the fine print, in large friendly letters
About the Squirrel
Hi, I'm Alex.
I found every hidden whistle in Super Mario World.
I've designed a few board games, shipped some small computer games, and abandoned more prototypes than I'll admit to.
ArcadeSquirrel is a recommendation engine built on what players actually say in hundreds of thousands of reviews, not tag checkboxes. I write the standards and make the cuts. My own projects, and some of my kids', are on here too. I build in the open, and you can follow along in the dev log.
Start with a game you love and see where it leads.
— Alex Jackson (Alexander Clayton Jackson, if we're being formal)
What this is
ArcadeSquirrel is an independent one-person workshop doing two things: making browser games (starting with Exit Liquidity, a stock-trading roguelite) and building a game-discovery engine that recommends games based on what players actually say they feel like to play. Both are built in the open — the dev log has the real numbers, including the unflattering ones.
The squirrel is the editorial policy: evaluate everything, stash only the good ones, remember where they are.
Where AI is involved — exactly
We think you deserve to know how the things you read and play were made. Here is the honest breakdown:
- The games: designed and directed by a human. AI (Anthropic's Claude) is used as a programming and design assistant — writing code, suggesting approaches, debugging. Every mechanic and decision is human-chosen; a human plays, tests, and ships every build.
- This website: designed and coded with heavy AI assistance, directed and reviewed by a human.
- The dev log: written by a human. AI sometimes helps outline or edit; the experiences, numbers, and opinions are real and ours.
- The discovery engine: the recommendations are machine-generated by design — that's the whole point. The engine reads half a million human-written player reviews and finds games that feel alike. The verdicts on each match are machine-written against strict editorial rules a human wrote, machine-audited against those same rules, and human spot-checked. Which games get included at all — and which get cut — is a human call, every time. Prices and review data refresh automatically.
- What we don't do: no AI-generated review scores pretending to be human opinions, no fake authors, no AI-written "personal experiences" that didn't happen.
Short version: a human with taste, aimed carefully, using a very capable robot. When that balance changes, this page changes first.
Contact
Found a bug, want to say hi, or think the squirrel stashed the wrong game? Email [email protected] — I read everything, even the ones about how I'm wrong about Frostpunk.