gets put into a different colored car next to the main player and can participate as well! There are also a few minor annoyances like "the other player can't move while a cutscene is playing, such as an vehicle being dropped off" or "the other player's car disappears when you start a certain mini-mission type
(car robbery) on the overworld", but they don't ruin the game for me. The fact that you can't move while the other player gets a vehicle can be funny when e.g. the other player is doing a chase sequence and his car just stops in the middle of it while the world around him moves on at normal speed!Other Notes
- The game is more prone to glitches and crashes compared to the Wii U version I feel, which can be both funny and a bit annoying.
- I quite like the music, with some of my favorite tracks being "the loading screen music that was abundant in the Wii U version", "Bluebell Mines" and "Scrapyard Scrap".
- I still quite like the dialogue, humor and cutscenes β probably moreso than when I was a kid where I didn't care too much about such things.
- It's good at having a bunch of things to collect & do in the overworld β there is a humongous selection of vehicles and outfits you can unlock by doing a variety of stuff. Since vehicles are cool, there's always a drive to do stuff since you want that cool stuff, so any activity is automatically valuable based on the reward. The world is also filled with other things you can do and collect. Literally anything ever nets you Golden Bricks which are sort of the completion percentage of the game to see how much things you've completed.
- I'm kind of mixed on the fact that the world is filled with areas you can only reach once you get special abilities/outfits over the course of the main story.
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It promotes revisiting older areas and keeps them fresh during the course of the game, but makes it feel like a waste of time to explore at the beginning of the game
(or really any time you explore without every ability unlocked first) when you can't do anything. - However, one good instance of locking away content until certain main story progress is done is with locking off the main island until you've played a fair bit on your starter islands. It makes it less ground to cover to potentially prevent overwhelming you and generally spreads out the joy of discovery of the world so that a part of it is in the middle of the game instead of it all being frontloaded at the beginning.
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We β₯ Katamari (Reroll)The gameplay is simple: You have a sticky ball that can roll up stuff that's smaller than it. You have levels in which you mostly roll up the ball to a certain size before the timer runs out. What makes the game stand out is it's style, presentation, creativity and the sheer amount of japanese weirdness hamfisted into it - it all gets combined in a charming package with it's music, ideas, characters, writing and it's cathartic and replayable score-chasing secret-hunting gameplay!
I β₯ Katamari
- When you quit the game, all the characters in the level select screen wink at you. This and the characters cheering if you mastered a level surprisingly touched me a little. It feels innocent and of pure kindness.
- The beat-boxing when you walk in the level select is certainly interesting.
- With every level you complete, you'll create a planet inside a little solar system that you can later observe, and I have to say that it's one of the coolest ways to visualize your progress I've seen in a video game.
- The banter between the King of All Cosmos and the Fans is always delightful and fun to hear when loading up a level.
- I love the themes of some levels here! Rolling up clouds in the sky to remove the rain clouds; having a Katamari that won't stop rolling forward participate in a race; the Zoo level β it's all great!
- The music is great as well β "Blue Orb", "PrinceβDisco", "Everlasting Love", "Houston", "Meadowtronics" β chef's kiss.
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Loading screens are the head of the King of all Cosmos turning into the DVD logo and spewing out letters - most of the times, they spell out comprehensible sentences
(or things like the digits of Pi) and I just find it a charming detail. -
The story about people just loving Katamari Damacy
(the first game in the series) and praising it as some way of life fits perfectly for this game!
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NSMB - Mario Vs Luigi Online -
Arco -
GIMMIKOGimmiko is a game I'd recommend both because of the atmosphere and the unique gameplay gimmick.
Starting with the gameplay, it involves having dice that you can throw on enemies. You can assign each side of said dice with a gimmick
(essentially attacks) , and that gimmick activates when the dice lands on it. Within the demo, the concept is already explored further with dices ranging from having 2 sides(a coin) or 20, and the infrequent updates posted to Steam showcase some other characters with other mechanics that all play around with this core idea! The full game seems to be promising in the kind of stuff you can do!The artstyle, writing, humor, extras, dedicated middle finger button, music and characters all contribute to the unique atmosphere of the game. At the moment I struggle to really describe why I like it, but it is definitely unique! One of my favorite extras in the game is Jerrod Sorelli's Solitaire β it's such a random inclusion, with Jerrod himself having funny dialogue all-throughout as well as having a harder difficulty option that's tuned to people not really experienced with solitaire and felt like a nice challenge to beat.
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lucid blocksI was first introduced by this game by seeing 'the diatoms of hope and joy', a 2-minute sneak-peek at the game's gameplay. The striking things, in order, were: the realistic hand, the bee glove item, the atmosphere and general visuals. I'm just intrigued by what other items there could be if "bee glove" is one of the things that fit in the game.
Right now it's still in development, but the YouTube channel holds a bunch more sneak-peeks into this little curious world.
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DarkwoodA game I haven't played myself, but I saw the playthrough of Limealicious. It's a good horror game that delivers horror and dread really effectively. The day-night cycle
(especially the nights and the morning thereafter) is also really well done. -
OFF -
Fight Knight -
Deep Rock GalacticThe website is also pretty charming with it being written like a job listing from the DRG company β it's a fun 5-minute read!
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JazzpunkJust a really funny and somewhat unconventional experience :D
I watched a Let's Play of it when it came out years ago
(2014) and would say that I've forgotten enough that a replay on be worth it! Now to decide if to allocate the time towards JazzPunk or to more important matters... -
Master KeyA zelda-like top-down adventure that has a good lot of charm and fun ideas! It wants you to explore the world and get lost without much guidance to hold you, and does so well.
- The music is a nice mix of fun and playful in the beginning and motivating determination towards the end!
- Exploring the overworld and some of it's secrets was fun
- The ideas for each dungeon were quite cool!
- The little fox character is cute and the little bits of "dialogue" and humor charming!
For no reason what-so-ever, the game also has around 140 Picross/Nonogram puzzles.
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A Solitaire Mystery30+ variations on the classic Solitaire. Haven't played it a lot yet, but still here because of the cool concept!
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The Zachtronics Solitaire CollectionA collection of 8 Solitaire games, each with their own rule sets. 7 of them were present as minigames in Zachtronics' other games whilst one variant β Fortune's Foundation β is exclusive to this collection.
One of the reviewers said that if you like one variant a lot, it alone is worth the money β and I have to agree! My favorites (Sawayama Solitaire, Shenzhen Solitaire and Kabufada Solitaire) heavily outweigh the one's I don't like (Cribbage Solitaire) or am indifferent towards (Cluj Soltaire, Proletariat's Patience, Sigmar's Garden (which really doesn't feel like it should be called a Solitaire game)). Whilst I haven't played Fortune's Foundation yet, but it seems like something I'd enjoy!
One nice touch is that each game has it's own card designs, music, and mood and a little description that's neat to read β the game overall just feels polished.
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Environmental Station AlphaA little Metroidvania about exploring a little space station meant to preserve fauna and animal life. That story is set-dressing to get you some gameplay β exploring, upgrading, and β if you're willing β finding some secrets. I liked the base gameplay, and found some of the more cryptic secrets a bit tedious to figure out, but that was worth it considering one of the secret areas being really unsettling and being like the thing I remember most vividly when I think about this game.
Some of the songs on the soundtrack here are also quite full of depression, like "Out There", "Sigil Summoning" or "The Green Room", cementing the whole game with an an depressing, melancholic and odd undertone when combined with the endings and, like, the unsettling secret area I mentioned above.
...at least there are some nice tracks to balance it out like "Valiant", "Onwards", "Sinking Feeling" or "Hesitantly Descending" .Oh, and there's a video called Thinking About Environmental Station Alpha that I remember liking. It was one of the motivators pushing me through the "post game combing through every place for potential clues and finding nothing 9 out of 10 times" drought so I could watch it without being spoiled. ...I can't remember if I used a hint guide of the sorts... -
Hyper Light DrifterI remember that I once downloaded this game as a teenager. I had no memory of any parts I played, just a vague sense that I didn't enjoy it back then. Perhaps it was because I didn't feel as melancholy back them as I like to do now, but framing the game as a solitude experience and a lonely journey makes it feel right for me. This vibe of the game's world is best seen in videos such as "Soundtrack + Ambience: East #01". Especially the part in the chapel manages to touch my heart the most β it's just filled with so much emotion and melancholy, it's incredible!
Fast forward to now, where the way I got re-introduced to this game was through it's soundtrack and the vibe of the world from the limited shots I saw from extended versions of those tracks. I really love the music and the way the world makes me feel. Even before having played the game, videos like do an excellent job of introducing the kind of vibe the game has.
Gameplay-wise, the game is mostly about the flow and difficulty of combat, with minor flavours of exploration, secret hunting for collectables, a mysterious story and a world with a great atmosphere and soundtrack sprinkled in. Since I did play a lot of video games growing up, the combat sits at a nice level of difficulty for me.
Here are some notes from my current playthrough that I may or may not discontinue at any time based on how I feel!
2026-01-13 β WEST CLEAR!
In my current playthrough, I have visited the left area first and beat the boss there whilst having found 7 pink doritos. It was a neat area that first started as a plain, but oddly-colored forest and then slowly these crystals were everywhere. Then there were also this large hollow underground areas and then finally I fought some dude that wanted to kill me. The wolves were definitely the most difficult enemies as they unpredictable one's. I also used my ticket cubes to bush the triple-dash upgrade and found it interesting that you can't press the dash button too early, making it feel skillful to use! I also do not know how locked doors and the space bar cubes work yet.
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Arctic Eggs- "Raw Eggs and Tango Circuit" Mini Concert, featuring unreleased songs from both Buckshot Roulette and this game. There are five tracks from the Arctic Eggs set, and I like pretty much all of them! Quite the hidden gem!
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Thank Goodness You're Here!
Nintendo Exclusives
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Splatoon 3I love Salmon Run! Everything from it's theming to it's gameplay makes it sometimes so exhilerating and fun to play!
I remember that I was at first really anxious about playing my first round of Salmon Run because of performance anxiety and disappointing my team mates into oblivion, but thankfully the game is gentle and starts everyone out with easy waves, which gave me enough time to adjust and really get into it.
My performance currently really seems to waver between somewhat below average and "I can't believe I just did that, that was awesome!!!".
This game is also sort of my training game to better my mindset in these competitive games - to learn how to not feel like shit after a row of failures and focus on the next step, for example. Or what I could do, regardless of how small, to help my team just a little further.
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Splatoon 3: Side Order -
Super Mario Maker 2"Random, half-finished ramblings about game design and ideas I apparently wrote one time."
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Picross 3D: Round 2Since the 3DS isn't produced anymore and the 3DS eShop got taken down, this game can only be obtained second-hand or through dubious means.The little time killer we know and love from Picross, but with the cool twist that you sculpt 3D picross that result in nice little wooden sculptures. The sound effect whenever a finished piece drops on the table is oddly satisfying. The atmosphere of the game in general is quite nice.
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Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
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Super Mario Odyssey
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Rhythm Heaven Megamix
Since the 3DS isn't produced anymore and the 3DS eShop got taken down, this game can only be obtained second-hand or through dubious means.
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Pikmin 1 -
Pikmin 2 -
Pikmin 3 -
Pikmin 4 -
Crypt of the Necrodancer: Cadence of Hyrule
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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door -
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
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Miitopia
Direct Links
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