Good morning! It is Independent penance day once again! Jhe day when all Americans put aside their differences and come together to celebrate the joy of indie game development. Ever since the founding fathers played their first game of world of goothe celebration was observed by all Americans by the law. Our legally sanctioned contribution to the event is this list of unknown indie games that you will most likely be buying or listing in a few moments.
As always with indie penance Or indiegeddon, I have not played any of the games listed below unless otherwise stated. Their inclusion goes through my tweeted call for suggestions of under-recognized indie games, randomly selected (qualified) from the responses. However, each seems able or required to be fantastic. So let’s go !
I happen to have played a whole bunch of Infernal Screen, the Doom-like Early Access where you have the added benefit of a rear-view mirror and the ability to shoot backwards. It’s incredibly fast, with the added bonus that if you move forward when firing, you deal double damage. Pull back while moving forward and you deal quadruple damage! It’s so fast, but could definitely do with more dynamic enemies.
If it can avoid being sued in the Gamma Quaby Paramount/CBS, this could be the Star Trek: The Deck Crew for the new decade. ship simulator promises a fully simulated “Magellan-class deep space exploration craft” that you can explore and scavenge at your leisure, then fly around what they claim is a “scientifically accurate Milky Way”. It sounds damn wonderful, if they can do it. There is a demo if you want to check how it goes.
While the title might sound like the nicest thing I can imagine right now, the game itself is made of heavier stuff. This is a collection of short stories on the subject of men and their relationship to mental health. Who is – oh my God – up there with the most important discussions we need to have. The beautiful monochrome line art might be the right way to approach the subject, provided it is handled carefully and hopefully with expert mental health guidance.
Expected release in fall 2023, somnipathy is a point-and-click pixel horror game, which is a genre description I haven’t read in too long. It’s, according to its store page, about helping a character called Aggy survive “nightmarish sleep disorder-themed dungeons,” which sounds terrifying if you’re as tired as I am.
Please I beg the developers Tearcell Game Studio, get rid of those awful, barely legible fonts that appear in many screenshots, so the game can be properly enjoyed when it appears later this year.
If you accused me of only including this game because of its title, you would be absolutely right. Yet despite this, in the two years it went on sale, it garnered almost no attention and only one Steam review. (Positive!)
I just did a quick test, and it’s as crazy as a box, insisting on running into the top left corner of my monitor. It’s about being a student forced to write a band report on Gandhi, Churchill and the Rai, through the post-colonial 4X strategy. I, uh, had no idea what was going on, but I never did in Civilization either. But he apparently takes a stand against nationalism and encourages a non-violent path through history.
With the most spectacularly particular voice-over, kritterThe trailer shows what seems to me to be a cross between, uh, vampire survivors, sands of time, and a survival base builder. Yeah! There are waves of enemies, time rewind mechanics, and a base to always grow and improve. Gosh, it would be splendid if this all fell into place.
I played quickly with smushi, and it’s just adorable. A game about being a mushroom, trying to find your way home after getting caught by a bird! Along the way, you meet lots of adorable characters, solve environmental puzzles, and discover lots of different types of mushrooms!
It came out last month, but didn’t get the media coverage it deserves, which I’m also guilty of as I haven’t written a review for it yet. buried treasure.
Owlskip Enterprises has has created some fascinating games in recent years, most based on solving mysteries by going through documents and recordings from different eras and genres of music. With The deadly path, developer Tim Sheinman is doing all the detour, with a card-based tower defense game. You build your dungeon, defend it, and attempt to bring a dark lord into existence to begin the “Age of Judgment.” What I call “Thursday”.
Death without phase is a neat precision platformer, where everything revolves around the dashboard. Dashing lets you smash through walls or obstacles, creating your own inventive routes to the exit of each level, with the ultimate goal of slashing your and everyone else’s best times by a few picoseconds. It should be out in the fall.
After the joy of PowerWash SimulatorI’m willing to give all the chores sims a shot. Leaf blower man You set off annoying your neighbors at 6am on a Saturday, but then things seem to take a strange turn.
I like what feels like a combination of voxels and 2D assets, in a leaf blowing game that seems to veer from suburban neighborhoods to outer space.
We’re not exactly out of games about restoring color to a gray world, but yet I’m a sucker every time I see it. SO Farewell North goes even further by making it a story about a young woman and her border collie dog, where you play… the dog. He looks very sincere, very pretty and even offers canoeing. Although probably not by the dog.
If you want to trick me into wanting to instantly play your game, make it look a lot like Advanced Wars but also huge. It’s a turn-based tactics game, which offers PvP and PvE co-op, but most importantly, has pixel art that I want to hug.
I hope it comes out this year.
A “rogue-like tactical autobattler” immediately makes me assume, “vampire survivors clone”, but The dungeon below looks like something very different. This is much more of a blobber game (shout out to other old people), dungeon-diving with a bunch of characters, seeing how deep you can go with the gear you gather. In fact, it reminds me much more of the glorious Pixel Dungeon from the old days of Android games.
It was released in 2020, and is always regular updated, and I’m installing it right now.
Every once in a while I look at screenshots of a game and immediately miss it. my wonderful daddy. Royal bloodA dungeon-Exploration, quest solving and inventory gathering RPG looks like a game he would have like. Although he was also reportedly intimidated by his automated “autochess” battles, because while it wasn’t a pre-1989 concept game, it shouldn’t be trusted entirely.
Still, I’m going to check this one out in his honor, because it looks wonderful. It came out just a few weeks ago.