Gamers Corner (Oct–Dec 2025): Adventure To Fate + Dungeon Scoundrel | Accessible iOS Gaming

By AppleVis, 6 March, 2026

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Welcome to Gamers Corner, your roundup of accessible games for blind and low vision gamers. In this October–December 2025 edition, we share our latest iOS game picks, highlight three runner-ups, revisit a classic Blindfold Games Vault Treasure, and close with a Crossing Consoles recommendation—plus a quick look at end-of-year awards.

Hosts: Thomas Domville, Aaron Spelker, and Jesse Anderson

Links (Quick Access)

Staff Picks (iOS)

Adventure To Fate: Dungeons — Platform: iOS — Price: $4.99 (one-time purchase) A turn-based roguelike RPG featuring handcrafted dungeons, multiple character classes, loot collection, and both casual and permadeath modes. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adventure-to-fate-dungeons/id6743055907

Dungeon Scoundrel — Platform: iOS — Price: Paid one-time purchase (no ads, no in-app purchases) A tactical roguelike card-based dungeon crawler built around a fixed 55-card dungeon deck, designed for quick 5–15 minute sessions. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dungeon-scoundrel/id6756222423

Runner-Ups (iOS)

Echo Chain: Multiplayer — Platform: iOS — Price: Free (in-app purchases; full unlock around $2.49) A rhythm and memory-based multiplayer puzzle game for up to four players, with modes like Battle Royale and Arcade and full accessibility support. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echo-chain-multiplayer/id6751758104

Lane Defender: Haptic Arcade — Platform: iOS — Price: $0.99 (one-time purchase) A minimalist, haptic-first arcade game with three-lane gameplay, optional voice announcements, and full VoiceOver support. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/at/app/lane-defender-haptic-arcade/id6749909197

Lenguard — Platform: iOS — Price: $12.99 (one-time purchase) A horror-fantasy narrative adventure with strong accessibility options, set in a stormy world ruled by colossal monsters known as Arks. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lenguard/id6747782520

Aaron’s Vault Treasure – The Blindfold Series

The Blindfold Series — Platform: iOS — Price: Varies by title (70+ titles, mostly free or low-cost) Aaron revisits the Blindfold Games series—an influential collection of audio-based games designed to be playable without sight. The series spans card games, casino-style games, sports titles, arcade challenges, puzzle and memory games, and more.

Download: Blindfold Games Launcher — Platform: iOS — Price: Free App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blindfold-games-launcher/id1067124446

Jesse’s Pick: Crossing Consoles – Stories of Blossom

Stories of Blossom — Platforms: Xbox, PC (Windows) — Price: $9.99 A gentle, narrative-driven puzzle game following Clara as she brings to life three stories told by her grandfather—featuring fully voiced narration, adjustable subtitles, clear audio cues, and low-pressure puzzle design.

Where to Get It:

Awards Mentioned (End-of-Year)

Mobile Accessible Games’ 2025 Game of the Year

  • 3rd Place: Ryft: A Timely Manor — Platform: iOS — Price: Free (IAP)
  • 2nd Place: Warshovel — Platform: iOS — Price: Free (IAP)
  • Game of the Year: Land of Livia — Platform: iOS — Price: Free (IAP)

AppleVis Golden Apples Award

  • 3rd Place: Land of Livia — Platform: iOS — Price: Free (IAP)
  • 2nd Place: Art of Fauna: Cozy Puzzles — Platform: iOS — Price: Free (IAP)
  • Game of the Year: Adventure To Fate: Core Quest Dungeons — Platform: iOS — Price: $4.99

Timestamps

  • 0:02:06 — Intro / what’s in this Oct–Dec edition
  • 0:02:37 — Review: Adventure To Fate: Dungeons
  • 0:24:35 — Review: Dungeon Scoundrel
  • 0:55:57 — Runner-ups: Echo Chain, Lane Defender, Lenguard
  • 1:07:29 — Vault Treasure: Blindfold Games (series)
  • 1:24:26 — Crossing Consoles: Stories of Blossom
  • 1:34:30 — Awards (End-of-year)
  • 1:41:23 — Mobile Accessible Games GOTY: Land of Livia
    • 1:43:28 — AppleVis Golden Apples Awards discussion
  • 1:55:19 — Wrap-up
  • 1:57:24 — AppleVis outro

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers' names, voices, or content.

Thomas: Hello and welcome back to Gamer's Corner. My name is Thomas Dombo, also known as the Nine Mouse. Here for you to go back the last three or four months of games that we are continuously to pick up and review and give you the inside and out of everything games. Welcome back, gentlemen. We got Jesse Anderson over here. Welcome back, Jesse.

Jesse: Hello, good to be back. Good to be talking about some more games. This is Jesse here, also known as Illegally Sighted.

Thomas: And then over there, we've got Aaron Spelker.

Aaron: Welcome back, Mr. Aaron. Thanks for having me. I'm only Aaron Spelker. No other names for me. You guys are not mocking me, are you? Come on now. I'll let you guys vote and you guys can pick what my name is.

Thomas: You guys don't have like handles for your gamers? Yes.

Aaron: Well, Jesse does because he's got illegally sighted, but I don't have anything fancy. I'm just Aaron Spelker everywhere. I'm boring old Aaron Spelker.

Thomas: What's your gamer's name then, Jesse?

Jesse: That's pretty much what I go by these days. That's just kind of my whole illegally sighted is kind of my thing. So that's kind of what I... I used to have a different one, but it was just kind of like my old Xbox gamer tag that got...

Aaron: know i used to use but not illegally cited is kind of where i'm at the last i kind of want to unify things and just use that everywhere when making a when i'm making a gaming character these days i go with uh crypto 74 because crypto is my guide dog so crypto 74 is my uh my uh whenever i have to make a character name that's what i go with that works

Thomas: That's a cool name. See, that's a cool name. You got to go with something that's cool, like Frostman or, you know, Frosty the Snowman or something kind of cool. Right? Well, it's good to have you guys back. Let's talk about what's been going on the past three months of games. And we've kind of just went through a list of games that came out. And we just came down with two that we actually want to review. And we thought these two were one of our favorites. So let's start with the first one. And that is with no doubt this was going to be on this list. So that is the Adventure of Fate dungeon game. So I'm going to let Aaron kind of chime in, tell you a little bit about the game and what his thoughts is on the Adventure of Fate dungeon release.

Aaron: Yeah, so this game is kind of a roguelike RPG, randomly generated map type of game. You're building a character, leveling them up, gaining skills. You're basically transcending or descending through 10 levels of a dungeon. On the fifth level, you'll kind of face a mini boss that you have to beat and then ultimately get down to the bottom 10th level where you defeat the final boss. If you play on kind of the normal mode, it's permadeath. So if you die, then that's it. You got to start back at the beginning. go on easy mode. You actually get three lives to make it all the way down to the bottom. Really, really interesting, fun game. If you played some of the Core Quest, Adventure Debate Core Quest, which came out before this, it adds a couple new features to it. They have a whole blessing and curse mechanic that you can, as you go down, it'll You might get a blessing that is something more favorable that helps you defeat it, but you might also get a curse that prevents you from doing as much damage or moving as fast or whatever the case may be. So the blessing and curse can radically change how you were approaching your movement through the dungeon about halfway through. It's got a lot of replayability. You have, I think, 12 different classes, six different professions, nearly a thousand different skills and spells that you can introduce. So you can really kind of craft, you know, a very distinct character that you like to play. And again, with that random generated this to the dungeon, it really makes it replayable. Each time you go through is a little bit different. Let's see. You know, the, There's a little bit of a learning curve. This is a little bit more complex role-playing game and a little bit more punishing than some. But there are things like when you get into a battle and you fight a battle, what I would say is watch the So recap, you can see the round by round recap of, you know, how you hit, how they hit, what was being effective or not being effective. So if you're kind of struggling on a battle, you can kind of see what was being successful or unsuccessful in your attack. So that next time you face that kind of monster, you might be a little bit more successful in tackling it. But, you know, really enjoyable. You know, I lost a lot of time playing this particular game. And I think I've mentioned this before. It's one of those things when you have to review games, even when you fall in love with the game and you're really enjoying to play it, you always have to move on to the next game. So this was actually one of the ones that I was sad to kind of move on from because I had to go review some some new games. But, you know, very, very enjoyable from my standpoint. What is your thoughts, Jesse, on this?

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I really enjoyed it as well. It's funny because traditionally I really haven't been into the turn-based type of games. Growing up with your Final Fantasies and all those types of things, I just never really got into the turn-based, menu-based combat and things like that. But so much of these role-playing games and dungeon crawler type of things... you know, whether it's you're checking your stats for your equipment or your character or reading your battle log, all those different things. I think that I actually have grown to like these types of games a little bit more, a little bit more than before. And I think a large part of that is just having them to be accessible, you know, being low vision myself, just trying to look at all of these, you know, I'll read all the stats and the numbers. I'm like, I'm here to play a game. I don't want to read a spreadsheet, you know? And so the Adventure to Fate series is one of them that I've kind of come back to. I really kind of enjoyed like Core Quest and I forget the name of the other one or two.

Aaron: Lost Island.

Jesse: Yeah. So I've played through some of those, haven't beat them all. But this one I thought was really kind of cool because, you know, in the old, in the other games, you were kind of playing through a story kind of straight through. And then if you died, you kind of just went back to the last time you were in a safe zone. But as Aaron had mentioned, this whole thing of kind of even in mainstream games, and this is a mainstream game. This is not a game that is just for voiceover users. You can, turn all accessibility features off and you can play it visually. So if you're, you know, fully sighted, non-disabled, you can still totally play and enjoy this game. But what I, you know, what I, you know, a lot of genres and just everything these days, it kind of has this roguelite, roguelike, run-based type of game mechanic where you go as far as you can, you get upgrades along the way, but if you die, you know, boom, that's it. And then you start over and you might get some, you know, permanent perks between runs and things like that. And I thought it was interesting that this kind of dungeon crawler adopted that mechanic, you know, and then also with the difficulty levels saying, okay, well, in the lower difficulty, you get two or three lives. And then other than that, it's, it's permadeath. And I, I, again, I think with, with the number of character classes and, and other variables, there's so much replayability. The random dungeons, It's actually really fun, and some of those creature battles, some of those boss battles can get pretty challenging and frustrating. But yeah, I would highly recommend it. It is a little deeper, but I think that's what a lot of people are looking for. They want something that is pretty... If you're looking for something kind of substantial, a lot of variety, a lot of replayability, I would also... Highly recommend this one.

Aaron: Yeah, I mean, to go off what Jesse was saying there, I mean, again, I have really enjoyed the turn-based because, you know, it gives me the time as a blind person to really kind of slow down and think, you know, sometimes when a live-action game is like, I can't figure out what's going on before I'm dead. And so I can't, can't ever figure out how to get past it. So this allows me time to actually really think and enjoy and immerse myself in the game. Besides the, you know, there, there are also besides having within any dungeon where you can play at three different or four, three or four different levels of difficulty. There's also three different dungeons. So the one that you start on is the easiest dungeon. And then there's two other dungeons that progressively get harder and harder. So, you know, you might, you know, go play the first dungeon and oh look i made it all through all 10 floors you try to go to the third dungeon you'll make it to two floors and you'll be dead so that that kind of allows for that replayability as well because even once you defeat a dungeon not really done there's there's two more dungeons that are even more difficult to try to get through so um i really enjoyed that and then

Thomas: You know, you guys made some very good points about the game. For one, this game, the Adventure of Faith series, you're right, this has been around for some time. For those that are new to Adventure of Faith series, the dungeon is definitely, you can definitely tell that each time this game has come out with a new addition, it's definitely getting deeper and deeper. more complex and vast of what you can do with it. I'm not really this kind of a game player myself, but for those that are like you and out there that really like this type of game, this is the game to do. I think this is like the best of the best when it comes to this kind of a game. I really do. When I got to play with it, my gosh, it just was fantastic. The sound, the effects, the thought that went into it, the mechanics, everything was just Unbelievable. And what I really like about it is I thought it was, I think it was $4.99 in the App Store. There's no in-app purchases. There's no ads, anything like that, which makes things way easier. And I felt that was a very good price for something like this game. As a whole, you know, even though it's not my kind of cup of tea... Man, I really have to say this is probably, like, if anybody's going to make any kind of game like this, this is where they need to come and learn from this guy. I think the developers really put in a lot of emphasis and thoughts in it for voiceover users and whatnot. And not just that, but replayable. Oh, my gosh. This game, you could play literally forever, I think, with so many different things and different ways you can do things to play this game. I don't know, guys. This is one of the rare... that i would say this is probably one of the best i've seen out there now there's i say that a lot but no i really do mean that this is probably the best of this kind of game i i definitely have to get him an a plus there's there's no doubt it's hands down yeah i mean i i really like that as we said that this developer has created several different games in this kind of genre and

Aaron: And there's been iteration. So he's not just reskinning and saying, here's, you know, give me another $4.99 for the same game. I mean, it's thematically kind of the same, but he's trying to introduce new things, which I like. The other thing that it does have really good sound quality and intentionality that, you know, particularly when you're kind of. picking up loot, I could almost tell what I was getting just from the sounds without having to read the little write-up. I kind of knew, had a sense of, oh, I just picked up an epic item just by the sound feedback that was going on. And then, you know, there are some things that Um, you know, I kind of like jotted down some tips, uh, if you're going to play this game and you're kind of new to this type of game, you have the ability to search, um, the kind of a, uh, five by five grid. So 25 squares, um, and you move around the grids and you, you know, you'll fight enemies and you'll find shrines or forges and eventually a door down to the next level. So the goal is to get to the door, get down to the next level and, you know, move around, um, you know, through the traps and the monsters and all, and keep going down until you defend. But each one of those squares that you're on is also searchable. So you want to make sure that you search every single square, whether it seems like there's nothing there or you just want to battle there. No matter what, you should search every square because it's always something findable. And if you search every square and you find everything, you also get some extra bonus rewards as you move down to the next level. So searching every square, super important. you'll have a chance to have some potion buffs. You definitely want to use those because it doesn't really cost you any action points to do it. So putting those on and, you know, for however many turns they are, two or three turns, and then reapplying them when that runs out, you really want to make sure you do that, pay attention to those. And that'll be things like, you know, it might be resistance to fire when you're firing weapons. fighting a fire monster. I mean, that would be an important thing to ensure that you have in place. So you want to do that based off the type of battle you're doing. You want to kind of watch when you're about to level up. So if you're just about to level up, you don't want to necessarily waste a mana potion or a health potion because when you level up, all of those things get topped off to 100% full. So you can save yourself some use of your health and your mana by just leveling up to the next level. So try to be aware of that so you don't waste a potion. And then if you're playing on the one where you get to have multiple lives, I always left some money in reserve so that if I lost the battle, I could go to the shop and replenish my stock of potions and then go attempt again. So if you go and have no money and you lose the battle, you're just going to kind of lose it again because you don't have any potions or mana or health potions to kind of do that fight again. So if you're on the one that's not permadeath, you know, leave a little cash reserve so you can effectively do that battle again. And then I mentioned this before, which is if you're struggling in a battle, there is that battle summary round by round of how your attacks did and how their attacks did, which can help you kind of get a sense of, you know, what might be a more successful strategy. So that's my particular tips for the game. Grade-wise, you know, I think it's a very, very good game. It's not quite an A+. But I'll give it an A minus as a score on the game. It's solid. It was fun. Again, I was sad to leave it, which kind of puts it into the A category for me. And, you know, I hope that, you know, he puts out the next and there's even more complexity and more mechanics to it. The kind of the more involved it is, you know, the more interesting it is to me. Yeah.

Thomas: That's interesting. So, well, Lisa is an A-lister game. And so I'm just curious, Aaron, is that do you think that this falls into the hardcore gamers out there? Would that please the hardcore out there? And what would you say for like beginners?

Aaron: You know, I would say like it's an upper level intermediate. um, is what I'm going to say. So, you know, a beginner might kind of struggle, a super hardcore might think it's kind of easy, uh, or a little bit on the easier side. Um, but it's, it's not easy and it's not super hard. So, you know, to me, that's kind of a nice sweet middle spot, to be honest. Um, it, it, it's in that realm where it can potentially please everybody.

Thomas: I would assume a game would be difficult to find that, um, that sweet spot that everybody would love, you know? Um, and I think you're right. I think that they got to pick in the middle, but, um, all right. So what are your thoughts then Jesse, Esther, um, of your, when you got to kind of play with the game for a bit, or did you think it was kind of rated up there for you as well?

Jesse: Well, yeah, as I said, I quite enjoyed it too. I've enjoyed this whole Adventure to Fate series overall in general. And I'm glad you guys mentioned the sound and the audio. I enjoy especially some of the battle music and the sound effects and things like that. So the presentation style is also pretty good because if you're going to listen to a game, you want to have especially a lot of replayability like this and you're doing battles constantly. It's nice to have some kind of catchy music to go along to that you don't really get sick of. And yeah, I would probably give it kind of just a straight up A because the only little nitpick that I would have with it is more for like a low vision user as a voiceover user. And this has kind of been a thing for a lot of the Adventure to Fate series is It's kind of a weird thing where when I use voiceover, I use a combination of swiping, flicking left and right, but also explore by touch because while either A, I can see that something is there and so I can just touch where that square is or touch where that health bar is or whatever and hear the information that I need. So it kind of speeds things up for me, but there's a couple kind of weird little quirks where if you're swiping through the screen, particularly around the middle of the screen where you have a lot of your XP and your health and mana and different things like that, it's a little, because some of the information is really small and just, I don't know, just kind of the way that voiceover interacts with it, I find that I have to like, I can touch somewhere near there and then I have to swipe. It's not quite as like, I can't just touch exactly what I want to. And so it's a little bit finicky there, but the fact that voiceover still easily reads it all and I can get in the vicinity is fine. But other than like a couple of very minor, just kind of little quirks with that, like I said, I have, no problem with the actual gameplay. Um, and again, you have the different difficulty settings, so, you know, you can give yourself a little leeway with the extra lives if you need to, but if you want more challenge, you maybe play a harder class or you play a harder difficulty.

Aaron: So yeah, I would say just a straight up a. And, and I agree with you on that, on that focus. Uh, I had that written as like one of my cons or drawbacks on this game is that, uh, when you touch on the screen, you could touch the exact same spot, but it does not announce the exact same thing at that spot. Like it's like the focus doesn't always hit the same spot. And I particularly found that on the inventory slides or something. Yeah. And then maybe that's what it is. Maybe everything's so tightly packed that just like the slight little bit that I'm off is putting me somewhere else.

Jesse: But yeah, I, the creature area is pretty good. Like that's pretty consistent, but I think we, again, you have the most, They pack a lot of really tiny bits of information where all of your health and mana bars are. There's a couple little strips there that are... There's a lot of stuff crammed in there, so that's where you're going to have to do a little flicking. You can't rely on Explore by Touch quite as often.

Aaron: I found it the worst on the inventory screen.

Thomas: I'm curious, guys. Now, I have to agree with almost everything you guys say. I mean... what I look for into a lot of games and I know this is not always the case, but when I see a lot of emphasis, um, a lot of thoughts went into it to help a voiceover users, you know, that's, that's a plus, um, sounds. Um, as you mentioned, both, I thought the audio and the sounds and effects are tremendous because a lot of times, a lot of these RPG games that I play don't have a lot of those. And if they do, they're very basic, um, sounds and things like that. So, I kind of gave it a little higher grade because of those. I look at everything, what went behind it, how much effort and work they put into it. I thought, even though it may be a little difficult for beginners and a little bit easy for hard players, I agree. I think you can change things up as you get higher into the dungeons. I think you'll get to the level that I think would be satisfactory for hardcore users, but So with that said, I'm really curious, what other game that you can think of at the top of your head that is similar to this kind of game that would get a better grade than this?

Aaron: Good question. That's kind of a roguelike dungeon crawler.

Jesse: Well, there's, I guess there's very, I mean, there's variations like the next game that we're going to cover is kind of a similar turn-based type of mechanics, but then You know, like Doncaster, I know it's not a dungeon crawler, but there's a lot of games that kind of have this sort of turn-based gameplay mechanics, battle mechanics to them. And I enjoy Doncaster quite a bit, too.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, I mean, there, there's a little different, like, um, so if you go with the series that we talked about before with, um, uh, untold and red tide and, and, uh, and black dust, um, the Eldrum series, um, the battle in that is a very turn-based, um, you know, use different skills and attacks and defenses. So from that standpoint, the fighting, um, in those games is not terribly dissimilar to what's in this game. Although the other one is, uh, Eldrum is more kind of a tech space world building, and this is more a straight up, you know, grid dungeon problem. So the fighting is the same, but the, the rest of the game is, is kind of different.

Jesse: So, yeah, I mean, this is still one of the top tier, I think, as far as like, you know, battlers and like the, the, the grid based dungeon crawler mechanic. Um, no, it's a solid, solid series.

Thomas: Oh, no doubt. Okay, well, that's good. So that is probably one of the biggest ones that I picked as well. So Adventure of Faith Dungeon Series or the Dungeon Game, part of the Adventure of Faith Series. It's great for those that are interested in this game. Let's move on to the next game. Now, this game, I'll admit I have a lot more interest and I can't seem to put it down, and they've done some amazing stuff here. Now, I don't know if it's because it's a little bit simpler, and I don't know what it is, but I'm going to hand over to Jesse. And what do you think of this game called Dungeon Scoundrel?

Jesse: Yeah, so I also got pretty darn hooked on this game for a little while. I need to get back to it because one thing I will say right off the bat is the developer – seems to be adding new content to it pretty regularly. I did a video for it shortly after it came out. And then a couple of days later, uh, he had an update where they added like achievements and a few other features. And then a little bit after that, they added another update that added like a whole new character class and things, which I haven't even gotten to play that yet. I haven't gotten to play the game since, but, um, So Dungeon Scoundrels, again, it's a turn-based battler game, but this one is more like you have a deck of like 51, 52 cards. And what was that?

Aaron: 55 cards.

Jesse: 55, okay. I forgot what the exact number, but basically you get your card deck on the top. You've got your kind of character. You have a left hand and a right hand, and you have a pocket where you can kind of like, you can store a card for later use. And then you kind of have your play field. And so what's really interesting is each card represents either an enemy or an item. It could be a sword. It could be a potion. It could be a shield or any number of other things. And then, of course, your enemies. And so each of these cards has a numerical value. So if you have an enemy, you might have an enemy that has... three hit points and so if i have if i have a sword that has five hit points um like i would have to first equip that into one of my hands and if i were to attack the creature for three damage that means i still have two damage that i can deal to another enemy that pops up and um it's you know it it yeah, it might sound complicated the way I'm explaining it, but it actually is pretty streamlined and it didn't take me very long at all to like understand how to play it. And once you start kind of just getting to know like, Oh, okay, this, you know, these numbers are this. Okay. I got shields. I got, um, swords. I've got potions. Um, it's just a really, it flows really smoothly and it's really kind of addictive. Um, A little tip that I would kind of say is that you may not... So when you're... The way that your battle works is if you are attacking with, let's say, a weapon, could be an axe, could be a sword, whatever, you have to equip it into one of your hands, and then you would double tap that, and then you would double tap the enemy that you want to attack. If you're defending, however, you make sure that you have the shield... in one of your hands you attack or you double tap the enemy first and then you double tap the shield and that's how you defend so that's it's a little bit confusing maybe at first uh i think uh aaron and i were texting about that briefly um so basically like if you're attacking you do your side first and then you attack the enemy if you're defending you do them first and then you and then your thing And like I said, I think it had really catchy sound effects, really catchy music, and it just kind of flowed really well. I beat it on... I've unlocked all the character classes on the easiest difficulty because I wanted to see what all the character classes were. And I finished it on, I think, the first one or two character classes on the normal difficulty. And it's so frustrating because... like in a good way, I guess, um, because I cannot tell you on normal difficulty, I cannot tell you how many times, um, basically when you're playing, the goal is to play all of the cards in your deck and also clean out the play field. So clean up any remaining enemies, any remaining items so that the whole play field is empty. And I can't tell you how many times on normal where I would literally get down to zero cards and I have like a potion or I have like a half broken weapon and I have like two or three enemies that just have ungodly amount of damage. And I just don't have the resources to survive with enough health to clear the field and still live. Like I'll literally die. on the last play, I'm like, Oh, but it just gives you that incentive that you want to, that you're so close that you want to play it again.

Thomas: You know, I have to agree with you. I can't remember how many times I've gotten to the point where I'm, I'm down to the last room where you have a few creatures left and it's like, Oh my God, there's no way I can end it. And it's just so frustrating, but yet so kind of, kind of pulls you in when a place more, Yeah, when this game first came out by itself, there was a classic, what they call it now, and that's what we're talking about now. I agree with the update to what they added, just substantially increase of what you can do. Now they offer a hero run, which has tons of different variation to different decks. They did introduce a new class. I also did a podcast on it, and I was just fascinated because it is one of those games that if you're a beginner or if you just want to kind of play something that's a little different than the typical RPG, this is a little different. And I really, really love this game. Now, it's not very often where I will just put Thomas's favorite game. You're not going to hear me say that very often, but this is definitely one of my favorite game. This is definitely up there. I enjoyed every bit of it. I know some people are not really into quests. The quests are things that you can accomplish, like have you defeated 25 monsters? Have you defeated 50 monsters? Have you defeated 100 monsters? So you got like little leaderboards and things like that and accomplishments or things you could try to beat for these quests, which is kind of a nice angle to it. There is just a little bit of curve, but it's not that much. I agree on the easiest level. It was pretty easy for me to go through all the class. But in that middle, my gosh, the game just started to increase on and pressure and how You wouldn't think something like this would be strategy, but it's almost luck in a way because these decks are just dealt out just how it is. And sometimes it could be totally against you. It could just be annihilated with all these monsters first on. Or sometimes you get overwhelmed with shields and potions. You can't waste those, but yet I need some monsters to fight. Yeah, I need more pockets. Right? I mean, you can only use one pocket. And so it's kind of fun. I really enjoy it. And what I should tell everybody is that this is one of those games that you can play probably in 5 to 15 minutes a game. So if it's something that you just want to do a little time waster, but not so fast, but something that involves a little bit of thinking and how you're going to do things, this is the game to take a look at. And I thought for the price of 99 cents, I thought, my gosh, this is a really fantastic game for being such a nominal price. And that's the price I would happily give to the developer. And my understanding originally, it wasn't very accessible, but he's had some people on his team to help him make it more accessible. And I think for the most part, it does a fantastic job. Now there's a bug in the latest one that, Um, but they seem to kind of fix the bugs out and once each of the new updates come out, but I really, I don't know, guys, I really love this game. What about you, Aaron? What are your thoughts on the game?

Aaron: Okay, so I will say that I played and have unlocked all the characters at normal level. And the first thing I want to say that you guys mentioned, it was right on my list, but what is really amazing about this game is almost every time I get down to the last card, and he has 10 hit points and I only have eight attack and I'm going to lose. That has happened to me more times than not. And I think that is phenomenal on the balance, right? That so many of mine can come down to just barely winning or just barely losing. I think that's a hard balance to get down and I'm very, very impressed with that. Now, what I will say is, To me, a very, very good framework here. But to me, it's kind of like, you know, baby's first card battler a little bit because there's not variety. I would love to see, you know, there's nothing different about one of one monster, the wolf versus the minotaur, other than one has eight hit points and one has 10 hit points. I would love to see, you know, one has. eight hit points, but is immune to shields or immune to, you know, a sword versus an ax so that, you know, look, I'm kind of, you know, I have an ax so I can't attack him with the ax because he's immune to ax. So now I have to use my shield. It would have added a different layer to the strategy if there was something different about each one of those monsters other than number of hit points to kind of put in there. So I would love to see that. The achievements were interesting, but a lot of times when you have these kind of roguelike card battler type of things, if I get to 25 monsters, then you get something like, oh, you hit for 1% more damage on all your attacks. The achievements, you've achieved them, but they didn't really help you in any way other than say, kept track that now I've defeated 100 monsters. I would love to see something tangible be attached to that. So that, you know, it would be easier to get to the normal level and easier than to go on to the hard level. As I take all, you know, all that work that I've done putting into the game and playing it, you know, that would be kind of available. There are different classes. Each class comes with a unique spell card, which is just one card that shows up in the deck. To me, that wasn't terribly different. I mean, there's kind of a little different of, you know, when I hit that card of how I played that card versus how I would play it on, you know, the rogue versus the paladin versus the whatever, but it didn't drastically change the playthrough. Like I see some other times when you, you know, have a class change, you, you really have to play the game completely differently. You know, like if it was, Oh, when you're the whatever wizard, you can't use any of axes or whatever, you know, you can't equip any of those or they hit for half damage or something like that, that makes playing that character, uh, really uniquely different. Maybe with one character, swords are double the attack, but axes are half the attack to really make that character feel different than the other characters. So all the bones are there, but the dressing to me was kind of missing on the game. So I thought it was fun. I thought it was interesting. It's not a bad game in any way. um but i i just saw so much more potential that was a that could be achieved with this game that seemed kind of left on the table at least for now you know maybe again he'll do updates or when he does you know dungeon scrounge dungeon scoundrel 2 uh it'll introduce those type of things um but uh yeah so to me it was you know it was entertaining you know was i sad to move on from this one you know a little less sad uh to move on from this one um but it definitely was not a bad game in any way. It was enjoyable. It was fun. I just saw that there was a lot more potential that seemed left on the table.

Jesse: You made some really good points. I didn't really think of a lot of that, but as you were, excuse me, as you were just talking through, you know, some of those variations and like that, those are some awesome ideas. And, whether he does that in a future update for the current game or if he does a sequel, yeah, I would say there's a fair bit of breathing room to expand. And I love the idea of, oh, this may... Because none of the enemies really had a lingering poison effect or a bleed or different stats that could make you play a little bit differently in or having, you know, I like the idea of, oh, this character class is better with axes or this is better with swords or whatever. I like those ideas. But I think, like, in a way, though, I think one of its strengths is that this does function as a new user, a new player's first card battler game, because, again... It's an intro to card battling. Yeah, I mean, I like the fact, in a way, that, you know, I'd love to see a sequel expand, but that's sort of what I found refreshing about it, because I found that, like, I don't play, as I said for the last game, I don't play a lot of turn-based games. And now that I'm more comfortable with it, I would love to see these such improvements, but like, you know, I'm more into like, you know, I play a lot of mainstream games with the vision that I have. And so I generally like if I'm playing with swords or guns or bow and arrows or whatever it is, I like to be in full control over my character and be like, Oh, well, if I screwed that up, it's because I didn't play it as well, not just because of some random stat or menu outcome. But as these turn-based games are becoming more accessible in a lot of cases, I'm kind of liking them more. And so as I'm getting used to playing these, I can find deeper experiences. But I think it's not a bad thing to have a game that... I would say balance is it's, you know, kind of your introductory card battler. And I think maybe that's why I took to it pretty well because you can play it in, you know, I, you, you know, you can play a game 10 to 15 minutes per, per game. And there were a few days where I played it for a good couple hours straight, just unlocking character classes. And I've, I haven't gotten all the achievements yet, but I've got most of them. So, yeah, I mean, I still really enjoyed it. And I would love to see what future updates bring. And I would love to see a... Because I think it would be probably better, you know, maybe you put a few more classes in, you put a few more weapons or a few more variations. But I think that putting a lot of what you just talked about, I think would make a really good... sequel, that's exactly what you would do for a sequel.

Thomas: I think he could get a lot out of this because, you know, some of the things I mentioned in my podcast about the original when it first came out for one, I think it's version 1.0.5. It's kind of funny because he posted on my podcast to say, hey, wait till you see the next version. It's going to do a lot more. And so version 1.0.6 came out. And, you know, to answer the spell card, The new version, they have a lot. I mean, a ton more spell cards that are available now. So basically how that works is that each dungeon that you, or I should say each card or deck that you complete successfully, you get rewarded with so many, I can't remember if it's crystals or what. I think it's crystals. And based on the crystals that you have are cards that you can unlock during the game. That was not there when I played.

Jesse: Yeah, because you started talking about multiple dungeons and multiple... I think that must have been a very, very recent update because I don't remember some of that. Did they fix the one... I mean, like I said, I came in, I played it after the achievements and the blind character class, and then I didn't play it after that. But did they fix... I know there was one bug I wanted to mention that is hopefully fixed by now. In the initial version that I had played, it was fine... But I know the last time I had played, you could swipe through the characters on the screen, but it wouldn't actually select them. And so that was broken.

Thomas: That is fixed in 1.0.6. However, it did break some other things. But in that version, yes, yes, yes. So what you guys are talking about is now deemed as classic. And now they have this hero run, which is the various dungeons and each of these dungeons you have, so you have all the classes. So you got like seven or eight classes now that you unlock now based on the character. So if I pick sorcerer and I do a run, a hero run, there are a ton. I can't remember how many, there's dozens of new dungeons that you go through. So you got to go through each one of them one by one, like as you were unlocking different dungeons and, And every dungeon now has its own set of deck of cards. So there are 55 cards in each of the dungeons you go to, but they changed it up. So you do have, the basic is still there. You still got, you know, hit points. You got weapons that does this and this, but they changed. You got different monster names now. You got different weapons. You got different potions. You got all sorts of things. And each of those, when you go into a hero run, Before you start the game at the top, there's now a spell button. If you tap on that, it'll show you all these spells that you can introduce into that card. So like one of them, for example, will automatically put, redeal the deck for you or put those four cards, put it into the end of the deck. And so there's lots of different spells you can purchase or to unlock.

Aaron: Can you do more than one spell per run?

Thomas: You can only use it once, I believe. So it has to be dealt to you. So it's just a card that gets introduced into the deck.

Jesse: Right, but can you have multiple spell cards during a run eventually?

Thomas: That's a good question. Can I have multiple cards? That's... I don't know.

Aaron: Because that's the thing, like, you know, one spell card out of the 55 doesn't drastically change things, per se. Now, the fact that you get to choose other than the one that's given you is a little bit better. But you're still kind of, it's on the margins. It's change on the margins, right?

Jesse: Yeah, you should have at least the ability to either have a couple of spells or use a spell two or three times, maybe. You still put a cap on it so you can't spam it. But having but yeah, but yeah, I mean, this definitely sounds like it gives me another excuse to play this probably this weekend, because no, I was not aware of some of the again, like I said, when I initially started talking about the game, he's updating it so fast that it's like, oh, because I played this like a week, week and a half ago. I don't think some of those features were there, so I'm like, oh, wow, there's still a whole bunch I didn't even know about for today.

Thomas: Yeah, give that a look because I agree with Aaron's point, and Aaron makes some really awesome suggestions and ideas. But one of those things, like Jesse said, is the simplicity of it that makes the game addictive. There's just something about it, but I am with you, Aaron. I don't think introducing too complex of a card game is ideal at first, but maybe as the game progresses, maybe as you go into different difficulties, you get those kind of moves. I would totally be down for that, and I think the developer would no doubt would love to hear those things. But I mean, for considering going for a very minor release 1.05 to 1.06, it was that dramatic and that impactful. I was like, Holy geez, that's, that's almost like a new 1.1 version. But, um, in the end, so what would you, what would you give it a grade for then, um, Aaron?

Aaron: So, um, you know, ultimately I think I'd give it like a B plus, you know, it's solid, it's fun. Um, Again, I had some particular, probably two major tips if you're going to play this game. One, you have the option to flee. Don't be afraid to flee if you're facing some really unsavory cards. So again, as I think Jesse might have said at the beginning, when you play this game, there's four cards that are dealt on the table. And let's say you have two monster cards, a sword card, and a potion card, okay? Well, what I can do is I can pick up the sword and then I can use the sword to attack, you know, the monster. And then now, you know, let's say the sword has 10 points. One monster has 10 points and the other has five points. Well, I take my sword, I attack the monster that has 10 points. Now I've killed that monster, but I've also destroyed my sword. Now I still have on the table a monster and a potion. As soon as I deal with one of those, if I pick up the potion and I put it in my pocket to save for later, now there's only one card on the table and it'll deal three new cards to bring it back up to four. So every time you get down to one card on the table, it'll replenish to four cards and you have to deal with it. So my tip to people is whenever you can leave something that is not a monster on the table, Because what can happen to you if you leave a monster on the table and you get three new cards, you might end up facing three to four monsters and put yourself in a real tight position. You leave yourself a potion or a sword or a shield. That's the thing that you leave on the table. That's just one fewer potential monster that you might face. Now, if you do get in a situation, I've left a potion, but then I got dealt three monsters and there's really no way for me to be able to beat that. there is the option to flee. It'll cost you a little bit of health, but you get to wipe out those cards and get four new cards dealt to you that maybe not be put in such a bad situation. So, um, you know, leaving a positive card as the last card before three new ones are dealt out to you and knowing when to flee are, uh, you know, really two ways to make sure that you get to that very last card and do well on, particularly on the normal run. Um, So that would be my two advice when playing this game, the tips by Aaron, if you will. Again, B plus, solid game, definitely room for improvement to bring it up into that A class. You know, I think there's loads that they can do here. And, you know, maybe then he can charge $199, make a little bit more money.

Thomas: What about you, Mr. Jesse? What's your thoughts on grades?

Jesse: Oh, yeah. Like I said, I really like this one overall. Another tip that I kind of just thought of that I think I have for people is there are times, I think, where it is advantageous for you as your character because you have your character in the middle and then you have, like I said, your left and right hand on either side and then your pocket down below. There are times where it might be more beneficial for you to take one or two points of hit damage directly, and then you can save the weapon or save the shield in one of your hands. So let's say that I've got an enemy that has seven hit points. I have a sword that deals six. Well, I use the sword on this guy, And rather than wasting a point on my shield that I might have in my other hand, I want to save that for a higher enemy, especially later on in the round. Once I get that one guy down to one hit point, it might just be more advantage so I can save my good items. And I might just have the tap on the enemy and then tap on my character directly. I will take that one hit point of damage but it may prolong my tools that I have in play, and maybe I might be able to survive that last round when you get down to one or zero cards and cards on the field. Rating? Oh, I mean, I want to... Like I said, I fell pretty hard for this one right away, and I'm kind of excited just to hear that all of these different... Features that you, that you just talked about, um, with like the new dungeons and the new spells, in addition to the character classes that I played. Um, I, boy, I don't know. I mean, I, like I said, I still, I think one of the things that happens is that sometimes like I've noticed, like they have a lot of features. And they're getting updates out pretty quickly. But I do hope that they have testers that can also test at this sort of rapid pace because, you know, especially for that one update where it's like, oh, you literally can't select a character class with voiceover because it got broken. You know, things like that. I mean, obviously, you know, you get a bug, you know, you get bugs sometimes, but Um, you know, like, so when I played it for a little while, I would turn voiceover off and I could see well enough where I could kind of flick, okay, I'm on my third character here and then I can turn voiceover back on, but you guys don't have that, that ability. Uh, so, you know, just a little bit more kind of checking that things don't break, um, like that during major updates. And I love the, all the ideas and suggestions that Aaron has. I originally was thinking maybe like an A, but because there is some room for a little bit of improvement, I think I'm still going to give it an A-, because I really did like this game. But you both make some really good points.

Thomas: I'll expand on Jesse's and Aaron's strategy. Jesse's right is that, remember when you go into this game, Don't use your weapon and shield and potion. There's not enough of those to help you get through the deck. It's impossible. So there's got to be that balance where you got to accept. And one of those things is to attack with your bare hands. That means if the monster is five and you attack it with your bare hand, you're going to take five damage. That's what that means. But you clear out that card or that monster. So what I found out and my thoughts is that when you have a high health going into it, almost anything that's five and down, just take it on with your bare hands. Don't waste your potion and your swords and your shield on that, especially when you get differences on the shield. So if a monster is eight and you have a shield that's five, I'll go ahead and take that three damage because the shield is only good for five of the eight hit that it's going to have on you. So I'll take that because you need to take that, and that's where the balance comes in. So the rule of thumb is anything five and less, and I'll do that until I get about ten health points or less, and then I just try to battle that until I get some potions and get it in me, or I stash a potion in my pocket. I'll bring it out and bring that number back up. But that's really where that game is. You've got to balance it out so you can't. use every card for you because that's not going to work that way, but it's just something to think about. The only annoying thing that I found is I don't like the tracks. I think the loop is a little bit, I don't know. I'm glad that there's four different types of tracks you can pick from music-wise, but sometimes it got really annoying. I don't know. I just feel like I need a little bit more selection and the loop is seamless. I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm just a podcaster or something, but I hate it when the music ends and it's just a pause and it's like it starts all over again. I just want continuous music that sounds really good. And I think that's something they can work on. Bugs are bugs. Yeah, there is some bugs in the initial version. uh, the workaround was double tap on a class. So if you were, um, if you swipe right, you went to rogue. If you double tap that and you swipe right, and that'll work just fine, but you don't have to worry about that now. But in the new version, there is some bugs and I wish it wasn't there. It is kind of annoying. I have to turn off voiceover to click on continue. Um, but other than that, I, I don't get too heavy on that unless there's a lot of bugs. There are just a few here and there. So I'm not going to, um, points for that unless it was something substantial um but i really like this i agree with aaron that i it definitely has potential there's no doubt about it but for a beginner game is something that's addictive like this i i definitely go with jesse does an a minus um i think there's some improvements you can do it and i think they're going to succeed doing that With that said, those are the two games we picked for this edition.

Thomas: Now, there were some runner-ups, and I have to get some thoughts from you guys on these runner-ups, and those games are, we have the Echo Chain, we have Lane Defender, and then we have the Lingard. Now, I will kind of chime in of those three. I I wasn't really a big fan of the echo chain or the lane defender. I'm not, the lane defender is more of a haptic kind of a game. I just, I don't know what it is. I just don't, I just don't get into those games, but, um, it was pretty popular, uh, by AppleVis users out there. They seem to like the game quite a bit. And there are some people that like the echo chain, but they lingered. I, I want to talk about this cause time quest is, um, They're known for their time quest game, and that is huge. Back in the days, that was the, gosh, when we had the Golden Apples many years ago, we had awards, and people picked time quests, and it was very popular. So I was really happy to see Lingard come out, but my problem with the Lingard is two things on this, guys. The price on it, holy cow.

Aaron: $12.99, is that what it is?

Thomas: $12.99 for a game. And I'm like, okay, you really got to convince me this is going to be worth that price. And, you know, I got to say the story and the music and everything is absolutely gorgeous. Everything you love about TimeQuest. But when I had a problem with Lingard is the price. And I felt like there's a lot less choice than there were in TimeQuest. I think that's what makes TimeQuest really fun because the choices that you had to pick and you got different paths. I felt like there's a less of that and way more stories. So I didn't feel like I was getting a game. Um, it was kind of like a, yeah, it was kind of a choose your own adventure game, but I felt like it really didn't meet my expectation at all. So, um, did you play any of those three games yourself and Aaron, do you have any thoughts on those three games there? Yes.

Aaron: Yeah. So, um, you know, echo chain, it's kind of like a, a Simon says, um, you know, match the sounds are going a little different though, in that the pattern will change on you. So it's, to me, it's pretty hard to get very far in that because you don't get that pattern recognition of remembering it, you know, this sound, that sound, this sound, and now you're adding a fourth sound. All four sounds can change on you, which makes that a pretty difficult game to play. Um, the lane defender, I did not like at all. I didn't, I didn't think it executed very well. Um, I, I started playing it. I put that down very, very quick, um, for my mobile accessible games group. if I think a game is not even worth playing, I don't review it and then say, oh, you know, this gets a D or an F. I don't really do with that. I want people to, you know, see games that are worth playing. So I'm not even going to review playing Defender for mobile accessible games. I just did not find it worth my time at all. The final one, which we were considering as one of the main ones for this one, I didn't have a new phone and I hadn't upgraded to iOS 26. which I do now have a new phone and I do have iOS 26. So I might download it just to check it out if I decide I have $12.99 to spend. So maybe we can pick that up next time around and I can give you some more opinion on that last one. But yeah, I just got my new phone over the weekend. So it's only four days old.

Thomas: So with the review, did you review the three games yourself, Jesse, then?

Jesse: No, I didn't. And I'm kind of on board with both of you guys. The first two games, like Echo Chain and what was the other one? Lane Defender. Yeah. I will put a disclaimer out there. The developer for Echo Chain did reach out to me via email. He must have found my channel or something. And so he did give me a pre-release code for it. So I will just have that as a disclaimer right away. But I mean, you know, like I said, I, there's, what I would say is the value in these is you could put them on, you know, a younger kid's iPad or iPhone or something. You could use it to kind of, you know, teach some basic iOS gestures. Cause with echo chain, you're swiping up, down, left and right to match the sounds. Did it, did either of those really do anything for me? No. Um, there's been a number of games that have either had the simon says mechanic just as their overall game or as a mini game and those games have just never done it for me whatsoever to be honest lane defender yeah again like i thought it was sort of weird because it was sort of hard to tell like what lane was going so i would just kind of like take three fingers and just go and yeah so that one just i yeah i i i don't think i'm going to cover that one on my channel either because like you said you don't want to bad mouth the game um like and like i said that's where i still try to find the positive of like you know if you got a younger kid and you know, you get them interested in, or you get them, you teach them some basic gestures. You do have the kind of the, you know, the echo, um, echo chain has the kind of multiplayer thing. So you could get a couple of kids maybe on an iPad or something and whatever, but yeah, another, neither of those games really do much for me. The, was it Lingard? Um, I like, yeah, I liked the previous game quite a bit. My main problem with those was that I wanted to play through the story and I, and I hated waiting like, Oh, you get to make this choice. Now you get to wait eight hours. Right. I just like, I want to play a game when I want to play it. Um, I have not had much of a chance to play much of Lengard. Um, but if you say there's not as much choice and everything, um, it may be one that'll pop on like every once in a while. I think it may still be worth, um, you know, covering on my channel at some point, but again, even covering that on a video is hard because I can show the interface. But if I run up against something right away where, Oh, I perform an action and now I can't do anything for an hour and a half. Well, you know, you know, so yeah, I mean, um,

Thomas: You're really into the game for the story. I mean, that's what it's about. It's really for the story, and I think that's what people really love TimeQuest is for the story.

Jesse: Yeah, and the story in TimeQuest, that was, again, that was kind of what was the cool part about it. I do think in a way that the price is a little bit high, especially when you look at it like mobile has a little bit of a different standard than console and PC games. But at the same time, man, you think you complain about $12 for a game. Try being a mainstream gamer. You have games releasing at $70 or $80 a pop. Thankfully, I'm into indie games, and those are more $5, $10, $20, $30 on the high end. But your big AAA games, ooh, they got you. There's a bunch of Nintendo games that came out late last year for the Switch 2, and I'm just like, yeah, I'd like to play Metroid Prime 4. I'd like to try Kirby Air Ride, but if you think I'm going to pay $80 a pop for each of those, I've got a lot of other stuff I've got to do and play, so I'm not going to play those right now.

Thomas: No, you make some good points, Jesse, is that we've gotten so used to these prices. I mean, I think that's the key point there is that, you know... I can tell there was a lot of development into the game. I'm positive. It took years to develop because the story is vast. I mean, just huge. It's like bigger than a book. I should have looked into how many hours of book play or book is in this game. And the sound is just incredible. The music is wonderful. It's gorgeous. It's definitely A-lister game sound. But I'm not, I, I don't know. I have a hard time thinking this, you really, this really fall into the game category because it's almost like a book, you know, choose your own adventure is a book. Um, and it's always been a book.

Jesse: I mean, in the mainstream market, they do have, um, it's not called interactive fiction. Um, what the heck do they call them? There's a bunch of games, uh, like a digital novel or, uh, like an interactive novel there's a lot of games that come out like that on steam and uh there's been a couple games on the nintendo ds i remember back in the day that have that sort of a thing so they are games they're just you know again they're not the deepest as far as gameplay mechanics go but yeah they you know with the interaction and things yeah

Thomas: I mean, it's kind of like the game the last time we did the Gamer's Corner that you picked at Dusk's Fall. I mean, that kind of reminds me that kind of a choose your own path. And then the story base went along that path. It's kind of sort of like that. But, you know, I at least want to do some runners up. I thought we didn't do that last time. And I thought, well, let's just do that. So we just get some people out there to see if there's something that's up your alley. I mean. There may be some people out there that absolutely love Simon's game, so I think the echo chain is definitely for you because it's definitely a Simon game on steroids. I think it's a lot harder than you typically see on the Simon's Face games. And like you guys all say about the lane defender, it is difficult. I don't like the haptic. I don't know if I get overstimulus of the haptic, but nonetheless, those are the runners-up.

Jesse: To me, there just wasn't enough there.

Thomas: Right.

Aaron: I don't think it's you. I think it's lane defense. Okay.

Thomas: It's not just me. You know, I don't mind haptic every so often when it really kind of enhanced the game. Now, when it's just all haptic, then it's just like, okay, you lost me because it's too much. I don't mind. Maybe, you know, some of the games, you know, when you do a hit or you do a major damage, I would love to feel a little rumble. It kind of reminds me of some of the game controllers that i have that just kind of do rumbles here and there um it kind of enhanced the experience of the game so i enjoy that i wish more games take advantage of it just don't abuse it um too much not only that but my god it kills my battery when you play those kind of games too it's just like it just drains it big times but um okay aaron this is up for you we're in the next category which we did last time and we have the aaron's treasure vault which you will pick a game that is something that we have come to love and play in the past. So what is your game for the Treasure Vault for this edition? I'm curious to what you got.

Aaron: Well, I'm going to do the same thing I did last time, which is not pick an individual game, but pick a series. And this is a pretty wide breadth of series. It's the Blindfold Games. The Blindfold Games are a series of games. The founder is a guy named Marty Schultz. who originally kind of did like an afterschool program where he had, you know, kind of teenage kids create a game and they created a completely audio based game. And then they turned that into really reaching out to the blind community and kind of, he's ended up formulating a company around it. I think there's something close to 80 different games in the blindfold series. So you're going to have, you know, things like card games and casino games, but you'll have sports games and live action games. There's a whole host of them. I thought I actually went through and listed them all by genre. So I don't know if maybe in the show notes, you want to drop it in so people can kind of see all the different games that they have. But I do have that available. They are, you know, all audio based games, all based off of sound. They are, kind of depending on which game you're playing. Some of them are very, very simple. Some of them are a little bit more complex. What makes it really interesting to me is to really look at, you know, he was doing blindfold games and audio-based only games 15, maybe even 20 years ago now when he started this. So a lot of the kind of gameplay that you see kind of did it first. Other people have come and iterated on it, improved on it and made it more complex and maybe made it better. But he kind of went through and said, how do I take a basketball game and make that audio only? How do I do home run derby and do that only? How do I do bobsledding or an endless runner or a driving game? He kind of mentally went through that process and came up with something and put it out there. Again, have people come along and done those games more complex and better? Yes, but he did them first. And I'm really, really impressed with that. I got a chance to interview him a couple of years ago. Really, really fascinating conversation about formulating the company and where he's been taking it and what partnerships he's done. But it's really... a great series because I think a lot of people have iterated and use that as inspiration to create some of the games that we play now, uh, and greatly enjoy. Uh, you know, again, he kind of got there first, um, It's kind of like, you never hear the joke, the Simpsons did it. Like any plot line, the Simpsons have already done it. It's kind of like Blindfold Games has already done it. So really, really kind of impressed with him, with the company. And then, again, that willingness to experiment with genres, to try something different, to figure out how do I make this a game is what I really, really like. The other thing I'd like for a majority of their games They give you kind of a series of coins, if you will, where you can play the game, you know, I think up to usually 10 times. And then, you know, then decide whether you want to purchase it or not. So I like that. You don't have to put money out right away and then find out you don't like the game. On most of the games, they give you a chance to play it for a little while before you get to a point where you run out of coins and then you actually have to pay for the game. So I like that. You know, it gives me a chance to play. decide if this game's for me or not before I actually lay down some real money. So I really like that. Most of the games are iOS. I'm not sure if any of them are available on Android, but all of them are available on iOS. So if you were asking me of the series, again, there's 80 different games that have been created by this company. I'll tell you the kind of ones that I like. So well, actually, before I get into the ones I really like, what they do particularly well is anything that has a rule-based game, you know, card games, board games, they're exceptionally well, do well at those. They're very voiceover friendly, you know, and the voiceover is flawless because they're focused on that. Again, as I mentioned, having coins, so you can, you know, not have to spend real money before you, you know, get to try out the game before you spend real money. Again, they have several different live action games. Again, they tend to be a little bit on the simpler side, but as I said, they're really, you know, we're kind of the first to think of how do I take this and make it a real game? How do I take table tennis and make it a real game? How do I take basketball or home run dirty, as I said, and make that a real game? So that's what really impresses me for the games that I suggest. Any of the card games at all, they have hearts, euchre, spades, uno, all of those. Rummy, solitaire, war, any card game-based game works flawlessly. It's exactly what you want in a card game. They have a whole bunch of casino-based games. Those are also very, very good. And again, as you can see, those are two very rules-based type of genres. They do very, very well on those. There's one called Blindfold Runner, which is an endless runner. I quite enjoyed that as a game. Maybe one of my most enjoyable endless runners that I've played as a blind person. And then Blindfold Dominoes. I really, really enjoyed that as well of playing dominoes. It was simple execution, but also very, very fun. So those are all the ones that I particularly enjoyed. Again, I can give you the full list if you want to put in the show notes, if we have enough room to do that. But there's a wide variety of genres. So whatever you're kind of into, there's probably a blindfold game that you can try out and see if you enjoy it.

Thomas: Mm-hmm. I would definitely put in a show note where you can go to the app store that lists all of his games. I'm not sure if all the games are there anymore or if they work anymore. I know there are a few that don't anymore, but there's a lot that still do. You know, talk about the blast from the past. You know, when he first came out, there were some very simple games, like you said, but when he started getting into the things that really interest me, and those are the card games and the casino games, I mean, back then, we're talking, gosh, oh my gosh, I want to say, that had to have been, well, 13 years ago?

Aaron: Yeah.

Thomas: Yeah, and at that time, it was hard to find any games that were that accessible, especially games I wanted. I wanted Uno, I wanted Spade, I wanted Hearts, I wanted Rami. Those were non-existent, and when he came with that, I was totally excited, and I thought the games were really good, and they're great because you can play offline, so you can play yourself against a computer. The coins options that you mentioned, yeah. I like that because you got to play a few times to see if that's something that would interest you, but almost every game you do have to upgrade to get either more coins or get unlimited coins. I can't remember how that system worked, but one of the two – he just simply just disappeared. It was just like one day, boom, it was like he released a game, one or two games a month for years. And then it was just one day he just disappeared. And I was like, what happened? Cause I always, um, the one thing that I was kind of not, well, I don't know. I want to say not upset, but I wish I know I've written to him a couple of times to say, Hey, I really would love to, if you enhance this, because, This is definitely be something I want to play multiplayer with other people, friends and family, especially because one of the things I love about dice world is that I get to play with my mom, my sisters and whatever not. And I love those kind of a turn by turn game with other people. And I've always wanted a hard card game that was the same scenario. But I felt like. Most of the time, what he grabbed are open source – open domain source codes. And so he would take those codes. He would either pay the – purchase a license to it, and then he enhanced it to what he came out with his own voiceover version, which is fine. So he did put some money into it. I don't think he recouped his money. I think that's probably why he fled. I don't think there was enough in there to justify the games he was putting out. I think he was hoping – But I think he really could have done a lot better if he offered a multiplayer online game with other people, whether it's the same time or turn by turn. And I also I wished and I mentioned a couple of times, you really need to make a game pack, you know. put all the casino games into one and the coins could be used either one of either of those games. And I, and I found that frustrating because there's some games, I think you just purchased by coin. So I may have purchased a coin in this game, but I can't use that coin for other games. So it wasn't, um, wide base, but I, in the end, the quality of the game and the type of games that he put out is staggering and is, is great. And I think anybody that loves this kind of game, I definitely would highly recommend kids friendly games, but yeah.

Aaron: And you know what he, what I liked that he did too is like, you know, when Candy Crush came out, he did you know, his version of Candy Crush when Flappy Bird came out, he did his version of Flappy Bird. So like he tried to, you know, make it so that we could play something that was similar to what was in the zeitgeist as well. Um, which, which I thought was great. Um, again, I think he pivoted to, um, like accessibility educational programs or software. So that's what he's kind of moved away from games and he's working and doing accessibility software. I think particularly with schools, I think that's what I remember from my interview with him. That's where he was pivoting the company. Right. Right. So I kind of interviewed him at the tail end of his gaming time.

Jesse: Yeah, I think, um, I forget what he called the new company, but yeah, I believe he did pivot more toward educational, uh, apps and software. I haven't followed that as closely, but I think both of you make good points about, you know, he was there kind of early on, you know, I, I started using iOS during the iPad too. And then I discovered like, Oh, this is kind of cool. But the iPad is only Wi-Fi, and I want internet everywhere. So that fall, I also got the iPhone 4S. And now I can stream music and have internet everywhere. And getting hooked up with AppleVis, learning about that pretty early on in my iOS journey. um, you know, blindfold games was one of the first regularly occurring, um, groups of games that I remember seeing, you know, you had the something else games for audio games, which RIP God, I want those back. Um, but, but like, you know, and I think you guys make some good points. Like I was more as far as like the quality of the games and, and stuff like I kind of, I think that he did the systems based games, your card games, board games pretty well. And I didn't even think of that. But like, you know, the kind of following the trends of, hey, you want an endless runner, you want a candy crush type of thing. That was kind of a cool thing. I didn't really get into as much of the kind of audio based games that were a little bit more like audio gamey because they were a little bit simpler. Like I remember, I remember early on, I saw blindfold racer and I was like, Oh cool. I get a, I get a accessible, blind accessible racing game. But if I remember correctly, it was like this kind of really like, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like real cars or anything. It was kind of like a very kind of kiddie,

Aaron: I think blindfold racer was their first game. That's the one that kids did as their afterschool project.

Jesse: Right. Right. And so like, I totally respect it for what it is. And I totally, you know, like I said, it's like, for what it is, it is cool, but it's like, Oh, I was just kind of disappointed because, you know, it wasn't like, I don't want to say like, you know, like an adult racing game, but it was, it didn't have like the depth and, and, You know, it was a lot more, like, cartoony.

Aaron: But can't you see how Blind Drive basically just made Blindfold Racer better and cooler and funner?

Jesse: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's not even a true, that's not even, like, a true racing game because you're just kind of going between, like, you know, swiping left and right for lanes. But Blind Drive was, yeah, Blind Drive was a lot of fun. I remember streaming that when I was still doing streaming, and I did get a pretty good enjoyment out of that one. By the way, not so much for kids, that one. Blind Drive, not so much. Yeah, no. But yeah, blindfold games, respect for what they did, and I think some of the games still hold up. I like the coin system, being able to try something before you play it. And I don't remember if they added it eventually. One thing that I kind of wish that they would have added for the longest time was a lot of the games were kind of light background and then black text. I'm like, please give me a dark mode. There's a low vision user. You know, people that get are light sensitive, a little harsh on the eyes, but, but yeah, otherwise no, it's a good callback.

Aaron: When you link to the store, do both blindfold games, you know, which I think, I think it says just developer Marty Schultz. So you grab Marty Schultz, But he also put games out under the kid-friendly Ears games, so like Ears Casino and Ears Roulette. So grab both of those because basically both of them are Marty Schultz.

Jesse: Oh, and both of them, the thing with Blindfold Games, too, is like they used to launch them independently, but now they sort of like you download the Blindfold Games launcher. Launcher, yeah. And then so you can explore and play the games within the launcher itself. Yep.

Thomas: That helped a lot when he introduced that.

Jesse: Yeah, especially when you have so many.

Thomas: I think it's fantastic. It's definitely a blast in the past, and thank you, Aaron, for that pick. I think it's a wonderful pick for the day and age, and I think some of the games are still pretty darn good for this day and age. I play the card games all the time. Oh, right. That's what I was thinking. I think it's more the casino games and the – and the card games are still valid to this day. Unfortunately. Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of games that kind of taking it up and enhanced it, but you still don't have awesome Uno cards, Rummy space, hard games there that have gotten that. I just felt like he made the game, fix the bugs. And then he left. There was no update. There was no, it was like next to the next game. It was just onto the next and the next and next. And I can't figure out if he was just trying to, score up as much money as you get from us i i don't know but in the end when you do love that game it was awesome um okay well thank you aaron for that wonderful pick i love it and to the next category we got mr jesse over there for the crossing console so these are games that are not uh always going to be on apple products or apple platforms so this is the point of this segment so What do you got for this month, Mr. Jesse? I'm curious to what you got.

Jesse: Oh, yeah. It's going to be kind of another, I promise I'll mix things up next time. But the game that I picked this time is Stories of Blossom. And the reason I picked it, we were kind of hoping to get to the episode kind of before the holidays. And I thought this would be a really good game that is family friendly you know you can you can show that games are accessible but they can be you know very kid friendly you know you can play with your kids your grandkids whatever um so yeah i mean i promise next time i'll do something maybe a little more actiony or maybe a racing game we'll see you know we'll see i've got a few ideas But Stories of Blossom, it's kind of on the similar lines of, it's kind of a point-and-click adventure style game, sort of like As Dusk Falls, but where As Dusk Falls was definitely your adult crime, crazy-themed game. Stories of Blossom is a very kid-friendly game. I did play through it all the way on PC, so you can get it through Steam, and I believe you can get it pretty much on most of your modern consoles, your Xboxes. I don't know if it's on PlayStation. I can't remember. I was going to look that up and I forgot. But if it's on, you know, your modern systems, they went above and beyond for accessibility, not just blind accessibility. But I remember, I think it was during one of the, like, GA Conf, the Game Accessibility Conference sessions or something where I heard about it. I don't remember, but I remember seeing the initial trailer and started following the guy on Twitter. And then they released a demo prior to the full game release and was just so impressed at how they made, again, this is not a game that is developed for blind users specifically. This is a full visual game. It's got almost like a hand-drawn, hand-painted storybook that you would read to your kids vibe to it. It has human narration, so it's like this grandpa is telling a story to his granddaughter. telling these stories and you know there's a little bit of you go back and forth between you get a little bit of the grandfather and the granddaughter and then you get these kind of make-believe stories that he's telling about all these little creatures and things but the way it works is you know you can play it as a traditional point-and-click where you you know move your cursor around and point and click on things and you might have to use use an object or interact with something and or you may find and pick up something and then you have to combine it with something else or use it in the, in the world. So you might, you know, in the early, one of the early puzzles, you go into this place and you've, you know, you have to make a good habitat for a plant to, a plant to grow. And so you find different things in the environment where like, oh, you have to You know, again, and it's a good kind of teaching things for little kids and stuff. You know, you'll find a little clippers and you'll find that, oh, there's some vines growing over the window. So you go use the clippers on the vines to let the sunlight in. And then you might find a watering can and you go back out to the fountain and, you know, fill it up and, you know, water the plant, that kind of a thing. But what it's really does well is like the moment you start the game you're presented with like accessibility options, you know you can have text to speech right away for menu narration and. you're given a lot of other accessibility features font size subtitle options. there is human narrated audio description. I mean, even to the point where you go through this initial menu, you choose your initial settings and set up your accessibility features. And then when, even before you get to the main menu, it literally, um, the, the logos, the comp, the developer logos have audio descriptions. So like, it'll tell you like, Oh, this is a orange and black square. And it says the logo bubble. I forget the name of the company. But no, I mean, if they go, and so every time you enter a new scene in the game, so the character walks into a new scene, it'll give, and even between like a cut scene or like, you know, the grandpa and daughter talking, they will, like if there's something like a new character pops on the screen or, you know, there's something that happens to kind of, you know, a little goofy thing that'll happen. they'll put that extra little pause in there if you have audio description enabled and you'll get the audio description for it. And then of course the characters themselves in the game, you know, all the characters are voiced. You kind of have a little, the grandpa doing the narration. So it's just a really kind of, you know, you know, I'm sure like a lot of people are going to be like, Oh, well this is just a, you know, baby game. This is a kid's game. But you know, like I said, I think it's important to, that kids have family-friendly content too. I mean, am I going to go back and play this game repeatedly in the future? No, probably not. But I played all the way through it, and for what it was, it was kind of a fun little thing just to see the stories. And if I had a kid or something like that, it would be something that I could easily – be able to play with them. But yeah, I mean, if you've ever played a point and click adventure, you know, you talk to people, you find items, you see other items and you figure out how to use one item on another, and you've got your little backpack. So you store items in there and then when you need them, you can use them. But it's, it's like I said, it's just, it's very, it's got a really nice presentation, visual presentation. It's very well, I mean, it's like an audio, um, kids storybook kind of come to life both visually and audibly. And so, yeah, I figured, you know, around the holidays, family together, um, just having something like that, um, would be a good option.

Thomas: No, that's a fantastic choice. I mean, that's the whole point is that, um, this podcast for Gamers Corner is not always about adult games. We definitely want to be talking about kids' games that comes across, and this is definitely one of those. Did you do a podcast on this?

Jesse: Yes, I actually did. Well, I did two. I did a demo video for it, and then I did a PC accessible game spotlight video. So if you look up in the PC accessible game spotlight videos, I did a – kind of a spotlight for the full game. And I know I have, like, people will sometimes ask me, and this goes for iOS or PC or console games, because what a lot of people will do, you know, when they stream on Twitch or they'll do something on YouTube, and a lot of people, you know, have asked me for various games over the years to do full playthroughs. You know, people will play through a game all the way through on Twitch or on streaming on YouTube or upload it to YouTube in segments. And I will do that occasionally, but especially what I find, what my kind of theory, my kind of philosophy is, you know, I might do that down the road at some point, but that isn't really the primary focus of my channel. If it's something I'm really hooked on and something I really just kind of want to have an excuse to play through again, yeah, I might do a recorded playthrough of it. But I really... The reason I call a lot of these spotlight videos is because, especially for the accessible games, I want to encourage people. I want to show people that these games are available, show you how accessible they are, give my critiques, give my suggestions and whatnot. But I want to give you guys just enough of a look about it, look at it to maybe get you interested and then buy and play the games for yourself because watching the game isn't the same as playing it. And also I think that, you know, as we talked about, you know, whether it's blindfold games or, you know, any number of voiceover accessible or audio games that have come to iOS or even other platforms, a lot of developers don't find serving blindness specific market sustainable long-term. And so we eventually lose out on these games. And so I really want to encourage people with the spotlight videos that I do low vision spotlights or accessible spotlights that, you know, Hey, here's a look. If you can see well enough to play these, check it out. If it's an accessible, blind accessible game, check it out and support the developer, you know, financially, but also just supporting them in general. so that they will continue to make these games. And so that's what I would say with Story of Blossom. I remember I got a comment saying that, hey, I'd love to see you do a full playthrough. I'm like, well, maybe eventually, but I want you guys to play it because you can.

Thomas: Well, this is fantastic. I love your choice, and I think that's fantastic. I will definitely put in the show note to those podcasters. So for parents or for people that would like to pick up this game um you could see see what it's about and see if it's something you want to pick up now on to the last segment and to kind of wrap up the gamer's corner for this edition um this is one of those favorite times of the year for me because the end of the year comes different types of awards for games and uh I'll kind of start with the first one here. I think this is one of yours. Is this not yours, Aaron? This mobile accessibility game, pick of the year.

Aaron: Yeah, mobile accessible games is the Facebook group that I run that has about 3,700 blind and visually impaired gamers who are a part of it. And we review, basically I'm on an every two weeks schedule. So I did 30 game reviews last year. And what the people do is they vote on of the 30 games I've reviewed, those are what are eligible for game of the year. So it's not necessarily 30 new games that came out last year. It's just happens to be 30 games that I've reviewed last. Okay.

Thomas: So I was going to ask you what the criteria was. So it's, it's, uh, the games that you reviewed for that year, let's pick one of those.

Aaron: Okay. Exactly. So I show them the list of all 30 games that got reviewed, uh, and they pick, uh, I used to be at a pace of 50 games a year. I used to do one a week, but, uh, Life has gotten hard and actually it's just been harder to find games to review. This is the fifth year of it, so I'm up to 200 plus games that I've reviewed so uh over the years um man so yeah um it's a lot um i'm just impressed you found 30 games to review this year that's that's what amazes me because you know well like i said i get to it's not 30 games that came out this year right because that's right i wouldn't get there to be honest um so i get to go deep i can you know play something that came out five years ago but it's new to me right so And it's still out there. It's obviously games that are still on the App Store for somebody to review.

Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah, the games that have gotten nominated and chosen were absolutely fantastic games at one point or another. Definitely all of these are definitely up there for me. I absolutely love these three games. So I'll start with the third place, the third runner-up for this year is we got Rift. timely manner I know a lot of people are probably familiar with that game and I've done a podcast on that myself and I I have to tell you I it's being as simple as that game is I really love that game a lot and it's one of those it's kind of a short game right I mean it is short and it's something that you can pick up pretty easily and

Aaron: And it's a puzzle type of game. You know, go find the key, bring the key back to the door, then go grab this from the door and go over to this place. You know, so it reminds me of the old Myst games, if you remember those from the 90s.

Jesse: Oh, those were maddening, though, because those puzzles were so hard.

Aaron: Yeah, so hard. So, yeah, it's a fun puzzle game. What really is fascinating, I don't know if you've noticed this with your voting over on AppleVis. So I have 30 games. Of those 30 games, 17 of the games got at least one vote. So a pretty wide breadth of things. And I think of those 17 games, that covered something like 12, 11 or 12 different genres of games, right? So... not everybody was interested in the same thing. It's not all just, hey, let's play card games or text adventure games. There are a lot of different genres and a lot of different interests in people, which is what I just find fascinating. It's been kind of like that every year. There's kind of been you know, anywhere from 11 up to 16 different genres represented and over 50% of the games that I said are eligible have gotten, have gotten at least one vote. So I just find that fascinating. It really encourages me of, you know, you know, we're not, we're not pigeonholed into just one type of game, but there is something for everybody. And as I tell people who, you know, aren't aware of mobile accessible games and the, you know, 230 plus games that are reviewed. Um, I tell them like, whatever you're into, there is at least one game on that list that fits that category. Uh, and hopefully, hopefully more than one. Um, I think there's something like 45 different game genres that I've counted. Um, that are represented under those 230 game reviews, 230 plus game reviews I've done. So I'm always fascinated. I'm always looking for something that's a new genre because that just fascinates me. And I've played something that I've never played before. So yeah, that's what really just makes it exciting for me is just to see the breadth, see all the different interests from the people. and it's my favorite time of the year when I get to put out, hey, everybody vote. They get the whole month of December, so from December 1st to December 31st. That's an open time period for people to vote.

Thomas: Gotcha. The second winner up is War Shovel. I have never played that game now. Apparently, it must be pretty popular because that is a popular game on Apple. A lot of people did vote for that as well, so that is a pretty popular one. It's

Jesse: I'm still playing it. You're still playing it?

Aaron: Is that what you said?

Jesse: Yeah, I'm still playing it. It's one of those, it's an idle game. So basically like I check into it maybe like once a day, maybe twice a day. And you just, you, you know, you tap a few buttons, you kind of help your clan, you do a couple of little kind of auto battle things. And it's just, I mean, there's like, I'm, I don't know how much longer I'm going to keep playing it, but like, it's just one of those, like I can just, you know, pop in for five minutes, do my thing and then move on with my day.

Aaron: It's got an archie RPG component to it where you can decide, well, I'm going to up-level just be a super strength character while I might be a super intelligent character. And, you know, so we can make our characters a little different from, uh, each other. Um, Yeah, it's a nice, fun, little idle RPG type of game. Again, I played it for a while, but unfortunately, in the game review world, you always got to move on. But yeah, that one was interesting. And it's a sequel to... I'm going to blank on the one... A very, very similar game.

Jesse: Yeah, I played that for a while. I knew you were going to say that too, and I'm like, I don't remember what the name of the game is. I can't remember. It's still on my phone, but I haven't played it in ages.

Aaron: We'll see if it pops into my head before this podcast ends.

Thomas: All right. And then to the grand finale of the game of the year on the mobile accessibility game, pick of the year goes to Land of Libya. So now that one, You're talking my style. That's the one I would have picked for the year myself. I don't know, guys. Everything I love about the game is that one. And I know everybody's feeling of different type of game. But regardless, all three of those games are rightly deserving. Perfect. Those are absolutely fantastic games.

Aaron: Now, with Landolivia, it actually has been reviewed twice at Mobile Accessible Games. So I reviewed it many years ago. but fairly recently they did kind of a major overhaul of the game. So I decided to step back in and play it again, you know, and kind of my review is kind of like, well, this is when we saw this three years ago, it was like this. And now here's some of the new things and the new features and improvements. So that's how it ended up on the 2025, even though that's a game that's been around for a while. Now, one of the things that make this game even funner for Aaron Spelker is is the developer of that game gave me a code that allows me to bypass any time mechanic.

Jesse: I'm so jealous of you. I don't have to wait an hour for traveling.

Aaron: Oh, my God. It is the best because I can really play the game and not have to be caught behind, you know, oh, I need to wait an hour to travel from one destination.

Jesse: That's my one critique. I'm impatient. I admit I have low patience. And so like, gimme, gimme, gimme.

Aaron: I told him to, you know, make it where I can pay... $5.99 or whatever, $3.99. Oh, I would totally do that.

Jesse: If I could just do a one-time unlock, skip timer purchases, heck yeah, I'd do that.

Aaron: It defeats the purpose, though, Aaron, for God's sakes, buddy. No, because you've got the story. You're still moving around, and you're still finding the story. It's time to play now, man.

Thomas: I don't have time to wait. I mean, the original purpose of the game was it was intentionally done for that reason. And then we have the AppleVis. Now, we do have a couple categories, but one of those categories is the best game of the year. Now, the criteria for AppleVis is a little slightly different. It has to meet quite a few criteria to make it as a nominee in the first place. And so first, it has to be a new game of that year. So whatever game is that year gets placed into a pot. So all games get listed as nominees that came out that are accessible. Now, obviously, anything that's halfway accessible or not accessible don't get into the pot, but that's how we put that in there. And the other half is if a game received a major update, such as Land of Olivia in this part, yeah, it's been out for many, many years, but they really made a huge push in the past year putting a lot of enhancement updates to the game. And one of those in recent updates, guys, is it reduced the time. Now, of course, it doesn't get rid of it, but the time is much more considerably less than it used to be or a little bit less. But they make changes to it all the time, which is fantastic. But that is how that works. And then we have a committee that and Aaron and Jesse were part of those committees that were able to go through the pot of nominees that I gave them, and then they just kind of pick what they thought would be the best of the best because we only pick probably eight to ten games that we think that should be up there because we want to concentrate the votes on the best of the best and try to find a good one. um it's not much fun when you have a lot of games and you don't get one vote for a lot of them you don't get two i don't know we so we do things a little bit different there so not that anything's wrong or right about anything but that's how that works on applevis with that up uh third runner up was land oblivious so i was really glad to see it made it in the top three because i definitely think it was definitely in the top three game of the year hands down as it is As I mentioned before, there's not very many games that lives on my phone on the front page. Yeah, I have a game folder that has stashed away on a bunch of old games that I haven't touched for years. But there's always a handful of games I consistently play all the time and it's right in the front. And Land Olivia is definitely one of those. The second place runner up, and I think this was rightly deserved, but I question if it's a game or not, but it is Art of Fauna. A lot of you probably heard about Art of Fauna. I had an interview with the developers back in June when they were nominated as a WWDC convention of the one of the finalists. And of course, it was also Apple's made it one of the finalists best app of the year from Apple in the cultural diversity category. So. It is a good game. It's not really for me. There's a lot of people that love words type games that really appeals to them. So I definitely think that it kind of appeals to them because this is a game when it breaks up a sentence and the sentence is fragmented and it's broken up and it doesn't make any sense. So you have to replace the words in place to make the sentence sound correct. And so once you get that in the right pattern in the right way, And then you unlock the puzzle and each of the puzzle is an art of a nature and or animal. I think the concept is fantastic. I thought the voiceover accessibility, what he's done to it is really great and fantastic, but rightfully deserved. I thought it was great for second place.

Aaron: Let me ask you this question about that one. Sure. Because I have a little battle. I played Art of Fauna and again, it was kind of like a, simple educational thing, you know, as you said, you know, when you get the sentence together, okay, now I've learned about, you know, whatever, tigers in Africa or something. But do you think it got most vote? Because my understanding from people who are cited is that the artwork allegedly is very beautiful. But again, as a person who's completely blind, I'm not seeing that at all. So like the game for me never really resonated all that much. But I wonder if that's because I'm missing a piece of the game that maybe somebody with low vision or vision, you know, is getting to experience.

Thomas: You know, there are many people out there that love those kind of word games. And so it is kind of a two type, two games into one. But as a voiceover, it's just strictly blind. You're only getting one portion of that game.

Jesse: Yeah, kind of. And I'm trying to remember if the pictures themselves, once you were showing the picture, I'm trying to remember if they did like a quick little audio description of the picture. I don't remember if they did or didn't do that. But this is a game that I also covered on my channel. And the thing that I would say about it is, again, this is one that I totally think it's got a cool idea. And, you know, I might play a round or something every once in a while just to, you know, let's learn a random fact or something. But where I think that some of these games, you know, we talked about the blindfold games earlier and, you know, other games. This is one where I think it can be used in an educational setting really well because if you are trying to teach somebody something assistive technology be it a computer or an iPad or a smartphone you know if you're it all depends on how you're teaching it to somebody and if you're making it interactive if you're making it like oh well just memorize a bunch of commands or memorize a bunch of gestures and then you practice them and let's open up word let's open up what Excel or let's you know on the phone let's go open a the mail app or let's go, you know, they kind of like drier subjects, but if you can also then, um, get them into like, you, you know, again, that's why windows included solitaire, uh, and mind sweeper earlier on because people had never used a mouse before. And solitaire was something that was very familiar to people who just, you know, play it, took a deck of cards and played solitaire. Um, so it got, and we, when I used to do tech training, um, at my previous job with low vision users, that's one of the things that we would, um, you know, we would, we would, I would get them set up with something like zoom text and then we would, uh, you know, get them to where they could see and read things pretty well. And that first day or, or just class session or two, I would do that. I would get them playing solitaire because they would get used to being zoomed in on the screen and they were frustrated at first. But then like a half an hour in, by the time they were getting frustrated with the game because they weren't given the right cards they wanted and they weren't even thinking about the mouse or you're zooming in and not seeing the full part of the screen. So I think, you know, games like Art of Fauna that are not only can be used for educational value, but on top of that have like an educational value for like, oh, I'm learning some facts about, you know, nature or science or animals. And so that's something that you can... What's that?

Aaron: And sentence structure.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. And sentence structure, if you're a voiceover user doing that. And so you're learning about reading and sentence structure. You're learning some animal facts. And so this is something that you could have a kid play a game in school, and it's not like an arcade game where you're shooting things or whatever. There's multiple levels of... educational value to it. So even though it might not be something that we would play, I think that's where I try to point out that those are some really good use cases for it.

Thomas: Well, you know, the point of the 10 games that get nominated is that you got what Aaron was hinting at earlier on the mobile accessibility is no different than the AppleVis is that you got a widespread of people, what they deem as fun and games that they'd like to play. And this is definitely one of those educational games for certain. But, you know, the majority of the people that are playing this game are blind. There are some that are low vision, but I think the majority of those that did play it, it's just like, he didn't like those games. So it's great to see that he was a finalist for the WWC. And I'm so great to see David's finalist for the Apple, app of the year as well. So it's wonderful to reward the developers for their hard effort to make something like this for the visually impaired community. So I was really glad to see it came up in the top three. And then finally, the finalists and the game of the year. Now, this went to a two-way kind of a duel for Adventure of Faith folks because Oddly enough, Adventure of Faith came out with two games last year. There was a Core Quest earlier in the year and then Dungeon a later part of last year. So we kind of combined them to call it the Adventure of Faith Core Quest Dungeon. And that won by a landslide. Now, within the top three, it probably landed about 80% of the total vote of all the nominees. So it gives you an idea – how impactful these top three games were compared to the others. So it made a big difference. But Adventure of Faith obviously won it. And I have to say it deserved that spot. I think all three of them could have won first place. But in my view, if you got me in the top three and 80% of the vote, you all won. But Adventure of Faith won for the Core Quest and Dungeons. So congratulations to all the winners out there.

Jesse: And I find it really impressive that, as you said, they had two games in one year, and these aren't little games, man. These are, you know, you kind of get, maybe you can reuse some of the assets or some of the core design because you have the same grid dungeon and a lot of the same interface and mechanics, but there's still a lot of, like, variation in, like, classes and mechanics and monsters.

Aaron: Well, and they made a major change to go to a roguelike. Yeah, yeah. Which is different. And I think... On Core Quest, as you played through the levels, I think those were the same layout while Dungeons is randomly generated.

Jesse: Yes.

Aaron: So those are two huge changes.

Jesse: Well, that's what I mean. It's impressive that they were able to crank out such deep games two in one year. That's pretty good.

Thomas: Right. And that is a very, very deep game. That is not a simple thing you just write up in a couple months. These guys took some time to develop it. I'm sure he had the engine core in place. He was able to change things up a little bit to entice it. But nonetheless, I know it took them a long time to create the game, which is fantastic to see that they made it up there. Well, guys, that's pretty much going to do for the Gamer's Corner for this edition. I appreciate you coming on, both of you. And I think we got some fantastic reviews in here. And we definitely reviewed some fantastic games. Fun games. I absolutely love some of the games we just covered here today. And... And don't worry, we will be back eventually, probably in about three months down the road again. We might come up with a special edition in between. You never know, so I'll see you guys then. But thank you so much for the both of you for coming on, and hopefully you guys both get a new name. I mean, I love Jesse and Aaron, but, you know, you can always say, hey, as I'm going to sign out with the Gamer's Corner for this edition, my name is Thomas Domville, also known as AnonyMouse, and the other guys are just Well, Jesse and Eric.

Jesse: I got illegally cited, man. I'm rather proud of that name. I came up with that one. I love that name. I stumbled onto that one, and I really kind of like that. Because what had happened is I used to, like people would ask me all the time, what is your vision? You meet somebody new. What's the first thing that they ask you? Well, what can you see? What is your vision? And I don't mind answering questions about that. I'm totally fine. But then I thought about it, and I just wanted to start messing with people. So I would just say, oh, I'm illegally sighted. And you could just hear the gears turning away in their head and kind of processing it for a second, and then they would get it. Because it's kind of this whole spoof on if I'm legally blind, then I must be illegally sighted. So that's just kind of – and then that just become my brand as I started going to YouTube.

Thomas: I know, but it's not like a cool Superman superhero name, you know?

Jesse: I don't know.

Thomas: I know. I'm just giving you a hard time. All right. Well, that's going to do for this time, guys. We're signing out. Take care. Bye-bye.

AppleVis is a community dedicated to helping people who are blind, DeafBlind, or have low vision get the most from Apple products and related technology. Learn more at https://applevis.com Subscribe on YouTube or follow the AppleVis Podcast in your favorite podcast app.

Podcast File

AppleVisPodcast1705.mp3 (107.97 MB)

Tags

Gaming
iOS and iPadOS Apps
News
Roundtable Discussion

Options

Comments

By Adventure To Fate Dev on Friday, March 6, 2026 - 17:06

Thanks for the awesome review and shoutout! The new Volcano Dungeon is coming soon! More great things to come from Adventure To Fate: Dungeons!

By Holger Fiallo on Friday, March 6, 2026 - 17:19

Can you say football? A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away in windows, someone did a US football game with sounds which it work with jaws. Can not believe gamers can not create a football game in which you can play against the PC or someone else. Not talking about managing the team but playing football. Long live cats.

By Felipe (Dungeon Scoundrel DEV) on Saturday, March 7, 2026 - 16:19

It means so much to see Dungeon Scoundrel covered on Gamers Corner. This community has always been so welcoming, and knowing the VoiceOver support is landing well with players makes all the work worth it. You're helping more people discover that accessible games can be deeply strategic and genuinely fun. Thank you, Thomas, Aaron, and Jesse, and everyone on the AppleVis team, for all that you do!