Lo-Fi Plays VIII: Six Obscure Indie Gems

Hello enemies, you are reading Lo-Fi Plays, the series that redirects you to a donation page and requires unzipping. In each edition, I talk about six obscure indie games worth your time or five if I am sleepy this week. Here are your video games for this September weekend.

Leaf Blower Man: This Game Blows!

Have you played Sheep for the PS1? It was an endearing but frustrating toy that Leaf Blower Man takes me back to, as they both hand us the humbling responsibility of corraling a bunch of things into a second thing. But your leaves can't run away, making this indie original less slippery than Sheep. Leaf Blower Man is what I might call a social nuisance game, in the tradition of Donut County and Untitled Goose Game. You fire up a shoulder-mounted jet engine outside your sleeping neighbours' windows at six in the morning and don't stop cleaning, no matter how much they yell. I swear I have lived next to this guy before.

Leaf Blower Man has humour silly enough to make Monty Python blush. It's a rotating bowtie satire of hero's journies and exploitative monetisation. Its FMV cutscenes have a no-budget YouTube sketch charm, and its campaign has a couple of mechanical switcheroos thrown in to keep things fresh.

Leaf Blower Man: This Game Blows! is free on Steam.

Doug Huggem

The moral opposite of Leaf Blower Man, Doug Huggem springs from the minds of the jesters at Mega 64. It may, like Leaf Blower Man or Goat Simulator, take place in an open-plan town of gormless, glassy-eyed NPCs, but these gormless, glassy-eyed NPCs need your help. Duke Nukem claims to parody macho action pointmen but gets so smitten with those mavericks that it can't do anything but copy them. It's not funny because there's no humour in playing a character straight.

Doug Huggem manages to get your giggle gear whirring by being a simple comedy of opposites. It shows how ridiculously extreme the violence and self-aggrandisement of Duke Nukem and his siblings are by situating him in a town where he must act compassionately and charitably. Doug walks around an amusingly broken white picket purgatory, one arm outstretched in an offer of charity like a haunted marionette. Every starving child and muscular bodybuilder emits the warmly familiar voice stylings of Rocco, Derek, and the gang.

Doug Huggem is free on mega64.com.

Horsle

Perfect word game. No description required.

Horsle is free on horsle.glitch.me.

iPad Baby

A toddler with a tablet has the media diet of a VPN server. They suckle on a high-bandwidth firehose of randomly assorted content. They are a shaken-up cola bottle of overstimulation and stimulus beyond their comprehension. Their visions are repetitive and sometimes dangerously inappropriate. Now, so are ours. iPad Baby harkens back to that period when YouTube content farms were vivisecting box office closers and Frankensteining them back together to make Spiderman Elsa Hulk Learning to Count videos. If you were really lucky, you'd get Spiderman Elsa Hulk dentistry with some gore sprinkled in for good measure. An autueur of slop, iPad Baby recreates the feeling of that dark era without projecting the same imagery onto its walls, except maybe the medicalised mouths.

This is a Doom mod, not that you'd know that from its XP wallpaper tunnels and its Pintrest board characters bouncing off you like crane flies. Everyone speaks in computer-generated snippets, but to say something rather than because they have something to say. Fetch quests for arbitrary jetsam pull us past hideous murals of council flats and high streets while unwelcome distractions intrude upon our screen. An absolute migraine of a game, iPad Baby is suitable for the sickos who got off on Cruelty Squad.

iPad Baby is "pay what you want" on itch.io.

The Open House

Some of horror's classic creep generators are people, places, and events that are traditionally associated with safety and joy but presented with a hint of malevolence below the surface. They could be an abandoned daycare or a kindly elderly lady who stares at you a little too long. The Open House chooses the real estate agent: someone who, with punchcard positivity and a Gorilla Glued rictus, tries to convince us that our new house will be perfect, even when we know no home is. As they performatively open a built-in dishwasher that means no more slaving over the sink every night, I imagine the rats in the walls making electrical cable bolognese.

The Open House could be the future of house viewing: an interactive walkthrough of a property facilitated by 3D scans. In each room of our future abode, we can ping the cardboard cutout salesman for more marketing shibboleths. Just don't ask him to inspect the red stains on the walls too closely. While your haunted PC games are listening for stage directions from imscared or Ben Drowned, The Open House has its nose in Zillow listings and timeshare Powerpoints. Hey, I wonder why this second-hand house needs selling.

The Open House is "pay what you want" on itch.io. Be aware that there's some suicide-related imagery in it and that the comments on the itch.io page contain a spoiler.

The Signal State

One of my favourite puzzlers is 20th Century Food Court, a chapter of Zachtronics' swan song anthology, Last Call BBS. The target of Food Court is to construct an automated kitchen and wire the circuits behind it to rustle up some truly putrid grub. But 20th Century Food Court was only twenty puzzles long. For those who have room for dessert, there's The Signal State. Scrapping the conveyor contraptions of its Dad and leaving only logic modules and wires, The Signal State is a dry but focused game. More often than its spiritual predecessor, it has a more pronounced emphasis on generating and modulating signals over routing them to the right places.

Its sprites are fetishistically detailed, and it comes with quality-of-life lifesavers like colour-coding for wires and a single button that deletes all components. The levels expect you to be able to handle crushing cognitive loads, and the machines we make for one request often become single cells of future devices. But with those high hopes for us, the game allows us to stretch our wings and prove that there is no conundrum too perplexing for us to solve. At £15.00 and playing best with pre-existing knowledge of low-level computing, Signal State won't be everyone's cup of tea, but for the budding embedded systems engineer, it's a stunner. Zachtronics may be dead, but its spirit of systemic experimentation lives on here.

The Signal State is £15.49/$19.99 on Steam.

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And that's time. I want to do these more often, but I may not. Thanks for reading.