From the brilliant mind of Miwashiba comes 1bitHeart, an a funny, heartfelt adventure game about making friends and coping with social anxiety. A few hundred years from now, in a time when everyone and everything is connected to a central network by “BitPhones”, a boy called Nanashi lives alone in …
In a combination of moreishness and nostalgia, I followed up SteamWorld Dig 2 by immediately firing up SteamWorld Dig for the first time in years. I knew that the new game was an improvement over the same ideas that drove the original—such is the way with sequels, generally—but I didn’t …
The isometric stealth tactics genre has been dormant for a long time, and this is understandable. It’s niche, to say the least – there are only a handful of notable examples, even from the genre’s heyday of the early 2000s. Such games are also tricky to design well; to take …
Rabi-Ribi cleverly combines the Metroidvania and bullet hell genres, using a silly but heartfelt story and adorable pixel art to seal the deal. Two of the very finest game genres are Metroidvanias and bullet hell shoot ‘em ups. (This is a fact. Don’t @ me.) When you take two of …
Yukie: A Japanese Winter Fairy Tale is a haunting interactive folk tale, and another example of what can be done with RPG Maker and a bit of creativity. Despite the limitations of RPG Maker as a development tool, a lot of folks have been able to produce some fascinating games …
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a breath of fresh air. In a world where every other game is an open-world busywork-a-thon for no reason other than because it’s the flavour of the decade, Yonder comes along to show what makes the genre actually work. It’s a game that gives …
I’d never really thought about before I heard about Drifting Lands, but RPG and shoot ‘em up are two genres that should go together really well. Take the hectic action of a shmup and layer RPG loot and progression systems on top of that, and you’ve got a fresh new …
If you want to make your indie pixel art platformer stand out, you might give it some ridiculous premise: a cat-owned company’s teleporters keep breaking down, so it’s up to a the firm’s master of Custodial Sciences (who is a frog) to investigate. You might do something even more radical, …
Leaving Lyndow is a teaser for the forthcoming Eastshade, but it’s also a delightful game in its own right, about the complex feelings of leaving home. It’s hard to describe Leaving Lyndow, because I’m still not sure what, exactly, it is. I know what it is in reductive mechanical terms, …
These days, it takes a lot for a retro-inspired roguelike platformer to stand out. Bard’s Gold does nothing of the sort. If anything, it’s more simplistic than its peers, but I nonetheless found it to be one of the more enjoyable games to come out of this obsession with pixel …
