Because this week’s new game is very short, we’re presenting a double feature from the backlogs!
Gost of Time
Rating: 6 out of 10
Modern gaming is big and impressive and important, but there are times I’m just in the mood to go back to the irreverent Flash Player days of Kongregate and Newgrounds. This style of simple, often hyper-violent or edgelordly puzzle game is still represented all over Steam, but it’s very hard to comb through the crap in search of the diamonds.
Gost of Time from developer Sometimes You is a top-down puzzler with a simple premise. You’re conscripted by a pill-addicted scientist who has invented a time machine/cloning device in order to retrieve pills from deadly puzzle rooms. In practice, this means scripting the movements of a set of clones, feeding them to monsters or throwing them on spikes so the final version of you can get across obstacles to the next level.
The game’s presentation can be kindly described as rough. Graphically, it makes Hotline Miami look like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. While the soundtrack is a total bop, the sound effects are a little less impressive. Considering how many times you will have to set yourself on fire to progress, the long, piercing scream that accompanies that act gets very old very fast.
Those hurdles aside, the game is wonderfully constructed set of puzzles. Rooms progress organically in difficulty, introducing new elements at a steady, but never overwhelming rate that encourages player innovation. While there could be a little more guidance (it took me a long time to realize that when you’re on fire the RIGHT thumbstick now controls your movement instead of the LEFT), figuring out the rooms becomes reliably rewarding. Destroying the first boss in particular was satisfying, feeding my clones to the beast to drop its shield so the rest could shoot it with lasers.
The narrative may be almost vestigial and the experience only a couple of hours long, but there is something fascinating about playing Gost of Time. Expecting the player to intentionally treat their own bodies so expendably isn’t something you see very often outside of a Soulslike. Playing the game, I started to wonder why we cry at the deaths of some characters and not, say, the millions of Marios we’ve all sent to their doom with our failures. In Gost of Time, we are outright told that only the last, successful version of ourselves matters, which is either very hopeful or terribly bleak depending on how you look at things. Either way, there is something compelling in Gost of Time even if its wrapped up in 2000s Flash jank.
Gost of Time is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/5, and X Box Series X/S. $9.99.
Afterdream
Rating: 7 out of 10
Released in 2023, Afterdream is a one-man side scrolling horror adventure game by Jesse Makkonen. It follows Jennifer, a young woman whose father has just died as she explains a terrifying and surreal dream she had.
As a puzzle game, Afterdream is decent if not exceptional. You find random doodads to use on other random environmental aspects to progress. Jennifer also finds a magic camera that lets her see some things in the environment differently, such as hidden doors or an oven mitt on a scarecrow. The camera’s flash can be used as a brief light source when the game turns on the dark, which it often does for scary bits.
Two things make Afterdream stand out. The first is that it is a fairly coherent story about the deeply incoherent subject of grief. Jennifer is wracked with guilt over not visiting her father, and that twisted sense of loss has shaped her dreams into something that switches between hopeful to horrifying on a dime. As an explorable nightmare, Makkoken has mastered the art of surrealism inherent to the dreamstate.
The second is the horror elements. Usually near the end of each chapter, the game will pull out some brain-melting visuals that are honestly terrifying. While there are no real fail states to make this survival horror, Makkoken has a keen sense of visual monstrosity that transcends cheap jump scares and make his monsters cosmically unsettling. These, sadly, come a bit too rarely and almost never impact the actual exploration, but they are a perfect example of how lo-fi games can still scare the pants off you.
You’ll only spend a couple of hours in Afterdream, but it’s still a memorable experience well worth picking up right now while it’s on sale. I would love to see what Makkonen could do with a full team and a bigger budget.
Afterdream is available on Steam. Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/6/ and X Box Series X/S. $10.99.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
