Abbie Gonzalez (2024)

Visual DOS: Integer Overflow is the visual novel that provides narrative background for Gonzelez's Visual DOS, a puzzle game themed around a virtual OS. You are a private investigator, hired by the families of the Visual DOS development team, who've been disappeared by their own corporate master, Visual Corp., after being called into the office for mandatory on-site overtime while crunching to release the new OS.

While serving as a bloody cyberpunk mystery and an indictment of crunch culture in modern software development, this is also an opener to the puzzle game/OS-that-never-existed, Visual DOS.

It's intensely stylish, without its half-toned monochrome images, sometimes animated, effectively capturing an 80s vision of the future, with mysterious corporations and chunky CRT displays in the state-of-the-art tech. However, progress is quickly gated a series of Caesar cypher puzzles, which start out with well lampshaded clues, before rapidly leaning into more difficult sentences that nonetheless resist easy brute-forcing.

While I found this to be not quite the kind of challenge I was up for, if you're an enthusiast of sinister cyberpunk retrofuturism and word puzzles, this could be the perfect game for you, with a promise of blood and realistically written trans characterisation.

Visual DOS: Integer Overflow is available as part of the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2024, whose organisers pointed us towards the game for review. We reviewed the web-playable version of the game.

#QueerHalloweenStories2024 #QueerGames #Cyberpunk #PuzzleGames

Grey Alien Games, 2015

It's a cute Halloween themed match-three game for PCs with no microtransations, ads or other exploitative bullshit!

There are surprisingly few seasonal match-three games for this time of year, and this one's packed with 100 levels full of skulls, pumpkins, ghosts, coffins, poppets, eyeballs, sinister books, flaming torches and black cats.

You can find Halloween decorations for your house by beating levels, and this gets more impressive looking as the game does one. You can also find gold coins that you can use to by extra house decorations. You can save your house as wallpaper.

Dating from 2015, it's not the most sophisticated match three by modern standards. You can create area-affect bonus items by matching four or more objects, and the yard decorations you collect can give you extra, limited-use-then-recharge items.

Recharges come in the form of dust released by glowing objects on the play field. Some squares have gold tiles or steel plates that require extra clearing or have their contents locked by spider webs.

There's no narrative beyond “match shapes to stamp out evil” and an occasional hint from one your neighbours. (This is fine, I don't actually want to read a visual novel in between making colourful objects go “pop!”)

Music is a synth affair somewhere between stereotypical Halloween/ghost train music and one of those meditation study types. It's likeable enough but there's not much variety. You can switch it off when you get bored, though. Sound effects bang and fizzle in a satisfying manner.

You can disable level timers for an extra-chill gameplay experience, and I'm not very good at this these things, so usually do.

It's for computers rather than ported from mobile, so there are no unexpected quirks when it comes to mouse interaction, and no relics of exploitative microtransaction systems. It works fine via the Steam Deck's touchscreen and works perfectly on my Pop!_OS Linux desktop via SteamPlay Proton.

Anyway, I like the cute spooky match-three game. Grey Alien Games are great this kind of casual brain-soothing fare, and while this lacks the narrative elements and gameplay depth of some of their other games (Buy Shadowhand!), it does exactly what it's supposed to.

Buy on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/388450/Spooky_Bonus/

It's usually 8,19€, but I believe it sometimes gets a discount nearer to Halloween.

Screenshots

![“The main attraction – there are 100 festive sinister-stuff matching levels that can be played with or without a timer.”] (https://hauntedgames.net/images/spooky_bonus/big-level.jpg)

#HalloweenGames #IndieGames #LinuxGaming #HorrorGames #MatchThree #Match3 #CasualGames #PuzzleGames