Cor, there's been a lot of games this year, haven't there? While I've only slapped one Bestest Best badge down in 2023 (woe is me), our lovely freelancers, current RPSers, and former RPSers have done a whole lot more badge-slapping. A grand total of 26 Bestest Bests have graced our monitors this year, which makes it three more than last year's Bestest Best round-up. And I'd say it's a nice mixture of big budget open worlders, puzzle gems, and indie delights that make up our roster for 2023, too.
So yeah, I'd encourage you to have a flick through the list below and see if there's anything you can add to the wishlist. Even as the person with "Reviews" in their job title, I can confirm I literally have loads of these Bestest Bests in my backlog. I will endeavour to play a handful over this Christmas break on my Steam Deck, maybe combining the experience with a nibble on a mince pie. Anyway, enjoy! And Merry Reviewsmas!
]]>Don't look now, but we're almost halfway through 2023. How is that even possible? I hear you cry. Well, I'm not entirely sure either. The last time I checked it was freezing cold outside and the sun went down at 3pm, but here we are with long, sunlit evenings and that sticky sheen of an early, muggy summer. Or at least it's been quite clammy in the RPS Treehouse this month, as we've all been sweating over our favourite games of the year so far.
]]>Proving that our ability to organise recording a podcast episode wasn't some sort of one-off fluke, the Indiescovery crew are back again! Going forward, this is going to be a fortnightly podcast, but we just couldn't wait to share our thoughts on this year's best upcoming indie games, so we decided to release Episode 2 a week early, as a treat (the treat is for us, really, but we hope you enjoy it too!).
]]>Indonesian studio Mojiken have been making games for years. Most of them are less than an hour long. They're short, punchy adventures and cover everything from digital fortune tellers, violin-playing owl-men, and poetic folktales about potato-shaped forest creatures.
A Space For The Unbound is Mojiken’s first 'big' release in that sense, clocking in at around nine-ish hours. What begins as a YA coming-of-age tale about a small-town romance quickly gains remarkable momentum, and suddenly you’re dealing with supernatural teens trying to desperately stop a world-ending calamity. Part sci-fi drama, part high school romance, A Space For The Unbound manages to have incredible weight and grandeur while also being poignant, sweet, and honest at the same time. It's a triumph.
]]>Happy New Year, folks! Crikey, there are a lot of games coming out this year, aren't there? When I first asked the team to put together their most anticipated games for 2023, I was thinking we'd have a reasonably sensible number of things we were all looking forward to, you know, somewhere in the region of the 43 games we highlighted at the start of 2022. Very quickly, though, it became apparent that, actually, there are simply loads of games the RPS Treehouse is personally excited about this year, and cor, it would be rude not to include every last one of them. I'll be upfront: there are a fair number of TBA games on here that probably aren't going to come out in 2023, but as ever, we remain hopeful and optimistic all the same. So let's dive in.
]]>Last night’s Nintendo Indie showcase gave us fresh looks at many exciting indies. Chief among them was Storyteller, a narrative-puzzle game we first saw ten years ago, and has now confirmed a release date of March 23rd. The game’s comic-strip puzzles let you remix classic stories, like Dracula, using various props, verbs and nouns. A game for all the literary nerds out there.
]]>Fantastical slice-of-life adventure game A Space For The Unbound has resolved its publishing problems, developers Mojiken Studio have revealed. In a joint statement with UK-based publishers PQube, shared on the game’s Twitter account, Mojiken and the game’s PC publishers Toge Productions said they’ve “reached an agreement to the satisfaction of all parties”. Toge Productions will continue to handle publishing for A Space For The Unbound on PC, while Chorus Worldwide are taking over console publication.
]]>Another indie developer has come forward publicly with allegations that UK-based publishers PQube have withheld money from them. Thai dev team Corecell claim they’ve only seen some of the minimum guaranteed money agreed when they signed the European console publishing rights to their action-puzzle game AeternoBlade 2 over to PQube in 2019.
Corecell say they attempted to resolve things with PQube but that didn’t work, and they had to terminate the publishing agreement in 2020. Since then, Corecell have tried to regain the rights to AeternoBlade 2 from PQube to no avail. Corecell allege that PQube did offer to return the rights to the game, but only if they would agree to keep the situation secret.
]]>The developers of indie slice-of-life adventure A Space For The Unbound allege that the game’s console publisher in western regions, PQube, withheld information about a diversity grant and used that to leverage for a greater share of the game’s revenue. Mojiken Studio say they were left feeling “manipulated and exploited” by the UK-based publisher’s actions. The Indonesian team have now terminated their contract with PQube and delayed A Space For The Unbound until they can find another publisher.
]]>When we were putting together our most anticipated games of 2022 list back in January, there was one game I knew had to be on it: Mojiken Studio’s A Space For The Unbound. It’s a slice of life adventure about two Indonesian high school students set in the late 90s, and the demo (which has recently been expanded to include the first chapter in addition to its short prologue) instantly captivated me when I first played it a couple of years ago. There are some light supernatural elements that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s watched the films of Japanese anime directors Makoto Shinkai and Mamoru Hosoda (including a giant, ominous Your Name-style comet, no less), but for the most part this is a much more grounded game than Mojiken have made in the past, such as the fantastical point and click puzzlers She And The Light Bearer and When The Past Was Around.
Indeed, the only game in their back catalogue that has a recognisable, real-life setting is their short, free browser game Banyu Lintar Angin. Born out of an internal game jam project in 2017, Banyu Lintar Angin once again draws inspiration from the studio’s home country of Indonesia. It only takes a couple of minutes to play, but speaking with its creator Dimas Novan, it was vital in sowing the seeds for what A Space For The Unbound would eventually become.
]]>2022 is finally here and that can only mean one thing. We've got another year of hip new video games to look forward to, and we've been busy rustling up the ones we're most excited about. In truth, there are tons of games on the horizon that could easily sit on this list, and some of them are so close to release we can practically already see the pixels on our screens morphing into their lush, polygonal landscapes. Games like Monster Hunter Rise, God Of War and Rainbow Six Extraction. You won't find them here, but trust us, you'll be seeing a lot of them over the coming weeks.
There are always more games coming out than we have fingers to write about them, but the 2022 games we've listed below are the ones the RPS team are personally most looking forward to playing. We've got games big and small here, and they're all listed in alphabetical order. After all, release dates are increasingly slippery beasts these days. Think we've missed something? Why not take to the comments below and tell us all about it. You might just convince us to put it on our radars. But enough from me. Here are our 43 most anticipated games of 2022.
]]>Oh thank goodness, reader. It is almost over. We feel the influence of the mighty Horaszdóttir receding. This is it: the last time this year that we must submit to her will, and receive her prophecy of the games yet to come. One last time for this winter, she draws turkeys from her eternal flock to auger the future from their innards. She comes closer, her breath hot and foul upon our ears, and whispers with a smile (oh! Her bloodstained teeth!) a final word: indie.
]]>Steam has blessed us once again with the paralysing terror of having too much choice. Like a Friday night "what d'you wanna watch on Netflix? Like, a comedy or...?" of indecision, but lasting an entire week. Yes, it is another Steam Game Festival showcasing upcoming games and free demos for them, and this time there are 500 of the things!
Covering the Steam Game Fest has actually become one of my favourite things to do. Each time I play I am staggered, yet again, by how many good games there actually are. Alas, it's impossible for me to play 500 demos, but I've played quite a few, and have curated a list of my favourites to give you a jumping off point. There's a bit of action, puzzling, strategy, platforming, and unsettling groups of tiny mushroom people going "Dap!"
Would that I could have done more. To paraphrase Lucas from Empire Records, I do not regret the games I played, but those I did not play.
]]>Ever since I played the moreish reverse tower defence delights of Necronator: Dead Wrong at EGX 2019, I've been keeping a watchful eye on Indonesian developer-publisher Toge Productions to see what else they've got in their surprisingly eclectic line-up of games coming out over the next few months. I'm really looking forward to their chill, coffee-making visual novel Coffee Talk, for instance, and after playing their recently-released prologue demo for Mojiken Studio's upcoming slice of life adventure game, A Space For The Unbound, I'll be adding that one to my list as well.
It's a charming pixel art adventure game set in rural Indonesia in the late 90s, and it follows the story of a boy called Atma and his young friend Nirmala. At the beginning of the demo, they're trying to finish writing a story together, but by the end of it Atma will have "space-dived" (space dove?) inside the minds of both Nirmala and a sleepy civil defence officer guarding a puzzle-critical ladder, petted some cats, acquired a mix-tape of keroncong music, and escaped the wrath of Nirmala's angry dad. It's a lot to pack in to 20 minutes, so come and let me tell you more about it. Did I mention it had very good cats?
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