After you move house there's a weird period where you keep trying to get pans out of the fridge or cutlery from a drawer that doesn't exist. In fact, I'm lagging several years behind and still trying to get cutlery out of the drawer in my flat share in London four years ago. Yesterday I walked straight into the sofa for no earthly reason. In this time of doubt and not knowing where your own two feet are stepping, I present to you three new indie games to help you plan your footwork. And all for under a fiver! Howzat then?
]]>It's been a hot minute since we were last together, reader, and that's because I have been, as the kids say, hella busy. I've obliquely mentioned it elsewhere on the site and podcast, but in two short weeks I am emigrating, and I don't know how many of you have tried that but it turns out it will consume your life. I am aware that my journey into Ireland could be way more stressful than it is (especially because a fringe benefit of being a UK citizen is having the right to live and work in Ireland, no questions asked, no visa required), but still, I have been in need of focused distractions. Here are three new indie games to focus your attention on something other than whatever is stressing you out this week.
]]>Happy New Year! Somehow we went straight from January 2020 to January 2022. That's weird. Huh. Well, I'm officially giving us a do-over. I think we've earned it.
The games I've collected this week for the first TFI Friday of the year are going to ease us gently out of the time loop that we've been stuck in the last umpteen months. Accordingly, the first one is a time loop puzzle game.
]]>I'd say call your family, but do we not all view phonecalls as deeply suspicious now? My phone is a glass-and-silicon brick for displaying text that makes me unhappy.
It's been a while since we've found ourselves here, looking at some indie games, and once again I have been drawn to some that are a little melancholy, but in a sort of healing, wholesome way. I'm not sure if that says anything great about my state of mind right now, but hey - the nights are drawing in, there's a bit of a nip in the chip, and it's the time of year when we're encouraged to think about family, found or otherwise. And who in their 30s doesn't get sad thinking about that.
]]>The year has finally turned, reader. I am having discussions at home about putting the heating on. When I leave the office it isn't dark, but it's fuzzy around the edges. My knuckles are cold. It's the time of year, before the Skeleton War memes begin in earnest, to luxuriate in feeling a bit melancholy. It's healthy to feel sad sometimes, you know. Didn't you watch Inside Out? I did, and in my screening at the cinema a child called out "Where's Bing Bong?" when the heroic Bing Bong disappeared...
This week, I have collected three different puzzle games with very different vibes. I know I'm biased in favour of puzzle games more than the usual reader, but these ones are very good and worth a punt, and at least one should pique the old interest. And they all gave me that happy-sad feeling. Like, I want to wrap up in a blanket and play these games and maybe think about my granny a bit. That sort of feeling.
]]>I love doing this column because it means a) it is the end of a working week (working hard or hardly working, amiright?) and b) I get to play something nice and (often) small, and usually a bit weird. I am also, as it turns out, really smug about the theme I discovered for this week. Last night I had a bath, so am ideally positioned to extoll the benefits of dunking things in water. May I present to you three brand new indie games: a frog's tea party, a potion workshop and a rainy walk.
]]>The past week or so has been Back To School time in the UK, also known as the season of adverts on TV about protractors and pencil cases, and posts on Facebook showing a six-year-old standing by a front door and wearing their new school uniform. A dance as old as time. I remember getting a blue jumper that was two sizes too big for me so I could grow into it. Remember it like it was yesterday.
But enough about school itself, a time in my life that I hated to an extraordinary extent and shudder to think of even now. We move to happier things, i.e. games, and in particular the assumption I'm making that now your kids are out of the house for most of the day, you'll have more time to play games. Here are three new indie games that came out in the last month or so, that I feel are apposite for a back-to-school theme.
]]>It's been ages, TFI friends! I'm sorry. There's been a lot on. But today I am pleased because this week has seen some absolute banger games released into the wild. Aside from what I've gathered into a little ball here, I'm excited to try Mosaic Chronicles over the weekend, am stoked about the existence of Strange Horticulture.
But this column isn't about games that I haven't played! It's about those I have, and this week the ones I've got for you are proper fun. They're all chilled puzzle games, I suppose, although the form of their puzzles are very different. But they're also all about art (kinda; you'll need to trust me on the third one) and emotions, and are perfect for a bank holiday weekend.
]]>It has been a hot minute since I hit you with some fun new indie games (I was on holiday! Gimme a break!) but I'm very excited to be back with some crackers this week. I was too tired to come up with a theme, though, so instead here are just some fun games that I think you'll like, woooooo!
In fact, I've managed to pick three games that are so disparate in style and tone that I don't think I could link them by a theme even if I really, really tried. I can start with a more topical one, though. Yes, it's about vaccines. But like, in a fun way. I promise.
]]>I think I am slightly out of sync with the original fortnightly schedule for this, owing to E3 destroying about a week of our lives, but now I'm back! Or rather, I'm gone - to my mum's house again. This means that my big rig is alone in Brighton, while I am here with my MacBook Air for company.
As such, everything this week is also playable on Mac OS. And blimey, loads of good games are on Mac these days, aren't they? It's a really great distraction from all the spiders in this house, and the fact that the shower osscilates between being freezing cold and boiling, bum-burning hot. The actual realities of cottagecore would shock you people.
]]>These past few weeks, I've felt myself to be in a bit of a creative funk, dear readers, but thankfully this doesn't seem to be the case for today's game developers. It seems they're still in full flow, as it were, and this week I've got a trio of nice things to play that'll hopefully kickstart your heart and get you in the mood to make something. They did for me, anyway.
]]>I've come to regret trying to theme these posts, reader, but this week I have been listening to the audio book of Rotherweird as my bedtime listen. I keep falling asleep at "man is interviewed for weird teaching job" and waking up at 3am to "the weasel-man spoke to the hideous spider-woman in the magical mixing garden". So I wanted to find some horrible hybrid monsters for you this week. Alas, it seems that is a niche concern (either that or games about hybrid monsters are not tagged correctly on Itch, where I thought I'd find them).
Instead I found some games about dead monsters, more or less. I found some of them suprisingly cathartic, and at least one of them surprisingly difficult.
]]>What a world, what a world! Recently I read a book called The Appeal, which I enjoyed very much. The framing of it is a couple of junior lawyers going through a bunch of case notes they've been sent, and so the book itself is mostly emails and messages between the central cast of characters. You have to figure out the shape of what you don't have by looking at what you do. It's very good!
So, inspired by that, this week I've got three text-based games for you, but with a twist. They each do something a bit different, maybe in how they play with the format, or how they bring in interactivity. For a bonus, definitely check out the Pokémon parody in a font file that Lauren wrote about a couple of weeks back.
]]>Last time I did one of these (which was a few weeks ago because I've been away, whaddaya want from me?) I said I was going to go and poke around on Itch.io, because they have as much - indeed, probably more - porn than Steam, but they don't try and surprise me with it by pretending it's something else. And I did go poke around on Itch!
None of these game are porn, though. They're a collection of fun Pico-8 games you can play in browser, and my other abitrary way of linking them this time is that I really liked the what-it-says-on-the-tin approach to naming that the developers have employed for all of them. Makes me think they're fun, devil-may-care jaunty types of people.
]]>Well hot dang, if it isn't another TFI Friday. Over the past couple of weeks I've been trawling the underbelly of Steam new releases to find some fun new indie games for you to check out. And let me tell you, there's nothing like spending several hours at a time on the platform to remind you how much grim hentai ends up on Steam these days.
It's not that it's there, so much as how sometimes it's disguised and I'm not prepared for it. I clicked through to a game that described itself as being about looking after a friendly sheep. "Cute!", I thought, much like a fool would think. From the screenshots, I can't say I believe she shares much of the anatomy of a sheep, but she sure was friendly. Anyway, the boob-cannon of new releases aimed right at my face shunted my psyche towards a lot of aggressively wholesome things this week.
]]>The last time I rounded up demos from one of Steam's seasonal Game Festivals, I observed that it had become one of my favourite parts of my job. Afterwards, Graham observed to me that there are so many indie games now, there was nothing stopping me doing the same thing basically all the time. So we hereby present TFI Friday, which stands for "These Fine Indies" (or the ruder variation of course), some good new indie games I've played, presented to you on a Friday.
I cannot promise I will keep to any kind of regular schedule on this, but I'm going to shoot for every fortnight. And I've got some fun ones to kick off with as well. A good varied spread. A buffet of sandwiches with different indie fillings for different appetites: fast-paced abstract runner game Nerve, atmospheric 2D action platformer Olija, and extremely chill clicky puzzle game Down In Bermuda. Feast your eyes on them in action in the video below.
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