Indie News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

There’s a teaser image on the wall. We stare at it and we think that’s the whole multiplayer shooter set in the Control franchise. Then, Remedy sneak a second teaser image alongside some tantalising lore snippets into their latest investor report (Thanks, resetera!) Also there’s an air fryer that turns nuggets into miniature black holes, or something. I’m not sure because, honestly, I never learned to appreciate Control’s wonderful architecture and lore because the combat made me want to gnaw my fingers off. Good news, then, for everyone except me specifically. We’ve got a few more scraps of info about its (presumably) almost entirely combat focused spin-off title, currently known as ‘Condor’.

Microsoft has reportedly reached an agreement with former Crash Bandicoot developer Toys for Bob for the studio’s next game.

It's Monday and I'm tired, so do I really have to write out hundreds of words telling you who Nic Reuben is? You already know Nic! He's been writing here as a freelancer loads. He threw a rock through the treehouse window and were preparing to sacrifice him to appease Horace's great coils, but the endless bear spake and instead commanded us to hire him, after a rigorous interview process. Say hello to Nic in his new and official capacity here on the site! My enthusiasm has woken me up again!

Toys For Bob has reportedly signed a deal with its former corporate owners at Microsoft, only a few weeks after finding independence.

Toys for Bob has reportedly entered a deal with Xbox to develop a new game that's similar to its previous work.

Nailing down exactly what PS5 game INDIKA is seems like an impossibility, so we will let the trailer above do a lot of the talking. Now confirmed for a current-gen launch on 8th May 2024, you play as a young nun with the devil by her side on a journey of self-discovery. You shall be taken back to the 19th century in an alternative Russia where «religious visions clash with harsh reality» for a third-person adventure likely to live long in the mind.

After letting you live out your Jason Bourne and John Wick fantasies by building decks and playing cards for close-quarters cool violence with 2021's Fights In Tights Spaces, developers Ground Shatter are venturing into fantasy-y fantasies. Last night they announced Knights In Tight Spaces, where you'll build decks with cards for turn-based tactical manoeuvres and magic-tinged action so you can bash baddies on small grids. Have a peek in the announcement trailer, below.

The rather charming-looking Harold Halibut has landed itself a release date.

Despite months in Steam Early Access and hundreds of positive player reviews, Stellaris Nexus is no more. Instead, the spin-off is taking the rare step of rebranding itself — dropping its Stellaris branding entirely — to launch with a new name.

The developers behind the wonderful tile puzzler Dorfromantik have revealed the first teaser trailer for their next game. Currently known as Project Mango, the game will be made in collaboration with the German animation and edutainment YouTube channel Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell, releasing in 2025. Not much is known about it right now, but come and have a watch of its teaser reveal below.

In November last year, the Australian post-apocalyptic CRPG Broken Roads was abruptly delayed mere days before it was meant to come out. Review code had even been sent out to press. But it was clear that the game needed more time in the oven, as developers Drop Bear Bytes acknowledged they needed "additional polish time and QA manpower" to test the "thousands of permutations" available in its deeply decision-driven storyline. Happily, that polish time has now come to an end, as the devs have today announced a fresh release date of April 10th.

A new Easter egg in Stardew Valley's 1.6 update punishes players who make their way to a particular area earlier than they're supposed to.

Since allows players to craft anything, many popular crafting options include popular shows like. Though different paths can produce since it is a Netflix live-action anime and manga, the quickest option is to go down the Anime thread to craft it.

Before a month of my life vanished into customising cards and rigging decks in Balatro, my desire to conquer dungeons by fixing gambling tools came from playing Slice & Dice. First released in 2020, it's a gauntlet of fantasy turn-based battles where most attacks, abilities, buffs, debuffs, and items are very cleverly handled by mapping them onto the faces of dice. Oh, you're going to make your dice so much better! Now Slice & Dice has finally arrived on Steam in search of a wider audience, accompanied by an update adding oodles of new heroes, enemies, items, and more. For newcomers, hey, it has a demo.

Arkane Studios co-founder Raphaël Colantonio has teased his next game at Wolfeye Studios.

The dino-loaded Ark: The Animated Series has secured a release date, and if you are over the pond, it's now.

PocketPair's Palworld — a game that the internet dubbed 'Pokemon with guns' ahead of its early access release in January — has been a huge success for both the developer and Xbox.

The winners of the 2024 Independant Games Festival were announced at GDC last night, and it was Visai Games' Venba that came home with the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The cooking adventure was up for four IGF awards in total, including nominations for Excellence in Audio, Narrative and Visual Art. But there was no runaway winner at this year's IGF Awards, with all prizes going to completely different indie games. Come and celebrate the full list of winners below.

In a powerful move, one of the two devs behind Cryptmaster announced the delightful typing-based dungeon crawler's release date last night during his acceptance speech after it won the Independent Games Festival award for Excellence In Design. Powerful. May 9th is the day, so you have time to practise your touchtyping with Mavis Beacon. I really enjoyed playing Cryptmaster's Steam Next Fest demo, so I'm excited for the full game.

allows players to craft anything they can think of, including the game itself. With limitless potential, it seems only fitting that the game itself would be a material that can be used to further make weird and creative combinations. Unfortunately, it takes a little work as various materials are needed to craft it.

Last summer’s Xbox Games Showcase was filled with so many eye-catching titles that I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting half of them. One title that’s stayed with me since then, though, is Dungeons of Hinterberg. The unique action RPG stood out thanks to its use of the Alps as a backdrop and its bold style that made it look like a visual novel come to life. It looked like the kind of game I’d love, but I’d need to get hands-on to see if it felt the part, too.

Founded in 2019 by Arkane Studios founder Raphael Colantonio, indie developer WolfEye Studios released its debut game in 2022 with immersive sim action RPG Weird West, and though the studio hasn’t yet officially announced what its next project is going to be, some details on it have emerged nonetheless.

A new VR publisher and developer VRAL Games has launched at GDC this week.

The 1.6 update for Stardew Valley has caused a massive spike of interest, resulting in a new record Steam concurrent player count.

Eight years after launching, Stardew Valley just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Update 1.6 arrived yesterday, with enough changes that the patch notes are 7308 words long. It bumps the farm-o-life sim's co-op player limit to eight, adds hundreds of new items, opens up a new progression system for "powerful perks and items", adds new events, lets you drink mayonnaise, and so much more that. Best of all, it lets you have more pets. New pets. Pets wearing hats.

It's been on sale for just under a month, but Balatro has already reached a huge sales milestone. After reaching the 500,000 mark after only 10 days, the indie roguelike has now doubled that figure, now having sold over a million copies.

Part of its lovingly curated Gold Master Series, Digital Eclipse’s exploration of Llamasoft is a comprehensive and fascinating package. Essentially an interactive museum, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story presents documentary snippets, archival materials, and, most importantly, the games.

One-man developer Shared Memory has announced Animal Well will launch for PS5 on 9th May 2024. It'll cost £20.99 / $24.99 at release.

Microsoft has revealed the titles they’ll be adding to Xbox Game Pass on PC and consoles in late March and very-early April, and it’s a pretty packed lineup. The headliner is Diablo IV, one of the first major Acti-Blizz games to jump to Game Pass following Microsoft’s acquisition of the publisher. Other notable additions include The Quarry, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2, and the new-release indie game Open Roads.

Later this week, Payload Studios' open world vehicular survival builder TerraTech Worlds launches into early access. As the name implies, it's a bigger, bolder and more ambitious take on their still very popular sandbox game TerraTech, but according to Payload's founder and CEO Russ Clarke, they're viewing this new version as more of a successor to TerraTech than a full-bodied sequel. "The overall quality of experience is really a huge leap forward," Clarke told me during a press presentation last week. "We're not calling it a sequel because we felt that making it a sequel would be a bit too constraining." Rather, it's "more of a reimagining" of the original game, says Clarke, with a change in engine and fresh investment from Tencent allowing them to reach the full potential of their original vision.

Microsoft have confirmed the waves of games coming to Game Pass in late March and early April, headlined by the expected addition of Diablo IV. This is the first Activision Blizzard game coming to Game Pass since Microsoft's ridiculous $69 billion acquisition, with more due to follow. Beyond that, look forward to games including mech-riding farming game Lightyear Frontier and the colossal alien invasion strategy game from the XCOM Long War team, Terra Invicta.

Cyan Worlds today announced plans to launch their fancy real-time 3D remake of Riven later this year, coming with support for both VR cybergoggles and standard meatspace screens. Riven: The Sequel To Myst was the 1997 sequel to Myst, the 1993 pre-rendered adventure game which sold a million CD-ROM drives and launched a thousand specks of spittle from John Walker's mouth. The remake previously had a longwinded name of its own, Riven: New Discoveries Of The Lost D'ni Empire, but now is simply named Riven. They should rebrand again and call it Riven: The Sequel To The Myst Remake.

In the run-up to Total War: Pharaoh at the end of last year, a slightly strange question popped into my head: "What if someone made a Total War game that also had the handsome anime looks of Fire Emblem: Three Houses?" Clearly, it was also a question on the minds on Japanese indie developers ThinkGames Inc, who have just announced their debut game Valiant Tactics EX. The 38-second long reveal trailer paints quite an enticing picture ahead of its Steam launch on March 29th, and that's not even the half of it either. For Valiant Tactics EX isn't just an anime Total War-like. It's also a whopping great deckbuilding game.

Planet of Lana will be arriving on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation consoles next month.

The poker-themed roguelike Balatro has sold 1m copies in its first month.

Animal Well — the 2D pixel art adventure from developer Billy Basso — will launch this May.

Stardew Valley's forthcoming 1.6 update will allow players to drink mayonnaise.

Solo developer Billy Basso's enigmatic Metroidvania Animal Well has been dated for May 9th, publishers Bigmode announced yesterday. In it, you'll explore a vast labyrinth of tunnels, solve puzzles and escape its many mammalian-based horrors, all of whom are out to gobble you up in one fell swoop - though as a strange, tiny little blob creature the size of a chicken nugget, it's unclear both what you are, and why exactly you're so appetising to them. Well, it probably has something to do with looking like a sentient chicken nugget, I suppose. Come and watch the release date trailer below.

Pirate RPG Caribbean Legend just sold enough copies to help its developer in "truly becoming a studio, a company."

Star Citizen is pushing towards the «finish line».

Wales Interactive's co-op zombie survival game, Sker Ritual, is finally coming out of early access on 18th April 2024.

Developer Heart Machine has revealed Hyper Light Breaker — the studio's co-operative rogue-lite spin in its acclaimed 2016 action-adventure Hyper Light Drifter — is now targeting a Steam early access launch sometime this «summer» following several delays.

If you’ve ever suspected that harvesting crops in Stardew Valley is faster in one direction than another, validation is at hand. The beloved farming sim’s creator has confirmed that the long-rumoured quirk is real, as its incoming 1.6 update prepares to fix a bug dating back almost a decade.

One of the best Steam bundles I've seen in years offers five outstanding indie games together in one package, and it's nearly half-price during the Steam Spring Sale.

The solo dev behind the indie poker roguelike Balatro is disappointed over how games with "actual gambling mechanics" are given age ratings, after seeing their own game's rating skyrocket due to gambling-related concerns. This came despite the fact that Balatro doesn't actually feature gambling, and the developer is strictly against it. 

Palworld developer Pocketpair will remain a small studio, despite the success of its «Pokémon with guns» survival game.

What do you reach for when you're waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting in a shop doorway for the rain to stop, or even while you're waiting for a game to finish downloading? I don't mean to assume, but let's face it, it's probably your phone, where some idle doomscrolling likely awaits you, or some other, time-wasting distraction that will help fill the dead air between one task and the next. Well, While Waiting is a game that delves into precisely this fundamental human question: what is the best thing to do while waiting for something else to happen? It's from the makers of the very good puzzle game Moncage, and its newly released Steam demo is a pure, fidgety brilliance.

Pocketpair have popped up a trailer for Palworld's first new raid battle boss, Bellanoir, who is "coming soon" to the monster-catching survival game in a big old Palworld update that will also include some fixes and additional anti-cheating measures. First impressions: it's an evil Goth girl with a jellyfish where her legs should be.

Valve is currently in the middle of an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against small indie developer Wolfire, which was originally filed way back in 2021 due to Steam's control over game prices and attempts to such out rivals. Despite Valve's best efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed, it actually went ahead in 2022, and the whole situation is now getting spicy as internal documents and previously private email exchanges are making their way to the public eye.

The Steam Deck is a very cool little handheld, and one that’s becoming increasingly popular. Only one thing is stopping me from buying it: I want to play everything on my TV.

As if colony sim RimWorld doesn't already have enough ways for your sci-fi frontier adventurers to die, a new expansion titled Anomaly is goiong to add "all manner of monstrous, mysterious, and maddening threats". It's out in around a month, and will be paired with a free 1.5 update for the base game.

With the recent indie game Palworld that released it has a lot of people in an uproar as it looks so similar to Pokemon, to the point that so many Pals look like Pokemon in recent games that fans have been making videos to show the resemblance. However, a recent interview shares that a past Pokemon lawyer has some information of how The Pokemon Company looks like lawsuits.

Narrative puzzler Paper Trail will release on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile (via Netflix Games) in May.

Crow Country, the retro survival horror game from the developer of Snipperclips!, now has a release date: 9th May across both Steam and PlayStation 5.

Crow Country and its spooky, mutant-stuffed theme park will be opening its gates on Steam on May 9th, developers SFB Games have announced. It's the first of two games from the Tangle Tower micro-studio coming to PC this year, the other one being The Mermaid's Tongue, which will be picking up the adventures of their Tangle Tower detective duo on a marginally less spooky-looking submarine later this year. Crow Country, however, is a very different kettle of fish, combining chunky, PS1-style Final Fantasy 7 character models with early Resident Evil tank controls and panicked monster shooting.

Sabotage Studio, developers of the indie role-playing game (RPG) Sea of Stars, has announced that the game has been played by over five million people and teased an upcoming co-op mode.

This is a quick public service announcement to let you know there is a free trial for Vampire Survivors — Poncle's award-winning gothic horror — over on Nintendo Switch. So, if you fancy your chances mowing down «thousands» of night creatures but haven't quite managed to get round to it yet, now is your time to shine.

The creator of poker-themed rogue-like Balatro has spoken out about the game's rating drama, stating «it is what it is».

With endless possibilities in , you can create all your favorite pop culture icons, including the iconic Disney film starring Jonny Depp,. You will need to craft materials starting with four basic materials like Ocean, Ship, and Jack Sparrow before you can hope to create this famous pirate film.

Bruce Lee is one of the many celebrities players can create in . To create the legendary martial artist and actor, players must combine a few different complex elements from their libraries. However, unlike many other celebrities, the Chinese martial arts master is actually fairly easy to craft.

RimWorld, the acclaimed sci-fi colony sim from Ludeon Studios, will soon be besieged by «monstrous creatures, mind-bending mysteries, infiltrating parasites, and sanity-shredding phenomena» when its new horror-themed expansion, Anomaly, arrives on Steam next month.

Enshrouded, the new game from the makers of Portal Knights that mashes up Valheim with a bit of Zelda, is the latest indie survival success on the scene, having attracted over 2 million players since launching in Steam Early Access in January. Well, now Enshrouded developer Keen Games has revealed what they plan to add to the game before its 1.0 launch next year, and it’s a packed list.

Not content with being one of the best single-player experiences of 2023, Sea of Stars is readying the modern-classic RPG to become one of this year’s most delightful multiplayer games. Developers Sabotage Studio have revealed that three-player co-op is on the way, letting you adventure through the entire campaign with a party of pals.

Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced a new Palworld Testing program that asks players of the wildly popular monster-catching survival game to help test future updates and provide feedback on the game, ahead of new content drops being released to the general public. Players can sign-up via a Google Form now if they wish, though Pocketpair stress that "the testing branch is not intended for free play or experiencing new content early, so we hope that only those of you genuinely interested in bug hunting and testing will apply." And presumably, those genuinely interested in also not being paid for their free QA support.

A Palworld player has modded unused Pals back into the game, including the previously discovered Mewtwo dead ringer.

Following Enshrouded's impressive early access launch back in January, developer Keen Games has shared the first iteration of its 2024 roadmap for the co-op survival action-RPG, featuring the likes of animal farming, weather, world events, and more.

Indie retro-inspired JRPG Sea of Stars is getting a three-player co-op mode in a twist that's scarcely believable. 

This indie horror game may look like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but I am begging you not to get the two of them mixed up. 

In an attempt to prove that The Witcher isn't the only European folklore-inspired RPG on the block, new studio Mighty Koi Studio has announced not one, but two brand new games.

Sea of Stars will receive a co-op mode allowing three players to adventure together.

Pocketpair, the developer behind this year's breakaway hit Palworld, is on the lookout for players to participate in a new testing program.

You can make anything in , from popular cartoon characters to famous rappers like Eminem. Though many things can be crafted relatively easily, some of the more specific items require quite a bit of combining to make the materials required to craft them, which can become quite a tedious process.

allows players to craft anything they can imagine, including popular Disney icons like. Starting with just four materials, Water, Fire, Wind, and Earth, the player discovers the chain of combinations that can eventually produce the desired result.

There are 137 Pals in Pocketpair's monster-catching simulator Palworld, which might sound like plenty, but the serial Palworld player is an insatiable creature, always clamouring for new beasties to capture, pet and exploit, even as the developers encourage fans to play other games while they wait for the next Palworld update. If you've already bagged all the available Pals and are hungry for more, you might be interested in Palworld mod Breed Unreleased Pals, created by ShameIHaveNoFriends, which grants access to three animals who exist in the game's files but are not, strictly speaking, available to players.

On March 7, EA shadow dropped a host of classic PC games on Steam, including pretty much the entire Command & Conquer series. That's good news - unless you're one of the indie devs who released a game the very same day and suddenly had to compete with decades worth of nostalgia amid the notorious whims of the Steam algorithm.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom already has a descriptive name, but its new trailer omits it in favour of a better encapsulation of its pitch: "You're a N64 taxi and there's no jump button?". The video itself is sixty seconds of pure, colourful joy, and it ends on a release date: April 9th.

Children Of The Sun instantly shot to the top of my personal most-wanted list when it was first announced at the start of February alongside its accompanying Steam Next Fest demo, and happily, publishers Devolver Digital have now set a release date. It's coming real soon, with its single-shot murder bullet puzzles hitting Steam on April 9th - and to celebrate, there's a flashy new release trailer to go with it. Come and be dazzled by its exploding headshots below.

Children of the Sun, the indie puzzle shooter where you have to take out encampments of cultists using only one bullet, will launch for PC on 9th April.

With its distinctive art style, Cult of the Lamb is a natural fit to be adapted into other media. And that's exactly what's happening with Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse, a new graphic novel that serves as an adaptation and expansion of the original game's lore.

I remember revealing at some point that my most-played game is actually a free-to-play picross game (picross, also called nonograms sometimes, being the logic puzzle game where you colour in squares on a grid to reveal a larger picture). You can imagine my intrigue when I saw that Tents And Trees, a picross-ish puzzle game previously on Switch and phones, is coming to PC on April 24th. That's a couple of months away, but you can play the short demo on Steam now to get a taste. It's slick and clean, and I like it!