I meant to do a few of these each week during my break and uhhhhhh oops, I guess that didn’t happen. So now I’m going to put all of them from my notes into one giant post and hopefully you find one or two neat things to play. I’ll try to sort this a bit more by genre so it’s a little less overwhelming. I hope these posts were useful to folks. Even during Steam and Itch sales, people are still releasing games! I even made a free Playdate game with my kids. If you enjoy these roundups, consider adding your own game or other small indies to MobyGames so they’re covered elsewhere too. There’s already been a few games covered in these that are delisted and that’s always weird to see. And consider blogging about small games you like in the new year too! There’s not much coverage of a lot of these games and there should be better writers talking about them. There’s plenty of games that never come out on Steam that are worth your time.
Adventure
After being in development for a very long time and then Early Access for a while after that, SpaceVenture (Steam/Itch) is finally out. This is a point-and-click adventure by the creators of the Sierra classic Space Quest. I’m just happy to see it come out. They had to deal with health issues and the worst Kickstarter backers I’ve ever seen, so it’s a miracle at all that it’s out. It’s nice to see that Steam reviews are positive too. I played a very early version and it was buggy but I think the people I know that are massive Space Quest fans have been fairly happy with it.
The Itch page for SOUP ROOMS (Itch) describes it better than me so I’ll just copy that. “SOUP ROOMS is a SOUP-like room tourism experience directly inspired by SOUP, an obscure Japanese minimalist art-game from 2007 where you walk around a series of small abstract rooms and generally soak in the atmosphere. Think of it as a sort of digital art gallery.” There’s 100 rooms from a variety of indie game devs AND a tool for making your own rooms. Plus it’s all for free!
jfrisby has a new horror adventure called MALLICIOUS (Itch) that is available for Pay-What-You-Want. It was made for the monthly game jam on the Adventure Game Studio website. I always like how jfrisby’s adventure games look and love that this has the aesthetics of a C64 game.
The Simogo Legacy Collection (Steam) is a collection of games released by the developer Simogo for mobile devices from 2010 to 2015. The most famous one is probably Device 6 but there’s some other big ones here too and it’s just really nice to see these games preserved on a platform that’s a bit more stable than the iOS App Store.
Arcade
Death in Abyss (Steam) just looks like a really solid arcade shooter with a low poly aesthetic, and I feel like I don’t see many arcade games taking place in a horror setting. A demo is available to try.
Unbeatable (Steam) doesn’t really need a mention on this site because it’s done so well already and everyone knows about it by now, but it’s going on here anyway. I joked elsewhere about how a game about a fascist government making music illegal is basically the Aerosmith video game Revolution X, but it looks nice anyway.
FPS
One Rotten Oath (Steam) is an interesting looking one to me. It’s an adventure game/FPS hybrid that uses tank controls and has FMV for all of the enemies. I realize that is probably not for most people but there’s a handful of us that go wild over FMV so I’m including it here. It’s got a demo too. The developer of this previously made a FMV game/interactive movie called A Trip to Yugoslavia.
I can’t believe ROUTINE (Steam) is actually out after being announced like 13 years ago. It looks great! FPS probably really isn’t the right category for this since it’s more of a survival horror thing that happens to have a gun. But it’s here, reviews have been positive, and it seems to be selling well so good for them. It’s weird that this roundup has two games (see: SpaceVenture) that started development over a decade ago.
Game Jams
Do you like Yuri? Well a whole game jam for it just wrapped up on Itch with 94 entries!
I don’t think I mentioned the 7 day fps jam in the last post either but that was also wonderful and had lots of entries on Itch. There’s also some very good ones that went past the deadline and were released outside of the jam instead like Dronelord Hyperviber. The look of that one actually reminds me of the DOS game Magic Carpet although it plays a bit differently.
Simulations
Tom City (Itch) is a very cute city builder for browsers by Dave Lloyd of Powerhoof and his son. Obviously I’m a fan of people making games with their kids so this gets a 10/10 from me.
Sports
I feel like I’m trolling a bit by putting Skate Story (Steam) in the sports section but it’s gotta go somewhere. Anyway, I’m the last person who hasn’t played it yet but I keep seeing everyone say the vibes are very good. It has a demo too!
Old School Rally (Steam) is exactly what it says it is. It’s a rally game that looks like it’s between the PSX and PS2 in terms of aesthetics (so Dreamcast era then?) and I think it looks nice.
TTRPGs
We Shall Be Monsters (publisher page) is a solo ttrpg inspired by Frankenstein about creating a living being, and now you can buy it in the form of a 20 page zine. I’m a big fan of Good Luck Press and their designers!
Dragon Reactor (Itch) is a mech tragedy game about conflict on a grand scale using d6 and for 2+ players.