The original Save me Mr Tako was a great game. A passion project created mostly by a solo developer, Christophe Galati, it was a throwback to the Game Boy classics of old, and a decidedly charming one at that. But what sounds like a fraught relationship with publisher Nicalis—who apparently …
If you like Japanese mythology, stories of fickle gods, and pixel art, you’ll want to check out Rainbow Sea, a gorgeous, free adventure game for iOS and Android that’s now available in English. Created by Japanese indie developer Hinuko Shima (aka Shirokurohitsuji), Rainbow Sea tells the sometimes funny, sometimes bittersweet …
Between the likes of Strangeland, Lost Words, and When The Past Was Around, I feel like I’ve written a lot lately about games dealing with grief—not to mention things like Adios and Olija that aren’t about grief per se, but traverse adjacent territory. And yet, no two of those games …
Dinosaur Polo Club‘s minimalist strategy game Mini Motorways is coming to Steam in July 20 and to Switch early next year, the Wellington-based studio announced this week. Mini Motorways follows a similar vein to Mini Metro, Dinosaur Polo Club’s excellent previous game: a strategy simulation game about building up a …
Few game developers have quite the mastery of psychological horror as Bloober Team. Layers of Fear 2, originally released for other platforms in 2019, and now making its way to Switch, is an especially potent case study in how the a surreal, eerie atmosphere and the fractured, tragic story of …
Essays on Empathy is so much more than just an anthology of games; it’s a candid reflection on Deconstructeam’s history and creative process. There’s no other developer quite like Deconstructeam. Even if you only look at their commercial releases, Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club show a …
On the first Friday of every month, the Indiepocalypse zine/game bundle brings together an assortment of indie games, typically with an experimental, creative, artistic focus. Today is the second Friday of May, which means I’m a week late in sharing this news (woops!), but nonetheless, Indiepocalypse #16 is now available …
It’s hard to separate The Settlers-style city-building strategy games from the colonialism embedded in them—after all, this is a whole genre built around the idea of settling unfamiliar land and creating a thriving community there. But Before We Leave, from Dunedin-based Balancing Monkey Games, looks at it through a different …
Today, Nintendo announced Game Builder Garage, a no-coding-required game development tool that’s making its way to Nintendo Switch on June 11. Game Builder Garage lets you program your own games by connecting colourful creatures called Nodon, each of which represents some different object, function, or programming logic. In one example …
There’s too much stock put into “polish” as a metric of quality in a videogame. The assumption is that “polish” is an inherently good thing: that an unpolished game can only ever be good in spite of its rough edges, and never because of them; that high production values and …
