🔍🦘🛎

You’d still want induced flow for better heat transfer though

Clearly they need all the help they can get

Hello fellow tiny indie enthusiast! Here are a few I hold dear:

Beyond All Reason - FOSS RTS game about robots destroying each other. Pick one of 3 factions and build up your army to crush the opposition. Great for multiplayer co-op or PvP, even has modes to face off against boss factions. Surprisingly robust and balanced.

PictoQuest - Picross is a pretty niche genre, but it’s a very rewarding puzzle system. This title combines the classic puzzles with real-time RPG combat, adding some frantic tension to the puzzle solving.

Smushi Come Home - Crazy cozy platformer about a mushroom dude trying to return to his family. If “Chill Vibes” was a game.

Aquaria - You’ve probably played this one; was a standout indie back in 2008, even getting a crossover in Super Meat Boy. It’s a Metroidvania with fantastic music, unique combat, and a heartfelt story. It perfected leitmotifs years before Undertale.

Miasmata - Survival horror game that focuses on plant sample gathering and cartography. Yes seriously, you literally have to triangulate your position with landmarks to fill out your map! It sounds like work, but it’s actually awesome to experience.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - 3D pixel sci-fi urban sim in which you play a street urchin dreaming of a better life. Its depiction of hope amidst abject poverty is heart wrenching, but the game is absolutely brimming with charm.

The Void - Otherworldly resource management sim from the studio behind Pathologic. You’re a soul in purgatory struggling to remain extant amidst a war between two factions. You have to travel between nodes to collect Color, which is the fuel of survival. Monstrous Brothers roam around stealing all of it they can, and helpless Sisters plead you to offer what you can, with the promise they can help you ascend.

Legend of Grimrock - Oldschool dungeoncrawler RPG. Pick a group of four prisoners chained together and traverse the prison dungeon of Grimrock. Classic hack and slash, sword and sorcery; comes with a map editor and has a lot of community maps.

Knytt Underground - Metroidvania minus the combat. It’s all about exploration, platforming, puzzle solving, and glorious aesthetic. You may have heard of Within A Deep Forest from the same dev.

Honorable mention: Dreamfall Chapters - Not as indie as the others, but not nearly as well known as it deserves. Adventure game set between two worlds - a dystopian fascist sci-fi and… a dystopian fascist fantasy. You swap between worlds discovering not only the secrets destroying these places, but also to learn about your own past. Actually the third title in the series, but acts as a standalone.

Yeah it’s 15 years past time to expect anything else from him. Just surprised to see his name pop up.

That Phil Fish? Where’s Fez 2!?

They’re not right wing/controlled opposition. They’re right wing controlled opposition.

Great stuff! Hidden Station Market sounds like it belongs to a lost Gameboy version of Cave Story. Really dig Thunderking Arena and Starfall Island!

Davey Wreden is just a powerful writer. Even his interview trailer for the game gave me pause.

I absolutely love how well Alta’s behaviors and animations convey her mood and motivations. Angrily running around swinging the tea basket is cathartic all in itself :D

Why would the earth have anxiety about wanting to spend quality time with us? That’s definitely ‘death of the author’ territory.

Hell yeah, my group has been playing that for a few months now. I should donate to the devs because it’s such a great free game.

Yup, it doesn’t make a difference if you pay for:

• a box containing random items (Overwatch 1)
• a key to open boxes you find for free (Guild Wars 2)
• an incubator to hatch an egg with a random creature (Pokemon GO)
• a wish to reward a random character but there’s a guarantee after 80 wishes to get one exact character (Genshin Impact)

At the same time, the Switch is such a solid console that a hardware upgrade with full backwards compatibility* is really the best case scenario. People have wanted a bigger screen, better chip, and better joysticks since launch, and now we’ll have them!

*the video says it’s not 100% compatible, but I’m assuming that’s for stuff like Labo and Ring Fit that need those exact joycon sizes/shapes.