Among your obvious blockbuster video games ripe for similarly blockbuster film and TV adaptations like Fallout, Borderlands and The Last of Us, it seems there’s room for some of the smaller gems to be fished out and brought to the big screen, too.
]]>Greetings all! Hope you're enjoying a Christmas with an appropriate degree of merriment. Me, I'm not. I'm angry. I'm fuming. Why? Because the RPS 2023 Advent Calendar is wrong. It's wrong, I tell you!
If all were just and right in the world, then it wouldn't have left out the following list of excellent games that came out this year! Plus a couple others that came out of early access in 2023 but which I sadly don't have time to write about in full. Trust me, The Last Spell and Against The Storm are both phenomenal games as well.
Anyway: in this handsomely decorated selection box, you'll find four of my honourable mentions for games I've enjoyed playing the most this year. If you have a hole in your Steam library, maybe these will help fill it over the Christmas break!
]]>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!
]]>Dredge was pretty weird to begin with. The indie hit somehow melded fishing with cosmic horror - seamlessly - to create an enthralling adventure where you can never be sure if what you're about to haul out of the depths will have a normal amount of eyes or tentacles. The new Pale Reach DLC gets even weirder, a masterpiece of show-don’t-tell horror that manages to evoke some of the more inspired Bloodborne monsters as well as some of icy, supernatural scares from The Terror. And it's all centred on a big whale.
]]>Following boldly in the wake of The Thing, The Terror and, errrr, the experimental artist Ellie Ga, who spent months drawing and sketching aboard a drifting icelocked research vessel, Black Salt and Team 17's Lovecraftian fishing sim Dredge is heading to the Arctic in its first DLC pack, The Pale Reach. Batten down the hatches and check out the trailer.
]]>Dredge was one of this year’s more surprising gems, an unexpectedly winning combination of spooky Lovecraftian atmosphere, open-world exploration and compelling fishing sim that lay somewhere on the ocean-wide spectrum between the chill management of Stardew Valley and the existential dread of Sunless Sea.
]]>Creepy trawler adventure Dredge's second major update is out now, and it adds a photo mode and new wildlife events to snap. It also adds a passive mode, if what you really want is to experience its story and fishing without the trouble of its terrors from the murky depths.
]]>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.
]]>Somehow it's June already, which means it's time for the Indiescovery crew to suppress our existential dread at the fleetingness of existence and take a look at our favourite indie games from the first (almost) half of 2023! Don't worry, we very quickly realise that June has such a slammed line-up we can probably give it a best-games episode all of its own to make up for the fact that we tackled this topic a bit early.
Listen and subscribe via your podcast provider of choice! Find us on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Deezer, and YouTube.
]]>The underwater scares of Dredge are about to run even deeper. Developer Black Salt Games have revealed a roadmap for their spooky fishing game, promising four new bits of content coming over the next year including a chiller passive mode, nice quality-of-life additions, and a larger paid DLC pack with a new non-eldritch horror threat.
]]>My wonderful co-hosts are both away this week, leaving the responsibility of writing the podcast post to the person least capable of doing so. I am but a humble video boy! My only job is to cut out the big "ums" from the audio mix, not writing words about the things we did a chat about! Thankfully this week Indiescovery is all about change, as we're experimenting with a brand new format. A group review! We've all been playing Dredge, the eldritch fishing adventure by Black Salt Games, and hoo boy do we have some thoughts about it. Spoilers: much like Katharine, we all think it's really really good.
Elsewhere, the review bonanza continues. Rachel's been rewriting fiction in Storyteller, I've been reclaiming the wasteland in Terra Nil and Rebecca has been dating hot monsters in Romancelvania. We also chat about burgers, olives and our current hyperfixations because hey, this is an episode of Indiescovery after all.
]]>Spooky fishing game Dredge is overflowing with underwater eldritch horrors, ghoulish critters, and mutant fishies - like, the Blinky-the-fish kind. Based on that description, you’d expect some three-headed sea beast, incomprehensibly twisted and glowing with an otherworldly light, to be the game’s most supreme being. Nope. That title goes to the dog you rescue in one of the game's side missions, the developers have revealed.
]]>Something terrible lurks beneath the waves in Dredge. Actually, scratch that. There are a lot of terrible things that call the oceans of The Marrows home in this melancholy fishing adventure, but what they are, I couldn't possibly tell you. In all my hours sailing these cursed waters, I've only ever seen brief flashes of them - their ungodly, slippery masses, long spiny fins, and a dozen different combinations of glowing eyes, teeth and tentacles. They're forever fading in and out of view, cloaked by the thick fog that blankets the sea every evening. Sometimes your ship lights will catch them for a split second before they slip away, or maybe you'll only hear them hurtling toward you, with a scream of a jet engine and a maw that's white hot, ready for gnashing your flimsy wooden carcass into sawdust.
It's unnerving, being out at sea after dark, but that's the time when the rarest and most vile catches raise their scaly heads. So the question becomes: are you willing to risk your own sanity for the sake of a quick buck? Or are you too afraid of what you'll find in Davy Jones' locker? In Dredge, the answer is always yes. Yes, you will be frightened of what's out there, whether it's real or born from your own fearful imaginings, but you'll sputter out into the darkness regardless, because the allure of this supernatural fishing sim is just too good to resist.
]]>It’s episode four of RPS’ indie podcast Indiescovery and this week the team got into the Valentine's Day spirit and had a long chat about our favourite indie game romances (any excuse to gush about how hot the characters are in Hades, really). We get gabbing about our favourite game OTPs, the fabulous representation of queer romances in indies, and then finish with a cursed (not horny) Cosmo-style dating quiz.
]]>It’s the dead of night. I’m in my little tugboat out on open waters. I can barely see three feet in front of my nose because of the thick blanket of fog, but I'm trying my hand at night fishing, hoping to hook something really good. I find a squid spot and start to fish, reeling in one or two fine-looking catches. The third one, however, is monstrous, a mess of jagged teeth and sickly pale flesh. Yes, this should make for a fine amount of cash. The more morbid it is, the more money I get. Suddenly there’s a deep rumbling in the ocean and panic starts to creep in. I chuck my prize into my cargo and speed back to town, the phrase ‘fuck round, find out’ circling my brain.
I’ve not been playing Dredge long, but I’m calling it one of my favourite games of the year, right now, in February. Black Salt Games' sinister fishing RPG is gripping and enchanting in a way I didn’t anticipate. I’ve spent hours exploring its murky waters and my constant shock at what unsettling creatures my hook brings in is seemingly never-ending. Its eldritch world keeps pulling me back with its mystery and malevolent horror, and its sense of atmosphere and tension is incredible. Basically, I'm completely enraptured, hook, line, sinker. Dredge already feels like one of this year’s greatest indie horrors and all this, from a fishing game of all things.
]]>Fishing mini-games make just about any game better. There’s something meditative about being close to the water, waiting in silence for a catch, and mashing buttons to reel them in - plus I don’t need to deal with the horrendous smell from behind the safety of my desk. The indie game Dredge subverts what I like about fishing games, with an eerie eldritch horror waiting beneath the ocean’s surface. We won’t need to wait long before we see what's under there as Dredge releases on March 30th.
]]>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.
]]>In case September didn't add enough new indie games to your burgeoning Steam wishlists, Valve are back today with another edition of their demo-packed Steam Next Fest, and we've been playing some of its many, many, many demos to help give you a few pointers on where to start. You can view the whole of October's Steam Next Fest right here if you'd rather just dive in headfirst, but below you'll find some hand-picked highlights we've been enjoying ahead of time - including a new Return Of The Obra Dinn-alike, a first-person skeleton shooter, an underwater citybuilders and a platformer where your gun is also an umbrella.
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