This month goes hard as heck, with some award-winners, DOS classics, obscure gems and even an offline Wikipedia reader. Let’s take a look!
Free/Ready to Play PortMaster Games and Apps
- Advanced Strategic Command – A free, open-source turn-based hex wargame in the tradition of Battle Isle 2/3. Command land, sea, and air units to eliminate your opponent across dozens of bundled maps and campaigns.
- Alex the Alligator 1-4 – ATA is a very short platform game jam. Jump around the level as Alex and try to find your dreamgirl Lola. ATA2 is a mouse-driven puzzle game. Place your tokens on the board or slide a row/column in turn, trying to wipe the board of your own color while keeping the higher score. ATA3 is a top-down racing game against AI opponents (and a second local player) around a single track, throttling, braking and steering to place first across 5 laps. ATA4 is a GameBoy-style platform game with 10 levels of Alex spitting cherries and jumping on enemies to rescue his captured family. All games were made by Johan Peitz.
- Alex vs. Bus: The Race – A free and open source platform runner game. Alex depends on public transportation and needs to run to catch the bus, or wait an eternity for the next one.
- Amphetamine – Jump’n run platformer with colored lighting, fogging and corona effects. Fight eleven evil monsters with your magic weapons.
- Amulets & Armor – 1997 first-person dungeon-crawler RPG, released as open source by ExiguusEntertainment.
- Angry Drunken Dwarves – A falling-block puzzle game in the style of Puzzle Fighter. Build large gems by matching colors, then break them to drop garbage gems on your opponent. Seven playable characters, six AI difficulty levels, and secret unlockable modes.
- Bab Be U – A fan game of Baba Is You: a puzzle game where the rules you follow are represented as physical blocks you can push around and recombine.
- Bullethell – A fast-paced bullet-hell shooter with weapon power-ups, a chargeable shield, and boss fights across three levels.
- cylindrix – cylindrix is a 3-vs-3 combat game set inside cylindrical arenas, with a retro Tron-style aesthetic of flat polygons and saturated colors. You don’t fly alone: you pilot your own ship, command two AI wingmen, and your goal is to take down the enemy team’s radar base, capture pylons, and survive while the opposing team tries to do the same to you. Movement is fully free on all three axes, the pace is fast, and the difference between winning and losing comes down to picking the right ship, giving the right orders to your wingmen, and reading the arena, rather than pure aim. A weird and very 90s hybrid between dogfighter, arena shooter, and pocket-sized RTS.
- DreamChess – Open source 3D chess game with a freely rotatable board and its own xboard-compatible Dreamer engine.
- Fire Madness – Top-down bullet hell shooter inspired by CrossFire (1981). Eliminate waves of enemy bots that grow tougher each time you destroy them, up to the occasional boss.
- Frantic Dimension – This game was highly inspired by the world’s first twin stick shooter, Space Dungeon. You are a treasure hunter Jason Allen, who had been teleported to the alternative dimension where aliens called ‘Yadcians’ are living. The aliens are chasing you to eliminate the intruder, now you have to collect alien treasures and escape the yadcian fortress with the stolen powerful prototype weapon ‘Million’.
- Grow,Seed!Pinball – Sid did not want to fall to the bottom. Help our little Sid friend growing up without getting burried! This is a pinball game developed by kNARF for the Ludum Dare 34 competition.
- Hypercycles – A raycasting first-person shooter, ported from the 1995 DOS game Hypercycles.
- Lasagna Boy Classic – A puzzle horror game with a DMG aesthetic.
- Last Scenario – Last Scenario is an RPG with turn-based battles. The party for battles can contain up to four members. Other than physically attacking and using items in battles, players can also use magic in the form of Spellcards.
- Mines of Moria – Descend the Mines of Moria, level by level, and slay the Balrog waiting at the bottom. Rufe.org’s rebuild of Umoria, itself the 1983 roguelike by Robert Alan Koeneke that Angband and much of the genre grew out of: permadeath, a randomly generated dungeon on every stairway, a town to spend your gold in between dives. This build uses the graphical client, with sprite tiles and a map that fills the screen.
- Monk Tower – A coffee-break roguelike. Climb 20 floors of the cloister tower to retrieve the lost manuscript, one turn at a time. Weapons wear out and break, so what you carry and when you swap it matters more than what you fight.
- Pentasma – Pentasma is a side-scrolling arcade shooter inspired by Williams Electronics’ 1981 classic ‘Defender’. Protect the terraforming humanoids from the deadly aliens and raid the alien planets to keep the galaxy peaceful!
- Plants Vs Zombies Portable – Plants vs. Zombies Portable is a community-driven, cross-platform engine re-implementation of Plants vs. Zombies: Game of the Year Edition designed to run on modern and handheld devices
- retsend – Transfer files between handhelds or your phone and PC over wifi, using the LocalSend protocol — no cable, no SSH.
- Rolling Bird – Rolling Bird is a retro arcade shooter, heavily inspired by Namco’s 1986 classic Rolling Thunder.
- SUPER Maze Robo – A small Mega Man-like platformer. Follow Maze Robo on a quest to save his GREATEST TREASURE after a group called the Shooting Robbers stole it. Travel through giant trees and flying ships to get to their castle to take it back, NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES IT TAKES.
- Wolfenstein RPG – A dungeon-crawler RPG spin-off of Wolfenstein, reverse-engineered from the original iOS release.
- Zimlite – Carry Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks and more in your pocket! Zimlite is a fast, lightweight offline ZIM reader with gamepad-friendly browsing, alphabetical article tree, link navigation with history, and instant startup on your handheld — no internet required.
Paid PortMaster Games
- Arcanum: Community Edition – A steampunk isometric RPG from Troika Games where you can freely mix magic and technology. Ported via Arcanum Community Edition, a clean-room reimplementation of the original engine.
- Damocle’s Gaze – Damocles Gaze is a radically tight roguelite top-down shooter where every run takes 12 minutes. No matter how many times you die, no matter how good or bad you are, the run ends only after the 720 seconds went out.
- Dungeon Antiqua – Dungeon Antiqua is a simple RPG inspired by the Wizardry and Final Fantasy games of the 1980s and 1990s, in which players traverse dungeons by repeatedly exploring and developing their characters.
- EAT Girl – EAT GIRL is a surreal top-down action game about moving quickly and efficiently through tight corridors while eating dots. Explore an interconnected world of more than 30 levels, meet creatures who may or may not be docile, and take in an atmosphere that is by turns meditative and unsettling, with every level scored by its own blend of ambient music.
- Fire & Brimstone – Delve into the ruins of a temple in the guts of a volcano, in the search for a powerful artifact that may let you have friends. A unique and tight roguelike with a randomized skilltree and hand-designed monsters and items.
- Impostor Factory – A narrative-driven RPG Maker game from Freebird Games, continuing the story told in To the Moon and Finding Paradise.
- Insaniquarium – The craziest aquarium game ever! Tend to your fish, keep them happy and they’ll reward you with coins and jewels. Buy tank upgrades or egg parts which hatch different in-tank pets. These pets can help you feed your fish, collect coins, or even protect against the aliens that will invade your tank.
- Limbo – Monochrome puzzle-platformer from Playdead. A boy wakes alone in a forest and must solve his way through it and a derelict, industrial world beyond, guided by nothing but silhouette, shadow and atmosphere. No dialogue, no HUD, just physics puzzles, traps, and a signature grain-and-fog visual style.
- Rogue Legacy – Rogue Legacy is a genealogical rogue-“LITE” where anyone can be a hero. Each time you die, your child will succeed you. Every child is unique. One child might be colorblind, another might be a dwarf with vertigo. But that’s OK, because no one is perfect, and you don’t have to be to succeed.
- Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary – This free fan game is a remake/conversion of the 1978 strategy game Super Star Trek reimagined with the UI of the Star Trek 25th Anniversary.
