Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org), page 3

10 new(-ish) Linux games from itch.io that caught my eye lately.

I dug through, tested, and researched these—and every one of them runs excellently on Linux.

Spirit Stackers (fluttersprite)

A competitive falling-block puzzler spun out of the Paranatural webcomic. Spirit blocks drop in pairs, spectral energy zaps across the board, and clever chains bury your opponent in junk. Local 1–2 player, arcade mode for solo, and a wildcard block that can swing a match at the last second.

https://fluttersprite.itch.io/spiritstackers

COLORMUSE (TheJohnyFeeD)

Twin-stick bullet ballet. Swap polarities like Ikaruga, eat your colour, dodge the rest. Add in an online leaderboard, Lunatic difficulty, and a pounding electronic soundtrack. Feels arcade-authentic in a way most shooters don’t.

https://thejohnyfeed.itch.io/colormuse

Mycelium (Leoseverini)

A cozy survival-puzzle where you build out a fungal network one tile at a time. Collect resources, fruit your mushroom, and slowly surface. Still in development, but already a satisfying little zoom-and-pan clicker.

https://leoseverini.itch.io/mycelium

OBRII (Exponenta Games)

A stripped-down colony builder that makes Mars feel like a puzzle box. Every turn you drop terraforming tools, reshape craters, carve out deposits, and watch as your settlement teeters between survival and collapse. No tutorial bloat, no grind—just tight mechanics and a stark aesthetic that makes every decision bite.

https://exponenta-games.itch.io/obrii

Ship Miner (arielsan)

A one-bit twin-stick about grinding rock in the dark. Asteroids aren’t just scenery—they’re loaded with minerals, scrap, and the occasional hostile surprise. Strip them down, haul the loot, and pour it into upgrades: triple mining rays, photon thrusters, even healing drones to keep you alive when the void bites back. It’s sharp, frantic, and weirdly hypnotic..

https://arielsan.itch.io/shipminer

Children of the Spring (Arcanzu Games)

The world’s gone under, leaving only scattered islands and a sea that hides more than it gives away. Children of the Spring drops you into that flood with a ship that evolves alongside you—unlocking new ways to fight, explore, and dive into the depths. Real-time combat, secrets tucked above and below the waves, and a looming tower that dares you to climb.

https://arcanzu-games.itch.io/children-of-the-spring

Hope of Taru (Seidel Games)

A family-built platformer with hand-drawn charm. You play a wanderer piecing together memory, collecting stone fragments, and slowly lifting the curse from a ruined village. Six levels, a bespoke soundtrack, and just enough rough edges to remind you this came from a summer project at home—not a studio boardroom.

https://seidel-games.itch.io/hope-of-taru

Waste your Wedding (Antoine Foucault)

A side-scrolling aerial brawler where you crash a wedding to steal cake. Yes, really. Attacks double as extra jumps, you can quick-warp with F-keys, and there’s even a palette swap button. Ridiculous in the best way.

https://antoine-foucault.itch.io/waste-your-wedding

Hungry Horrors (Clumsy Bear Studio)

Most deckbuilders have you slashing goblins with swords or zapping them with lightning. Hungry Horrors says forget that—you’re cooking for them instead. Every beast from British and Irish folklore shows up starving, each with its own bizarre cravings.

https://clumsy-bear-studio.itch.io/hungry-horrors

Moth Planet (Moth Fried Games)

A platformer that feels like it crawled out of a sketchbook and took flight. You play a tiny moth in Lepidopteros—bouncing, gliding, and fluttering through hand-drawn landscapes stuffed with secrets. It’s equal parts whimsical and unsettling, with a narrative that doesn’t spoon-feed but keeps you curious.

https://mothfriedgames.itch.io/moth-planet

itch.io is absolutely flooded with experiments like these—some polished, some messy, but all more interesting than whatever safe sequel AAA is rolling out this quarter. And the best part is that every single one here is playable on Linux right now.

@videogames

Lemmy users are in an uproar because MAGA fascists spun up their own server.

First time seeing this? Mastodon and Pleroma already have dozens of these.

We know the playbook: blocks, defederation, and they end up marooned on their own little island.

And if your server doesn’t cut them off? That’s your cue to pack up and migrate.

@fediversenews

Some guy copied my writing, dumped it into ChatGPT, told it to mimic me—and claimed this “proved” I use an LLM.

Thing is, ChatGPT can mimic anyone. For example, Shakespeare. Also, Hemingway. Pick your author. That’s literally what it’s built for.

And just because it can whip up a passable Shakespeare or Hemingway doesn’t mean those guys were AI sleeper agents. Same story here.

Misty Judgment just hit full release on Steam yesterday—after a short stint in Early Access—and it might be the best FMV murder mystery in years.

This is no bargain-bin experiment. It’s a fully realized, live-action production shot in HD, with real actors, practical effects, and enough polish to prove the “FMV is dead” crowd wrong.

You play as Qi Yi, a college student who wakes up from a nightmare with scrambled memories—even your own name feels uncertain. The game throws you straight into the fog: a sudden blackout, a return to campus that doesn’t line up with what you remember, and then—bang—a body falls from a building.

From there, things spiral. Familiar faces show up with different identities, your perspective keeps shifting, and new murders pile up. It’s part detective story, part psychological spiral, with the whole thing hinging on whether you can parse truth from illusion.

Production value is surprisingly high for an indie studio. The acting is Chinese, the dialogue’s in Chinese, but the interface and subtitles are also there in English. It’s a neat cultural crossover—you’re basically watching a Chinese crime drama where you get to pick apart evidence, connect cases, and push the narrative toward multiple endings.

The audio mix deserves a shoutout too: clear dialogue, ambient sound that doesn’t muddy the track, and a moody soundtrack built around synths and atmospheric cues.

On the tech side: Windows-only native support, built in Unity, but it’s rated Playable on Steam Deck, which means it runs fine on Linux through Proton. Specs are modest: i3 CPU, 8GB RAM, DirectX 11 GPU, and about 35GB of storage. Nothing demanding.

The studio behind this is 次元边界, a Chengdu-based outfit in mainland China. They’ve done FMV before—Rebirth! New Lover, a dating-sim experiment—but Misty Judgment is clearly their breakout.

Reception backs that up: over 700 reviews on Steam, with a 94% “Very Positive” overall rating, and recent reviews trending even higher into “Overwhelmingly Positive.” Most reviews are in Chinese, which makes sense, but the enthusiasm carries across language barriers.

Price point is friendly too: $8.99 USD (C$10.61 with the launch discount). For what you’re getting—a full-length FMV mystery with branching outcomes, in 2025—that’s basically a steal.

As someone who grew up watching Hong Kong thrillers and Chinese mysteries on VHS, I can tell you: this scratches that itch. FMVs are back, and they’re stranger, more ambitious, and more culturally distinct than anything Hollywood is willing to risk.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2803810/Rebirth_New_Lover/

@videogames

One reason #Piefed beats #Reddit is transparent voting.

I can actually see who upvotes and who downvotes posts.

Case in point: the admin of sh.itjust.works downvoted Pac-Man Party on Wii.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/5684318f-b63d-4daf-a726-b31190776126

Elgg joined the Fediverse.

Which happened on March 7, 2025 with the release of a plugin. Almost no one noticed. But it’s kind of monumental.

Because Elgg isn’t new. It’s not some trendy project that showed up last week and slapped on federation as a proof of concept.

No, Elgg has been around since 2004. That’s older than Facebook, older than Twitter, older than Reddit. And unlike those platforms, Elgg was always open source.

It was originally designed for e-learning. But it quickly became something more—a full-blown social network engine that you could host yourself.

Profiles, groups, blogs, activity feeds, photo galleries, file uploads, granular permissions—you name it. It had everything Facebook had in its earlier years. And in some ways, more.

Now, with the ActivityPub plugin released for version 6.1, Elgg is federated. Which means Elgg instances can follow and be followed. They can share posts to Mastodon, Akkoma, Friendica, you name it. They can receive comments from Lemmy or PeerTube or Firefish. The plugin supports inboxes, outboxes, WebFinger, even group federation. You can block domains too. It’s not a toy. It’s real.

And yeah, almost nobody’s talking about it. Which is wild, because this is the kind of thing that should be huge. Elgg isn’t some flash-in-the-pan experiment. It’s a mature codebase with a long history, and now it can talk to the rest of the Fediverse. That’s not just important—it’s rare for something this mature to federate.

Most federated platforms lean minimalist. They’re great at one thing—microblogging, video, link aggregation. But Elgg gives you the kitchen sink. It feels like a complete social network. Honestly, if you miss how Facebook used to be, this is probably the closest you’re going to get.

So yeah. Elgg joined the Fediverse. And if people really want alternatives to Big Social, maybe it’s time to give this old horse a look.

https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966

@fediversenews

Itch (2003) is a Windows-exclusive puzzle game where your job is to herd fleas into rows before they overrun the screen.

That’s it. That’s the pitch.

The premise sounds like a dare—what if a tile-matcher starred literal parasites? You line up four same-colored fleas in a row or square. Do it fast because they keep spawning. And once the grid is full, you’re done.

It’s got three modes—Time, Rounds, Puzzle—and that last one gives you 100 handcrafted challenges.

Visually? Think bargain-bin weirdness filtered through early-2000s CD-ROM sheen. It’s not pretty, but it moves. And it’s got just enough quirkiness to keep some people (not me) entertained.

Critics gave it a shrug (about 70%), but that misses the point. Itch! isn’t here to impress you. It’s here to crawl under your skin and see if you flinch.

And in a world drowning in clean, focus-tested puzzle games, there’s something refreshing about one that feels slightly diseased.

@videogames

Just tried upgrading to nvidia-driver-580 on Pop!_OS.

Result? Blinking cursor at boot.

Luckily I know my way around Linux. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to drop into a TTY, logged in, and ran:

That got the driver back in shape.

But if you’re not comfortable in Linux, this fix is anything but obvious.

This is another core reason why #Lemmy and #Piefed are better than #Reddit.

On Reddit, if a head mod of a major subreddit goes toxic or starts power-tripping, the community is stuck. That mod only got control because they lucked into claiming a name like r/movies or r/pics first—and now they hold the keys.

On the #Fediverse, it doesn’t work that way. If people don’t like !movies@lemmy.world, they can move over to !movies@piefed.social. Even if lemmy.world is the biggest Lemmy server, it has no monopoly on access.

And that’s exactly what happened. People voted with their feet. Which is why !movies@piefed.social is now the most active movie community on the Fediverse.

Someone just sent me a very angry DM because their replies to my #Akkoma posts (I don’t use Mastodon) showed up on #Piefed.

So let’s clear this up. When I tag a Piefed community like @movies@piefed.social or @videogames@piefed.social, your replies automatically appear on Piefed. On Piefed itself, the @ is swapped for a !—that’s how communities are marked.

That’s not a bug. That’s ActivityPub doing what it does best. Almost anything you post on Mastodon can show up elsewhere on the Fediverse.

I know a lot of you still think of the #Fediverse as just “Mastodon”.

But it’s far more than that. There’s an entire ecosystem of federated message boards that’s already proven popular: #Piefed, #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Mbin, and #Discourse.

Even the classics like #Friendica and #Hubzilla have solid forum features baked in.

If you’re only here for the microblogging, you’re missing a key piece. Communities built around interests are something #Twitter never offered, and #Bluesky still doesn’t.

So if you’re looking to replace your #Facebook Groups, the Fediverse already has you covered.

Freaks of Nurture (2018) is a stop-motion short directed by Alexandra Lemay and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

It’s six and a half minutes of pure craftsmanship. The story? A daughter dealing with her wildly quirky mother—who somehow balances raising kids, fostering dogs, renovating houses, and never breaking a sweat. Amanda Plummer voices the mom, and the whole thing is inspired by Lemay’s real life.

What floored me wasn’t just the humor, but the detail. One scene has spaghetti flying straight at the lens, and you catch yourself thinking: wait, this is clay. That’s the magic of it—every little gag is handmade.

And here’s the thing: people give endless hype to Japanese anime, but Canada has been quietly dominating animation for decades. The National Film Board has more Oscars than any other studio outside the U.S., most of them in animation. Freaks of Nurture fits right into that legacy, and it’s picked up its own share of festival awards.

Short film? Sure. But it’s also six minutes and thirty seconds of stop-motion at its best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d6YYCEO4OA

@movies