Indiescovery News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Pine: A Story Of Loss, which stars a bereaved woodworker and thus may be a play on the double meaning of ‘pine’, is a gorgeously animated interactive fiction game that sees you performing farming chores and wordlessly reminiscing upon cherished memories. It’s short - designed to be played in a couple of sittings - and while the fiction is the focus here, you’ll spend time gardening and whittling in bespoke minigames as you find out more about the woodworker’s relationship. The publisher describes it thusly:

The closest I have come to having any interest in sport is when I got really into reading about football hooligans, or like, Blood Bowl, but I do absolutely recognise the romance of it all. SUDDEN DEATH is a delicious free slice of playable art-pie that celebrates that romance. It is - says dev Cécile, who co-made the project with Nat Pussy and MOTHER GOOSE for collective Domino Club - “a game about love and sports. it's gay, it's very australian, and it's great.” You can tell it’s Australian quickly, because people call chips ‘chippies’, which makes me chuffed.

My experience with actual flight simulators typically amounts to approaching the runway far, far too quickly at far, far too perpendicular an angle, so perhaps I’m better off just flying folded-up bits of A4. Happily, that’s exactly what Paper Sky, a "semi-open world paper plane adventure" from solo indie dev Brute Force, is offering.

I'm the kind of awful person who looks at the background actors in TV shows and wonders what life is like for e.g. the old woman who sells birdfeed in Trafalgar Square in Mary Poppins when said upper-middle class domestic isn't singing about her. What fate the Warcraft grunt when he is too old to work work? It's probably pretty bad, right? Now let me slop Innkeep down in front of you like a big bowl of rat stew. Developer Daniel Burke furnished me with a little playable slice, and boy, Innkeep is a grim old time. I mean that as a compliment.

Sometimes, I hear critics describe something as ‘actively hostile’ to the act of playing it, but with something close to admiration in their voices. I've always felt that I, too, would like to one day find an artwork that I could describe in the same way. Partly because it sounds like an interesting experience, but mainly so I could steal that line and feel like one of those elite, urbanely perceptive, multiple trouser-owning critics.

At the end of last year I played the demo for An English Haunting and got very excited. I like horror that has a generally spooky, creeping dread vibe rather than being wall-to-wall cheap jumpscares and gore, and that sort of stuff is thin on the ground. But it'll be less so from May the 15th, cos that's when this ghosty point and click puzzle adventure is out! Hooray! The demo is still on Steam if you want a taste before then. In the meantime, the release date announcement comes with a new trailer to enjoy.

Rising Up is a free, sub-fifteen minute browser game that’s a bit like Streets of Rage, where you play a balding office worker and beat a giant scanner to death within the first 30 seconds. This, I believe, should be enough to tempt you into dunking it enthusiastically into your next break coffee, but if you need more convincing, let’s do it.

Neverlooted Dungeon is an rpg game in which you can shoot a crossbow from a first person perspective. This, I imagine, was the pitch it used when trying to blag its way past the thermodynamically powered golem wearing a Daikatana t-shirt that guards the gates of Steam’s currently-running FPS fest. Whatever the excuse, this silver tongued rascal succeeded, and is now nestled comfortably between umpteen boomer shooter revivals, trying to squeeze Ultima factoids into the conversation.

FACEMINER is a clicker/puzzle game where you work from your CRT monitor to analyse packets of facial surveillance data for a mysterious company. It describes itself as a ‘hardcore thriller clicker set in 1999’. As a connoisseur of unusual word combinations - as well as a believer in the satirical power of clicker games since playing Universal Paperclips - I immediately set about downloading the free Steam demo.

It's not every day you get to use both the 'sports' and 'horror' tags for the same game. Pool of Madness, an upcoming eldritch pool game where your surroundings get more bizarre and maddening the longer you play, is the latest game to crowbar Lovecraft into a place where no Lovecraft existed previously. It’s also the latest game to make me, someone who’s ostensibly had enough Lovecraft for one lifetime think: actually, yes, go on then.

Need anything from the shop? Mushroom milk? Fresh tarts? Mystical bejewelled skull? I'm just popping out to Dépanneur Nocturne, a lovely little game which came out in 2020 and I kept forgetting to post about. It's a small first-person explore-o-chatter set within a corner shop in a magical, mystical Montreal, full of things to admire, find, poke at, and chat about with the owner. And it'll only cost you about as much as a pint of semi-skimmed and loaf of Kingsmill from your own local shop.

The legally distinct Cheerios in Tiny Tires, the upcoming miniature racing game that looks to be a loving homage to Micro Machines, have their own physics. This delights me. So does the milk, actually, leaving trails on the checked linoleum tablecloth as the infinitely minute driver tries to compensate for its skidding effect on those titular Tiny Tires. There’s pool balls, too! And floppy disk ramps! Floppy disks were probably still useful the last time anyone thought about Micro Machines, but now I’m reminded of it, I’m suddenly very excited again!

Action roguelike UnderMine is getting a numbered sequel. That number is two. The follow-up to 2020’s action roguelike is UnderMine 2. It was announced today as part of the Triple-i Initiative, which is a silly name that I’m writing with the correct stylisation out of respect to UnderMine 2’s slimes.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom, a breathtakingly gorgeous city builder set in a fantasy world inspired by the Himalayan region, is out now in Steam early access. The meditative mountain environments are the sort of tranquil backdrop I’d happily stare out for hours, possibly with a Bonobo album and some incense, which is helpful, because the actual game is aiming to be quite a challenge.

I've worked from home for most of the past decade, but it was during the pandemic lockdowns that I was finally indoctrinated into the world of co-working streams, pomodoro timers and lofi beats to chill/study to. I'm better now, but I absolutely see the appeal of Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, a "gamified focus tool" that just launched on Steam.

I like close combat tactics, directing troop actions on a timeline, and breaching and clearing, but a recent revisit to Door Kickers revealed I no longer had the patience for its fiddly UI and grim scenarios.

Tropes aren't actually bad, right? Like, I'm not actually mad that a lot of games use 'the world is ending and you have to save it' as an inciting incident. When people complain about something being 'tropey' I think often what they're complaining about is that the work isn't putting any kind of interesting spin on the tropes. Great God Grove is a weirdo puzzle game where you have to stop the world from ending, and the only way you can communicate is by sucking up things people say to you and then firing them back out of your news cannon. It's coming to PC in 2024. Jolly good.

"It almost feels like proof-of-concept for a first-person Prince of Persia game, with an ever-so-gentle dusting of Portal," our Edwin said after playing free first-person platformer Grimhook when it launched in December. It's a cracking little game, parkouring about with the help of supernatural powers and a grappling hook, but ends right as it feels like it's getting started. I'd certainly be up for three hours of this, so how splendid to hear that the developers are planning to make a "complete" and fancier experience.

Hey, do you like going shoulder-to-shoulder with a pal to battle in same-screen local multiplayer games? Follow-up question: do you enjoy deceiving your pal while trying to uncover their own deceit? Last question: do you want to throw knives at your pal's face? If so, check out Neon Knives, a fun free same-screen game for two players where you must both try to blend into a crowd of NPCs while identifying and assassinating your mate.

I like horror, I like bunnies, I like cool little games. Hey, y'here that, Rental? You're alright, kid. It's a free (free!) little game originally made for 2022's 32bit jam that takes about 20 minutes to play through, wherein you play a child rabbit who has arrived at a holiday cabin with her family. You're the first to head inside and, oop, the door locks behind you. Classic twist. A further twist is that, while Rental is entirely free to download and play, you can buy a supporter zine as DLC to kick some funds to the devs. Noice.

You know me and Soulslikes. We're not particularly best buddies most of the time. We've had a couple of successful outings over the years with the likes of Death's Door and Hollow Knight and company, but anything with pure FromSoft blood running through its veins has always left me cold. Void Sols, however, is an upcoming Soulslike that feels like it might be able to satisfy both sides of the 'git gud' camp, appealing to nervous dodge-rollers like myself while also giving hardened Elden Ringers a run for their money. It's all down to its plentiful supply of approachable customisation options, allowing you to ratchet up the difficulty if you're finding things a bit easy, or knock it down, reapply your stat points, and even create whole new loadouts - each with their own individual stat combinations - to win the day. It's all wonderfully considerate, and having played the free demo that's just launched on Steam, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go if you're feeling in need of a little training ahead of Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree coming out.

I approve of the recent trend towards making building games as relaxing as possible (e.g. Summerhouse). Today sees the release of a new one on Steam, this one a teeny medieval city builder called Le Château that gives you strict limitations for building a castle. You can have a go of the demo for free - I like it a bunch.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Following game concepts including Max Payne with vampires, Kojima's Strands with witches, organ trading, and an airport for aliens currently run by dogs, Xalavier Nelson Jr's Strange Scaffold studio are back with another doozy. They've announced a release date of April 16th for Life Eater, a game about a modern-day druid who must kidnap and sacrifice people every year to sate a dark god and keep the world from ending. I know what you're thinking: surely he's insane in the membrane, insane in the brain. But what if he isn't?

I like a city builder, me, and newly revealed Beware Of Light, from tiny indie studio Bajka Games, has a interesting hook (and a Ronseal-type name, which you know I appreciate). Your advanced colony ship has veered off course, and you've crashed on a dead, desert planet with no water or fossil resources like oil. It's sort of a hot Frostpunk, because you have to manage manpower, there are limited resources to distribute, and nobody is going to help. You must live. What do now?

Turbo Kid is a 2015 movie set in a post-apocalypse in which a comic book fan battles a local tyrant, with gory, comedic, '80s-pastiching results. It was not a film I expected to get a metroidvania sequel, but here it is with a new demo and an April release date.

I've entered a stage in my life during which I have enormous nostalgia for the PlayStation era, and most of that nostalgia is focused on racing games and drum and bass. Enter Night-Runners, a racing game set between 1990 and 2009, scored by drum and bass, smeared with VHS filters, and just for good measure, set on and around the expressways of Tokyo.

This week's Nintendo Direct was stuffed full of games that will also be making their way to PC over the next few months, but the one I haven't been able to stop thinking about is the newly-announced Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure. It's the debut game from a team of indie devs that include Braid artist David Hellman, Carto writer Nick Suttner and Ethereal designer Nicolás Recabarren, and they've also partnered with composer Tomás Batista, who did the music for both Ethereal and Martian colony builder Per Aspera. It's a pretty stacked line-up as these things go, but it's Arranger's world of constantly shifting sliding tiles that's really piqued my curiosity. Come and watch the lovely announcement trailer below and see what I mean.

New arcade shoot 'em up Nidus first caught my eye with its psychedelic bug blast on Screenshot Saturday Monday. Three months later, it has now launched, and for a mere £6 we can all fill our eyes with so many colourful insects. You'd have to pay at least £57 for that sort of fun down the pet shop.

I respect a game with wild ambition. Declaring your game "the spiritual successor to Freelancer" is bold and ambitious, considering how the spaceship sim is still so beloved after 20 years that our readers voted it your 16th favourite space game of all time. This ambition is wild when the tiny development team is led by someone best known for replacing Skyrim's dragons with Thomas The Tank Engine. So while I'm not much of a spaceship sort, I had to check out the demo for Underspace, which aims to combine Freelancer shoot-o-trading space action with a dash of Lovecraftian horror.

One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That's one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it's a helmet). He's like if Hand Of Fate's dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.

Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but dozens of demos are still alive and kicking, it seems - which is good news for me, who still has a good half dozen on my to do list, and also good news for you, as it means you still have time to check out the really quite good demo for Stand-Alone, a fast, 2D hack and slasher where you play as a robot-powered sheep packing a very large sword. Wolves have broken into your home and murdered all your friends, but you play as the one sheep who got away - or rather, a sheep that's been fused with a surprisingly powerful robot capable of producing a honking great greatsword to make their escape with. Thus begins the wolves' hot pursuit - not least because this robot also seems to be kind of sleeper agent for them - and your roguelike-shaped quest to avenge your fallen friends.

As a big fan of moody first-person games where you follow procedures to do a job, I'm quite interested in the recent announcement of Threshold. Made by a former Arkane level designer, it's about a train maintenance job at a border post atop the world's tallest mountain, where the air is so thin you need to huff top-ups from cans. Concrete information on Threshold is a bit thin at this point but I can tell you that you have a bucket and some planks, so what more do you need to know? Check out the announcement trailer, below.

Ah sure I've enjoyed the nostalgic resurgence of Quake/PlayStation-grade 3D art in video games, but I am fully blown away by indie game Fragrance Point looking like the truest classic 3D computer graphics: the shiny pre-rendered CGI from TV show transition cards, adverts for double-disc dance music compilations, and Windows Media Player skins. My eyes are still reeling from the gloss and glitz and pulsating lights of the Steam Next Fest demo, and I welcome this pain. Grab the demo now and set out to explore a space station as a bopping security bot with snazzy boots and endless projectile lipstick.

Take your protein pill and put your headphones on for the free demo of Asterism, an "interactive music album" exploring a solar system one song at a time. Each visit to a planet lasts as long as the song, whisking us through scenes reflecting the lyrics and mood, rendered with a mix of 3D computer art and a range of handmade physical mediums. I was delighted from the first twang. And impressively, it's mostly the work of one developer, Claire Morwood. Do have a look!

If you played and liked last year's excellent slice-of-life adventure A Space For The Unbound, stop what you're doing and go and download the Steam Next Fest demo for Until Then. Go on, I'll wait. Right, sorted? Let's continue. Like A Space For The Unbound, Until Then is a coming of age story where the ups and downs of everyday high school life start intermingling with strange, supernatural occurences.

I've long been enamoured with the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, from the Douglas firs and waterfalls of Twin Peaks to the redwoods I once swam beneath on a road trip. Thanks to Pacific Drive's Steam Next Fest demo, I have now also barrelled through the woods and backroads of a spooky alt-history PNW in a banged-up car which is itself a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque artifact. I've had my eye on Pacific Drive for a few years and after playing the demo, I am delighted by parts of it but not entirely sold on its roguelikelike survival scavenge-o-rama structure. Hmm! Give it a go and tell me what you think.

It's been a good few years for relaxing, puzzle-strategy games about spreading nature's glory. The future looks bright, too, thanks to Preserve, which seems to blend Dorfromantik's lush hexes with Terra Nil's gradual ecological recovery. You'll find the announcement trailer below.

When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I'm just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I've had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro's demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you're into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who's never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let's face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that's turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it's coming out in full real soon, too.

Who'd have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can't jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she'll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I've been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it's a little rough around the edges, there's definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.

Take the Countdown numbers round, replace the number cards with cute woodland creatures and the mathematical operations with spells, and consider the target number a boss you must defeat, and you've basically got Super Algebrawl. This tactical mathematical RPG is the latest from Punkcake Délicieux, the small team behind the roguelikelike 'chess with a gun' Shotgun King. Super Algebrawl started life as a experiment by one of the devs to help teach his daughter maths, though frankly I think it'll teach her maths is cruel. This game and I have very different relationships with numbers.

Graham remarked the other day about how strange it can be to see which indie megahits spawn waves of homages and which ones don't, noting that Lucas Pope's Papers, Please has surprisingly few immitators. His post reminded me of Pope's other hit, Return Of The Obra Dinn. The closest we've come to a "Dinn-like" is probably 2022's outstanding The Case Of The Golden Idol, though as I said in my review, its fill-in-the-blanks murder tableaus felt just about distinct enough to be their own separate thing.

As much as I love looking at and admiring sandbox citybuilders like Townscaper, I am terrible at actually playing them. I get the same kind of blank canvas choice paralysis I do in games like Minecraft, or anything where there's no real clear objective for what I'm meant to be building. I sit there with a big toybox of lovely things to stick together, but always end up deflated and disappointed with my own lack of imagination. But Summerhouse, the sandbox citybuilder (or townbuilder, more like) from solo developer Friedemann is just teeny-tiny enough to give me a sense of creative satisfaction. I've been playing its gorgeous little demo this week in between Palworld sessions, and yes, more of this please, this is utterly delightful. Happily, we don't have to wait too long for the final game now either, as it's coming to Steam on March 8th.

I wasn't as sold on Half Mermaid's Immortality as the internet at large, but I'll give Sam Barlow as much rope for his FMV games as anyone else. He recently Xeeted about the studio's upcoming projects C and D, described as "next level FMV, hold onto your seats", and "reinventing 3rd person horror again", respectively. The games now have heavily redacted Steam pages, and Barlow revealed a few more details on Kinda Funny Games (helpfully transcribed a bit by VGC if you can't be arsed watching).

Basically the only sort of strategy games I like are city builders, so I was interested in the playtest for El Dorado: The Golden City Builder, which casts you as the leader of an ancient Mayan-ish city. The playtest is only the prologue, but the eventual goal is to take over the Yucatán peninsula, and if nothing else it's refreshing to see a city-builder that doesn't feel overwhelmingly European. It also has a complicated system of religion. Whereas in a similarly polytheistic game like Zeus, the gods would turn up to stomp on buildings and/or bless them, at fairly large intervals, in El Dorado I was getting a home immolated every few days. Building shrines that have an area of effect, and that require resources to run and protect your town, is its own supply chain in El Dorado. This is a very interesting idea that I liked.

As we all know, I like vampire stories, and I like different takes on vampire stories. Yesterday Edwin dangled an upcoming visual novel called Vampire Therapist in front of my nose. I am intrigued, also because I appreciate a Ronseal approach to titles. In Vampire Therapist, out on Steam this June 17th, you play Sam, a vampire who becomes a therapist to other vampires. So the title works twice!

Hey! How would you like to contribute to the downfall of society? I do so by regularly tuning into Love Island and/or Married At First Sight. For those of you who'd like to do your part in videogame form, dev_hell looks to be the answer. It's a first-person deckbuilding roguelike where you play as a software developer employed by a shady corporation to "reshape the future", and it's giving off strong whiffs of Inscryption. As much as I know dev_hell will be incredibly unsettling… I'm in.

I mentioned this in a What Are We Playing? and the podcast last week, but I've been playing a point and click puzzle game called Twilight Oracle, which is out at the end of the month. It's cool! It reminds me a lot of Legends Of Kyrandia, in that it doesn't need to explain why stuff in the world is like it is, it just is. Big talking fish? Sure. Skull floating in space? You betcha.

If you enjoy the novelty and challenge of fiddly first-person shooter controls, do check out the free new "experimental survival horror game" Neural Parasite. Can you fight your way out of a Nazi bunker when everything is controlled by clicking? Even simply moving involves clicking on pictures of your left and right shoes, moving faster as you alternate shoes faster. Neural Parasite is short and it's free, so hop to it! Or, click on one of your shoes to hop to it, I suppose.

Russian Roulette is just an edgy version of Snakes & Ladders. It's pure luck gussied up with high stakes and the cool aesthetic of spinning a six-shooter. A grizzled mafioso whose cheeks glitter with fragments of other people's teeth has as much chance of winning Russian Roulette as a sleepy five-year-old in SpongeBob pyjamas. But take Russian Roulette, swap the revolver for a pump-action shotgun, mix up live and dud rounds, and add Inscryption-esque items which let you change the rules, and now you have a more skillful game. That's Buckshot Roulette, the latest from Mike Klubnika, the dev behind those excellent horror games about operating machinery. Great weird machines here too.

I'm a sucker for games where swords are the pointy death delivery devices they truly are, rather than the big, blunt sticks so many turn them into. First Cut: Samurai Duel seems to be aiming its blades at my heart, then. It's a 2D sidescrolling swordfighter in which each connecting blow means instant death, and it has a January 17th release date.

I enjoy games where enemies are a resource as much as a hazard. It's not enough that you can farm them for XP by killing them while they respawn, though. I also want to make the monsters appear myself.