Favourites of May 2026

May was another weird month here in Belgium: the last weeks have been unusually hot. It’s pouring now, but I’m glad that it is as it gives our airconditioning units a few moments of respite. We’ll see what the upcoming summer months will bring. This month is packed with exams, grading, and deliberations, but after that, school’s out! Which means I’ll have to play daddy day care as my wife isn’t as lucky as me when it comes to paid leave. Hopefully I’ll emerge beaten up but victorious.

Previous month: April 2026.

Games I’ve played

I somehow managed to keep up the pace from last month and finished four (mostly small) games:

• Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping which is the second episode of the Duck Detective’s deducktions-based adventure game. It’s nice but only two hours long.
• Forbidden Solitaire, without a doubt the best and most unique card game with horror vibes I’ve ever played. Its atmosphere is inspired by nineties FMV games. Check out the launch trailer and tell me you don’t want to rush out and buy it:

• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is inspired by GBA-era top-down adventures. Its unique mechanics, pixel art, and soundtrack are superb, but the platforming near the end was a bit too much for me.
• Strange Horticulture is a cosy puzzler/visual novel where you have to figure out which client wants which plant.

Forbidden Solitaire is a candidate for my GOTY. Yes, it’s that good.

Selected (blog) posts

• Are we past the point of the The Last Human-Written (academic) Paper? Scientists Liu et al. compile a hefty report on what they call agent-native research artefacts. The results are… worrying? Promising?
• Popcar reviewed every single UFO 50 game. I don’t agree with many ratings but they’re well-explained.
• Noah Clements discusses how he hacked his bycicle monitor. The “welcome to hell developer” message is hilarious!
• James Sweeting thinks there should be a better term for game remakes and remasters: some specific types could be called videogame remakes instead.
• PekoeBlaze sees a difference in private versus public creativity. Do you make something different if you don’t have an audience?
• Seth Godin reminds us that nostalgia used to be deadly: For hundreds of years, nostalgia was seen as a serious disease, with doctors across Europe scrambling for a cure. Hundreds of thousands of people died from it.
• I enjoyed Pablo Meier’s review of Tunic. Every blog post by Pablo is accompanied by a song (“The song for this post is…”) which is a whimsical way to start an article.
• What’s a metroidbrania? Even as a metroidvania lover, I hadn’t come across that term before. GiovanH explains the differences and intersection points. Is Animal Well a metroidbrania?
• Diederick de Vries played around with a retro printer and explained how you can use a “Retro Printer” daughterboard on top of a Raspberry Pi to connect an old electronics port to a modern printer.
• Inspired by my workspaces post, Diederick also shared his past and present computing workspaces.
• Nicole Express unboxes a unique high-tech computer. You’d be surprised. I enjoyed the many photos present in this one emphasiszing the high-tech part.
• Slightly related: Stephen Sherratt restored his childhood family computer. I’m a sucker for these kinds of articles.
• Some more articles to rattle the cage: just fucking use Go. Fuck no: Go is a terrible programming language.
• Ty Porter explains how he built a Game Boy Game in 2021. Very educational!
• Blain Smith reflects on 30 years of programming at 44 years old. Profit pursuing enterprises indeed kill the joy of programming.
• Matthijs van Boxsel maintains a “digital encyclopedia of foolishness” where in 2021 he wrote about the Homo Viator (in Dutch).
• Miss Booleana writes about the struggles of motherhood (in German). Her experiences with parenting felt very much like ours.
• Matthias Wiesmann shared his thoughts on the video game Loop Hero. I’ve had my eye on that one for a long while; perhaps it’s finally time to try it out.
• Fabian Sanglard expresses why he likes the Magic: The Gathering 40 card format more than the usual 60.
• Over at ResetERA, Toma played 120 roguelikes so that we don’t have to. Their report is very extensive, a must read if you’re into the genre.
• Jeff Kaufman again urges us to donate 80% of our income and he has the numbers to prove it works for his family.
• I came across david.reviews, another indie site David maintains where he collects his thoughts on the media he consumes.
• After ten years of tinkering, Steve McCrea managed the impossible: to recreate Ultima Underworld in the Unity engine. It’s freely available at itch.io and looks very impressive compared to the original.

Other random links

• Keep It In Your Pants! What? Apparently, Nintendo thought it was a good idea to create a few bold commercials for their Game Boy—including cuffing a woman to the bed as a misplaced joke to claim the GB is “seriously distracting”.
• The roguelike Game Boy game Roguecraft got a physical release! Of course I’m too late and everything is sold out.
• https://www.jwt.io/ is a JWT token debugger that shows how a token is compiled.
• Retro Ready is a nice Dutch blog that reviews retro-inspired handhelds (think Anbernic, GameMT).
• It seemed that Atari acquired the rights to the first five Wizardry titles. I still hope they’ll sometime, somewhere do something useful with Wiz 7 & 8. They deserve a proper reimagining/remake/whatever-you-call-it.
• Geneat is a website that helps you dig into the genealogy of your family.
• https://cooklang.org/ is a… recipe markup language? Nerds!

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