Featured Indie Game Releases []

List of All Indie Game Reviews -
ordered by date

« Older reviews | Newer reviews »
Mark of the Ninja —December 15, 2012— This might come as a surprise, but there's a lot of discrimination in the ninja industry, or the "ninjustry" as those of us in the 'biz call it. If you're not a mutant turtle from New York chances are you're going to have a little trouble finding work. Sure, every so often you see a rising star from Beverly Hills or something like that, but for the most part in this job it's go sewer or go home. Thankfully for those of us who aren't reptiles, there's Mark of the Ninja, a stealth action game developed by Klei Entertainment that provides ninja excitement without the heavy shell or outdated surfer lingo. As an unnamed ninja, you'll use your weapons, skills and the powers of a mysterious tattoo to seek revenge for an attack on your clan.
Red Rogue —December 11, 2012— Available in action-RPG or classic turn-based flavour, this moody roguelike from Aaron Steed and music maestro Nathan Gallardo is deliberately mysterious. Descend into a dungeon searching for an amulet with your undead minion, figuring everything from the backstory to the deeper gameplay mechanics as you go. Oh, and tearing off the faces of your enemies and wearing them for bonuses and enchantments. Hooray!
Virtual Families 2: Our Dream House —December 8, 2012— Last Day of Work loves virtual sims. I mean seriously loves them, at least according to their lead designer. And, well, their product line, which includes the massively popular Virtual Villagers series. For those of us who love messing with the lives of little virtual people without all that faffing about on an island, Last Day of Work created Virtual Families, a game which featured the animated people without the exploding volcanoes. Now they've come out with the sequel to that fabulous game, Virtual Families 2: Our Dream House, which deepens the gameplay of the original in new and interesting ways, and all for your handy portable iOS device!
Primordia —December 8, 2012— As Horatio Nullbuilt Version Five, you and your floating spherical partner Crispin Horatiobuilt need to explore a post-apocalyptic world while searching for your stolen power core. Along the way you'll encounter plenty of other robots both good and bad, but not the mythical Man, the original builders who vanished from the world in ages past. Maybe you'll even find out what happened to them during your search...assuming you don't end up in the scrap heap!
Vertigo —December 8, 2012— Want a simple game with simple graphics that will twist your head in a dozen different directions? Try Vertigo, a tough puzzle platformer from Ketone Games that utilizes just about every gravity and screen-altering element you can think of to bend your brain out of shape. You're limited to walking and jumping in this minimalist game, and your only goal is to make it to the exclamation mark exit. And how do you get there, seeing as it's glued to the ceiling far higher than you could ever hope to jump? Easy, you just mess with physics and screen scrolling!
A Man's Quest —December 6, 2012— A Man's Quest is an HTML5 action platformer by The Drunk Devs that hearkens to yesteryear, both in terms of its retro graphics and the bouncy spirit of childhood. Help Ty show up his rival Kevin by swiping his place as Chosen One and being the first to make it to the top of Ominous Power. A compressed burst of fun, if one with somewhat loose jump physics.
Miasmata —December 2, 2012— Your last, best hope for a cure for the plague running rampant through your body lies on a remote island, but when you arrive, destroying your boat in the process, you discover that not only do all the researchers lie dead, but something is stalking you through the trees. IonFX Studios delivers a beautiful but unevenly paced atmospheric survival adventure where you'll travel all over a massive island, hunting down and researching everything you need to make a cure, while trying to evade a creature smart enough to smell, stalk, and trap you.
Boulder Dash-XL —December 1, 2012— Everyone remember Boulder Dash? Back in 1984, a little developer called First Star Software released a puzzle game for Atari 8-bit computers that featured a treasure-hungry character named Rockford who spent his time digging through dirt looking for gems the size of himself. Turns out that activity worked out quite well for him, and it worked out well for us players, too, as the game thrived over the decades with a number of sequels and ports to other systems. Now, almost 30 years later, the hunt goes in in Boulder Dash-XL, a re-imagined and updated version of the classic game that has finally made its way to mobile devices. And you know what? It's still a pretty good time!
Wine & Roses —December 1, 2012— Exposition... story... who needs it anyway? In just one month, Craze created a free indie RPG with extremely little narrative but extremely deep challenge and strategy. Over thirty difficult battles await you as you venture into a sprawling fortress with three young women as your guardians, where success depends not on grinding levels or items, but on carefully thinking out every turn in combat and swapping out the various skills and spells you'll learn to make the most out of bonuses, strengths, and weaknesses. Get ready to die a whole bunch!
Scribblenauts Unlimited —November 25, 2012— Scribblenauts Unlimited is a new and improved release in the Scribblenauts line from 5th Cell Media. Giving you the power to create objects at will, you embark on a quest to bring happiness to the world, helping people in need by granting them objects from your magic notebook. That's all fine and good and such, but the fact of the matter is you can create just about anything you want, so while that pedestrian is in dire need of a glass of water, wouldn't it be so much more fun to give her a gigantic angry flying shark instead?
Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory —November 24, 2012— Have you ever stopped to think about the little cubes of sugar you put in your tea? Like, maybe they don't really appreciate being dropped into scalding hot liquid? Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory is a creative puzzle platform game from TurtleCream that tells the story of one little sugar cube that wasn't too keen on the idea of being put into baked goods. Eyeing a method of escaping the factory, he hops from the conveyor belt and begins his escape, one stage at a time.
Haunt —November 24, 2012— ParanormalDev offers up their take on the now iconic Slenderman mythos with a free gorgeous first-person horror adventure made in just two weeks. When you wake up alone and disoriented in a vast park in the middle of a downpour, you have no choice but to seek out help. Unfortunately for you, you might find a big, malevolent mystery instead as you seek out more story and clues than before.
Very Pink Game —November 24, 2012— Short and sweet, Very Pink Game is an adventure game created by sheepherds using RPG Maker 2003. It stars a lonely little girl named Ivy who receives a letter from a friend asking her to meet outside of town. In order to make it out of the pink village, though, Ivy has to solve a series of puzzles, helping the townsfolk go about their day by finding lost items, answering riddles, and solving problems. Just like (a very pink-colored) real life!
Little Inferno —November 18, 2012— Baby it's cold outside, but with your Little Inferno fireplace, you can stay warm and entertained forever... as long as you don't run out of things to burn. The Tomorrow Corporation brings a unique, quirky, and gorgeously addictive indie game that's part physics puzzle, and part adventure, all without leaving your hearth. Who really needs the world outdoors anyway? What could it possibly have to offer... ?
The Witch's House —November 17, 2012— If you get lost in the woods, you'd better hope the worst you have to deal with is bugs and being forced to go to the bathroom in a bush. Little Viola has no such luck, and when she wakes alone and confused, trapped on a forest path, the only way to go is inside a mysterious house. Unfortunately for her, the place proves to be filled with dark secrets and a ton of fatal tricks and traps, and staying alive will be harder than you think in this gory free indie horror adventure.
Imscared - A Pixelated Nightmare —November 17, 2012— Get your fuzzy blankey and turn on the lights, Imscared - A Pixelated Nightmare lives up to its name. This short and simple horror game from Ivan Zanotti puts you in a dark corridor and asks you to explore a bit, gathering keys in order to gain access to different rooms. You know you "need a heart" to make it to the exit, but surely that's some sort of riddle, isn't it? And that portrait totally had blood on it the first time you looked at it, you just didn't catch it in the same light... right?
The Fool and His Money —November 10, 2012— We've waited a long, long, long time, but the follow-up to Cliff Johnson's seminal puzzle game The Fool's Errand has finally been released: The Fool and His Money. Packed with logic and word puzzles of all kinds, and the whimsically confounding prose that made the original so enjoyable, The Fool and His Money is just the thing for players looking for a mental challenge.
Phantasmaburbia —November 10, 2012— You know what the worst part of dealing with ghosts is? It's the ectoplasm. That stuff gets all over everything. If you don't want all your worldly possessions covered in ghost slime, you might just want to ghostbust by proxy in Phantasmaburbia, an RPG adventure by Greg Lobanov, creator of Dubloon, Assassin Blue and a variety of other titles. It mixes in the best elements of classic RPGs, adds in a bit of spookiness and shakes vigorously to produce a tasty ghost cocktail!
What's In The Box? —November 10, 2012— You've heard of "The Long Arm of the Law," but have you ever heard of "The Long Arm of Postal Deliveries?" In What's In The Box?, you have a package to deliver, a dangerous maze of spikes and traps, and a reeeeeally long arm with which to get from start to finish. You've got to solve each room's puzzles of gates and traps in order to reach the exit with box in hand, but can you make it through the entire game without damaging your precious parcel?
Cook, Serve, Delicious! —November 4, 2012— Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a simulation and time management game from Vertigo Games, creator of the similarly spectacular The Oil Blue. If you see a restaurant game and immediately think "casual diversion", let Cook, Serve, Delicious! change your mind. This isn't a light and simple easy to win time management game. It's a full-on simulation that makes you work for your money, pushes you to play faster than you thought possible, and teaches you to strategically plan menus to maximize income without turning the ever-picky customer base away. It's not an easy game to excel at, but it's an easy game to get hooked on, and the challenge of building and running your own restaurant from front to back is going to captivate you for weeks on end.
Pid —November 4, 2012— Pid is a unique and heavily atmospheric platform game from Might and Delight, a team of developers who obviously know some secrets about portable stone-based gravity control the rest of us aren't privy to. Set in a hazy otherworld and starring a lost little kid, you'll learn to control small cones of gravity as you work your way through bizarre landscapes. Sometimes Pid feels like A Boy and His Blob, sometimes a stealth game, and sometimes even Portal. But really, Pid is Pid, and it stands strongly enough on its own to be something unique.
Cypher —November 3, 2012— A small time data smuggler in the corporate-dominated futuristic city of NeoSushi, Dogeron Kenan's job is to transport passcodes in his cybernetic arm, trying to keep one step ahead of both the lawful and unlawful who want to stop him. But things just went south, and now everyone in the town is out to get him. It's going to be a long night. An excellent piece of interactive fiction by the Cabrera Brothers, with an atmosphere that more than makes up for parser issues.
SCP - Containment Breach —October 31, 2012— It's just another day at SCP's secret underground headquarters, and you're just another disposable D-Class grunt about to be used in an experiment with the creature designated only as SCP-173. That's when the lights go out and the containment procedures fail, and you find yourself suddenly lost and alone, pursued by malevolent otherworldly entities in this randomly generated free adventure game.
Hotline Miami —October 28, 2012— The first commercial release from indie developer cactus and his partner Dennis Wedin is a brutal and bloody orchestra from violence. Messages left on your answering machine seem to drive you to acts of mass carnage and unspeakable violence, but what's the reason behind it all? Unlock new masks to hide your identity with special abilities, deal damage with tons of unlockable weapons, and master the game's reflex-driven combat to waltz your way through sprawling, challenging missions as you get closer to the truth.
8-bit Halloween —October 27, 2012— Whenever it gets close to Halloween, most of us are ready for a good scare. Zombies tunneling from below the soil, mummies leaping out from behind tombstones. Slenderman staring at us from off in the distance. Lionsoft, creator of the previously featured Sprint - King of the Jungle, knows the feeling well, not to mention a handful of retro games that fit the scary setting just as snugly. And so comes 8-bit Halloween, an arcade platform game that borrows from some of the most popular sidescrolling games of old to create a challenging, holiday appropriate release to get you in the mood.
« Older reviews | Newer reviews »