Indie Tag Search
Indie Games Tagged with "indie"
Escape from the Underworld is a short exploration platformer that shares some design elements with some of the most successful indie games in recent history: Knytt, Iji, Seiklus, Cave Story, and, well, we could probably go on. In short, Escape from Underworld is a Metroidvania and it's really, really good.
Games Featured:
- • Light Arrow
- • A House in California
- • Great Migrations
Time for stuff! With the notable exception of Great Migrations, the games in this edition of Weekend Download seem to be dominated by white on black landscapes. Old school throwback or conscious atmospheric design choice? To that question I answer: yes!
Oh, brains. You are as delicious (to zombies) as you are useful (to anyone running from zombies). You're also apparently quite explodable, as evidenced in this colorful cartoon-like physics game BrainSplode!. Created by Rust Red Games, all you've got is a cannon, some highly-useful missiles, and a few mid-air power-ups that help you control things. Oh, and an inexplicable hatred of squishy pink brains.
Games Featured:
- • Sp.A.I.
- • Dear Agent
- • Eternal Dusk
- • Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Hey, you, weekend gamer. You want I should share games with you? You want they should be uh, fun? Good. Because I have games that are fun. RPG fun. Puzzle fun. Lasers fun. Lantern fun. What? You think lanterns are no fun? You think "flashlight.app" is more fun? Hmm. You need to play with lanterns more often, I think...
Winter Voices: Avalanche is a quiet, slow-paced, and very different kind of tactical role playing game. You play a young girl living in a snowy village whose father has just passed away. Dealing with the emotions that follow is difficult, and the mysteries surrounding her father's past makes it even more challenging. Avalanche is the first in a series of episodes telling the story of Winter Voices, and if you're looking for a game that's heavy on emotion, character, and storytelling, this one won't disappoint.
Games Featured:
- • Magnesian
- • Super Crate Box
- • Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch
- • Dustforce!
What's the most entertaining household object you can think of? Did you say "wooden crate"? Or, perhaps, "magnet"? "Broom"? You probably did, and since you did, you are rewarded with games that use said entertaining objects to provide even more entertainment in a digital, computerized form.
For some reason, everyone loves collecting things that are smaller than they are. We're not so much interesting in gathering buildings as we are looking at them, but if buildings were pint-sized, you can bet they'd fill our pockets like lint-covered jellybeans. Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds plays on this compulsion and puts you in control of a blob of gray goo that can eat anything smaller than it is. As you can guess, this is a dangerous thing to let loose on the Earth, but give it a time machine and all of the past and future could be in quite a pickle.
Games Featured:
- • Inside Job
- • Sanctum
- • Remaddening
Fooling around with the titles of this week's selection of games, I discovered something unusual. If you rearrange the letters, you can create the phrase "a decarbonised djinn met musing". Now, that may seem a bit random on the surface, but if you think about it (especially if you're a djinn who has had his carbon removed), you'll either go mad or realize it's kind of a funny thing. But, whatever... GAMES!
What Makes You Tick: A Stitch in Time is a handsome, evocative adventure game from Lassie Games. It features an excellent presentation, puzzles that are solid and never illogical, and a rich storyline. I continue to be entranced by the world of Ravenhallow and vicinity. One novel feature of A Stitch in Time is the ability to play every scene in both day and night. The differences between Ravenhallow in the day and nighttime are not only crucial to solving certain puzzles, but give you nearly twice as much game to explore. Ravenhallow becomes an entirely different world at night.
Games Featured:
- • Space Funeral
- • Cell.Protect
- • Streemerz 2
Video games have existed for so long, game parodies have begun to take hold. Those parodies have been around for so long, they're morphing into full, respectable games. Those full, respectable games are aging quite nicely, producing subtle bits of gaming candy like Space Funeral below!
And Yet It Moves, the simple but marvelous indie release from Broken Rules, will reignite your love for video games. That, or it will cause you to shake with anger as you replay the same part of the game for the tenth time. It might even do both! The physics-centric platform adventure employs the familiar "world tilting" mechanic that allows you to rotate the entire game environment in 90 degree increments. And Yet It Moves then proceeds to do crazy and wonderful things with this, allowing you to explore a universe as strange as it is satisfying.
Games Featured:
- • Gobber Assault
- • Zymo
- • Pheon
We've got three very special games for you this weekend! Special because they're all retro in style, but also special because they're really good and can be played over and over and over again and still provide loads of fun.
It's contest time! Want a free Indie Love Bundle? 'Course you do! Come up with your own creative kind of "bundle" and leave it in our comments. We'll choose ten winners to receive a load of free indie games!
Games Featured:
- • The Hive
- • The Myth of Sisyphus
- • TimeStill 2
- • Cenfinity
More games to help your weekend be more weekend-ey than ever! The first item on the list will keep you occupied for several hours, a somewhat rare thing with games of its quality. The rest are great for short spurts or long marathons, whatever helps you get the best score!
Two years after your victory in the first game, Eschalon Book II finds you living a quiet life... perhaps too quiet, since your skills are beginning to erode, and you find yourself forgetting important details, but troubled by strange dreams. When you awake to find a note on your doorstep from a stranger who claims to know who you really are, you find that the adventure has only just begun in this turn-based isometric RPG featuring open world gameplay.
Games Featured:
- • Fail-Deadly
- • Unarmed and Dangerous
- • The Lair of Fungal Wonder
- • Isolation
Another Ludum Dare, another bunch of cool experimental games to play! This competition's theme was "enemies as weapons", and each entry did something slightly different with the concept.
Instead of playing the usual part of "hero who saves the world", Recettear fits you in behind the scenes as shopkeeper, the thankless job of providing an endless supply of items. You'll haggle with customers, make smart purchases as the guild, and even hire adventurers to strike out on your own, looting dungeons in true action/RPG form!
Daniel wakes up on the floor of an ancient castle, unable to remember anything but his name... unfortunate for him since his past might be out to get them. Frictional Games delivers one of the most tense and frightening horror titles in a long time, using superb atmosphere and physics controls to plunge you into a story you won't soon forget... assuming you survive.
Games Featured:
- • Jables's Adventures
- • L'Abbaye des Morts
- • PlasmaPig
We've been fortunate enough to receive a number of big indie releases these last weeks, but the "even more indie" small devs aren't sitting on their hands, as evidenced by the games below. Behold, free awesomeness!
The road to magical greatness is difficult, littered with dragons, enchantments, adventure... not to mention test scores, rival students, detentions, and trying to keep your ghostly familiar in check. This incredibly ambitious text adventure from Black Chicken Studios is one part life simulator, one part fantasy RPG, and a whole lot of fun if you have the patience to let yourself become immersed in the tale of the making of the greatest mage of all time... you.
Sam and Max cap off the final episode of their new season of adventure games with The City That Dares Not Sleep.
Games Featured:
- • MADRIS
- • Infinity Bit
- • Tales of Unspoken World
- • Under the Garden
A Game By Its Cover competition has ended, all the votes are in, and the games are ready to play! The competition asked artists to craft cover art for imaginary games, then the programmers stepped in and made games based on the art. We've already featured a few of the contenders in the competition (Cat Poke, 8:Capsule, Dot Order Tie, and Love Letter), so below we'll highlight a few other favorites from the competition.
Games Featured:
- • Sugar Cube
- • Mr. Blocko: Super Tournament Edition
- • Alex Adventure
CUUUUTE games this week. So unabashedly cute. Sugar cubes and tiny block guys. Squeaking mushrooms and elevators that play elevator music. Ohhhh, I'm gonna burst with sugary sweetness.
Games Featured:
- • Momodora
- • Nudo
- • Cat Poke
- • 8:capsule
Pop quiz! The fact that there is now a game about poking cats is: A) Awesome or B) AWEsome. Your answer will greatly influence your future. Think carefully.
With his egg-bound siblings scattered all over the level, Toki Tori has to harness the powers of bridge building, block drops, ghost traps freeze rays, teleportation and waddling to rescue them all in the return of this brilliant puzzle/platform game.
Games Featured:
- • Typomagia!
- • Chawp!
- • Liquisity 2
- • Warlock Bentspine
The exclamation mark. It is thought to have originated from the Latin word for joy, lo, and made an appearance in printed English literature in the 1400s. Now, developers can append it to the end of their game titles to denote happiness, excitement or, indeed, to encourage you to exclaim the name outloud.
Today, Carrion is struggling to hold off an enemy attack long enough to allow civilians to escape while his country burns around him. But how did he get there? As a respected soldier, Carrion has lived in his father's shadow his entire life, and keeps butting heads with the new regent. When he and his adopted brother Maric are assigned a task by the prince, Carrion has no idea it will start him on a long path that will threaten the fate of the realm and cause him to question not only those closest to him, but himself. Will he make it out alive? Find out in this high quality retro RPG that will keep you adventuring for a long time.
Games Featured:
- • D.O.T.: Dot Order Tie
- • The Moonkeeper
- • Mind Jolt
- • Tricky Truck
A lot of indie games have rolled off the presses in the past week, including several as entries in the TIGSource "A Game By Its Cover" competition (which ends today). We've featured one of these games below, but look for more in the weeks to come!
Originally released in Japan back in 2007, Recettear is the story of an item shop, a girl, and a fairy. Recette's father took out a loan and then skipped town, leaving her to pay off the debt. Soon, she meets Tear, a fairy who is as persistent as she is... well, persistent. She teaches Recette to run an item shop out of her house, purchasing stock for adventurers who head out into the world to slay monsters. Buy and sell swords, shields, food products and more, haggling with each customer and placing items in ideal locations to attract business.
The platform adventure will never die. And that's a good thing! Frogatto & Friends injects a little more life into the classic genre, placing great-looking pixel art and a satisfying action/exploration game in front of your eyes for the low low price of free!
Games Featured:
- • Sulkeis
- • Nation of Reincars
- • EverEternal WinterWorld 2
One of the games featured on this Weekend Download is a product of the GameJolt Indie Game Demake Contest, a recently-completed competition that tasked game creators to strip their favorite indie game of anything more complex than a few elements and scale it down to a retro size. The results were excellent, and you can find dozens more to play on the contest page, including some browser games!
REVENGE. That's the only thing on sixteen-year-old Merui's mind when a valuable item is stolen from her... inside a popular online game, that is. The thief, Alistair, offers her a deal; if she can figure out his identity before a month is up, he'll return the stolen item. Of course, that's easier said than done when Merui's schoolwork and personal life keep getting in the way of this polished, charming visual novel from developers Sake Visual.
Games Featured:
- • Robotz DX
- • Man Enough
- • Illuminator
- • Mirage
It's not often you find songs with lyrics in a video game. It's even less common that those lyrics explain how to play the game. Man Enough does both of those and somehow manages to squeeze in an image of a manly moustache between each round. Be impressed with catchy expositions!!!
The Silver Lining is a fan-created King's Quest adventure game that got the unlikeliest support: the backing of publishing giant Activision. This ten-year old project has nearly been shut down twice by lawyers, but it has finally seen the light of day in the form of its first episode, What Is Decreed Must Be. But is it what fans of the series wanted? And what about people who never donned Graham's cap?
Games Featured:
- • Uchuusen
- • Ultra Mission
- • Shoot First
Weekend Download contains 80% of your recommended weekly allowance of awesome. It is recommended you supplement your intake of downloadable games with a balanced diet selected from other sources, including Flash games, mobile games, and that game you play with a paddle where you hit the ball on the rubber band.
Gaius James Rover is really having a bad day; first the ship he was escorting to the governor was captured by pirates, and when he finally manages to escape he finds out that not everything is on the up-and-up. Also, he's a dog. Jolly Rover is a weird and funny point-and-click adventure with some of the scurviest dogs and cheekiest humour you could ever hope to see.
Gaius James Rover is really having a bad day; first the ship he was escorting to the governor was captured by pirates, and when he finally manages to escape he finds out that not everything is on the up-and-up. Also, he's a dog. Jolly Rover is a weird and funny point-and-click adventure with some of the scurviest dogs and cheekiest humour you could ever hope to see.
Games Featured:
- • Cut It
- • Tower Bombarde
- • Rise: Sea of Static
Wait, so you mean, these games were just sitting there? Waiting for someone to grab them? Nobody was watching, no one at all? What about cameras or electric shock thingies? Nothing? Hmm. So I guess it's ok you downloaded them, isn't it? K whatever, let's play.
The Oil Blue is a clever mixture of a time management game and a tycoon simulation where you lead a crew of workers who strike out into the sea to discover new locations to drill for oil. Each island you reclaim opens the way for your employer, United Oil of Oceania, to establish a permanent operation there. All you have to do is manage the drills, sell the oil, and do everything as efficiently as you can.
Games Featured:
- • Attack of the 50ft Robot
- • A Picture is Worth a Thousand Orbs
- • Techno-Drone Alliance
What goes into a Weekend Download feature? The recipe is a secret, but it involves lots of game playing, internet searching, and cinnamon. Especially that last one.
Games Featured:
- • Surphasm
- • Rein
- • Dubloon
Nothing like a tall, cool glass of game to wash the week out of your system and get you ready for the weekend. Dubloon could easily keep you busy until Monday morning rolls around, but Surphasm is unique enough to deserve your attention. Rein is a great diversion when you're ready for an adventure that won't take you a week to complete.
Games Featured:
- • GunGirl 2
- • Baggage
- • Beeps and Blips
- • Lackadaisium
Piling on the clichés can be fun, and the heaviest-hitting release this weekend, GunGirl 2, does just that. So, ig releases come in small packages. Also, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And there's no time like the present.
There's something hidden in a mine deep beneath the ice in remote Greenland. Phillip follows a map to the location despite a letter from his missing father begging him to burn the documents he discovers. Phillip wants to find out what obsession could have taken his father from his family all those years ago. Instead, he may find more than he could ever be prepared for in Frictional Games' survival horror series about dark and secrets. What you can't see can hurt you.
Games Featured:
- • Blind
- • Hydorah
- • The Life of a Pacifist is often Fraught with Conflict
Multiple endings HURRAH! Different outcomes to the stories you are playing are nothing new, but it isn't often that the games are short and entertaining enough to encourage you to gather them all. It's interesting to play through several times just to see how your actions affect the game world. Two of this week's games feature different endings, and you'll definitely want to experience some of these alternate conclusions!
In Fractal, a puzzle game by the authors of Auditorium, your goal is to create "blooms" which are composed of six hexagons of the same color. On the surface it sounds like a simple matching puzzle, but the web-like nature of the gameplay and the gorgeous presentation makes it so very much more.
Games Featured:
- • Punishment: The Punishing
- • BulletZORZ
- • ProtoType
One of my favorite things about independent games are not the games themselves. It's the games' names. When you don't have to attract a certain demographic to plop down cash for your game so you can keep your massive studio in California air conditioned, you're free to have fun and call your game Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much, Squid Yes! Not So Octopus!, or Punishment: The Punishing! We love you too, indie game creators!
Fire Nuclear Crocodile Killer (FiNCK for short) is a puzzle platformer, but don't let the title fool you. In fact, out of the four rather unrelated things it suggests, I only encountered one during the whole game. As a Nifflas game, FiNCK must live up to a certain standard of cool relaxation instead of firey, manic arcade action. However, it differs from the author's previous offerings in that it forgoes atmospheric exploration in favor of a puzzle-driven, often hair-pullingly-frustrating experience.
Games Featured:
- • Visit
- • Aztec God
- • You Found the Grappling Hook
Certain conventions in video games will never change. Platformers always involve hopping on enemies' heads. Zombies want to eat your brains. Role playing games will always start with the main character being woken up from sleep. And swinging from walls and ceilings is fun. Let's keep it that way for a very long time, shall we?
Emberwind is an adventure-themed platform game from indie dev TimeTrap. The city of Grendale has been overrun by gremlins commanded by the evil CandleFinger. As the short, stout gnome Kindle Elderwood, it's your job to comb through the villages and dispatch the evil little buggers from every nook and cranny. Along the way you'll get to learn new abilities and collect a whole lot of loot!
Games Featured:
- • Blackfoot
- • STREEMERZ
- • Amphibix
A few games for your weekend perusal, all of which summon that coveted "oh, neat!" moment at least once! Also, it's a miracle I didn't type a D instead of a T at the end of the first game.
Strap on your point-and-click shoes, because these robots are assembled and ready for adventure! In this latest from Wadjet Eye games take control of a group of newly invented miniature robots with unconventional abilities who unwittingly cause trouble for their human creators when they stumble across a villain's strange secret. Fun, funny, and cheerful, Puzzle Bots is a quality adventure that, while short, is great for everyone.
Games Featured:
- • Eternally Us
- • Hero Core
New releases from either Daniel Remar or Ben Chandler, both highly-recognizable figures in the indie community, is always cause for fun-type celebration! Their games aren't as widely known in the mainstream gaming community as they should be, giving us cool people that smug, superior feeling of having a secret source of great entertainment.
Five amazing, cross-platform indie games, one gorgeous sale. The Humble Indie Bundle lets you pick up World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra: Overture for one magically low price of whatever you want to pay. All titles are DRM-free and run on Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.
Have you ever wanted to tell a story about a kitten? Or an alien? Or a mummy, or a genius, or a demon, or a block of cheese, or a little girl with the magical ability to talk to soap? Well, a little bit of time and effort with Sleep is Death will let you do just that, all in the form of a playable experience for you and a friend.
Games Featured:
- • Brave Island Diver
- • Needles
- • Jump Pirate
- • Paradise Fort
It's Ludum Dare time again! Another competition, another healthy round of entertainment and creativity. Over 200 games were submitted this time around, each involving the theme of "islands". Below you'll find a few of our choices out of the lot. Be sure to check out all the games and, if you're cool, cast your vote for the winners!
Sam and Max are back in another season of episodic adventure games! Expanding upon the established point-and-click formula explored in Sam & Max - Culture Shock and following episodes, the first game in The Devil's Playhouse season, The Penal Zone, lets you see things through the warped perspective of Max. Yes, it's as crazy as you think, if not moreso. But it's still a lot of adventuring goodness with the duo's characteristic sense of humor slapped on every object and situation.
Games Featured:
- • An Ordinary Shooter
- • There IS A Wall
- • Restricted Recall
- • Aftermath
This edition of Weekend Download is all about failure. Failure to escape a missile attack, failure to create a non-ordinary game, failure to climb over a wall, and failure to, well, not die. Failure is part of playing video games, as without risk there's no reward for succeeding, but the titles below use failing in some creative ways!
Games Featured:
- • Zombie Movie
- • LinePatterns
- • Action Fist
Meta challenge! If you can choose the game featured below that's clearly better than the others, you win the meta game! Too bad that's impossible, 'cause all of the games are extraordinary pieces of gaming art. :-P
Return to the underworld of Avernum one last time in the conclusion to Spiderweb Software's iconic RPG series. When a blight brings famine down upon the people of Avernum during a war, four soldiers are called to become heroes from unlikely beginnings. Create your party and set out into a dark world full of adventure, betrayal, and, most importantly, hidden treasure!
Games Featured:
- • Parallel Universe
- • Blue Roller
- • Ninja Rush
A handful of simple games to help you pass your weekend! Nothing that will entrance you for hours, just a couple of action arcade games and a platformer that's actually two platformers running at the same time. Nice, simple fun.
Games Featured:
- • Neonite
- • Diminish
- • They Need to be Fed
Welcome to the woooooorld of tomorrow!!!! That'd be really profound if you read it yesterday. Why isn't it profound to read things about yesterday today? I, for one, am pretty darned impressed people can remember events of days past. Things like the release of Dissipate or Jesse Venbrux's older games. Not that those were small events, mind you, just that they happened at a moment in time that is not this very moment in time...
Games Featured:
- • Jump, Copy, Paste
- • Digital: A Love Story
- • Ruined
This weekend we have an enormously interesting game to share: Digital: A Love Story. The title encapsulates the experience quite well, as it's a game that's both about 20 year old technology and love.
Games Featured:
- • Drone
- • Boxycraft
- • A Weekend in Space
Step one: Push the box, solve the puzzle. Step two: Go into space, push the box, get your stuff. Step three: Build a machine, buy some weapons, pick up some money. STEP FOUR WIN!
Games Featured:
- • Fatherhood
- • Fishface
- • Desktop Dungeons
It's a roguelike-like Weekend Download! Two of our games this weekend snuggle up to the famously non-casual sub-genre without turning up the complexity. Same RPG flavor, one tenth the time commitment! Quaffing potions should be a standard roguelike feature, though...
Caster is a third-person action-shooter with distinct influences from the glory days of console gaming; it cooks up some of the most-enticing features of high-energy, super-powered shooter action and serves it up on a silver platter.
Games Featured:
- • Wolf, Goat, and Cabbage
- • Animal Control
- • Six-Chamber Champion
- • Watch Ducks
Why spend all of your time toiling away on one game when you can make a ton of them? The 529-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart II: Kart Harder is all about that, and the games featured below are from this recent event. 102 people contributed a total of 529 games over the weekend, each made in under two hours. It's quantity over quality, so don't expect the next Sprout, but do expect a lot of wacky ideas, one-trick games, and maybe even a few things that, once seen, can never be unseen. Check out a random selection of the 529 games, and don't be afraid to download and play many more!
Games Featured:
- • Vatn Squid
- • Paper Dreams
- • Dissipate
Games are fun. Jam is delicious. Why not combine the two? The Game Jolt Weekend Game Jam has both of those words (even though its jam is less strawberry flavored) and contains exactly the same amount of yum. Check out a few of the top games from this 48 hour competition.
It's time to travel back to Isola! Yes, that magical island paradise with the odd wildlife and mysterious ruins is back in Virtual Villagers 4: The Tree of Life, the latest installment in the Virtual Villagers casual sim series by Last Day of Work. The powerhouse of the field, the game by which all other village simulations are measured, is back to delve deeper into the secrets of the island!
All it takes is one stranger on the road on one dark night to unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that could change the world. Choose your party members from nine distinct personalities and set off on a side-scrolling free RPG adventure through lush environments full of strange characters. Featuring nine chapters, a complex battle scheme, and more, it's a stunning linear adventure that will delight fans of the genre.
Games Featured:
- • Lunnye Devitsy
- • Which
- • The Hunt
This week's selection of downloadable games seems to ask a lot of questions. Not because one of their titles practically is a question, but because of the way they're made. What rests beyond the next corridor? How can you get to the other side of that waterfall? And if I step out into that suspiciously dark and open wooded area, will I get attacked by something hideous?
Galcon Fusion is the latest in the growing line of casual strategy games from Phil Hassey. Following Galcon Classic, the original desktop version of the series, and borrowing a ton of tricks from the iPhone incarnations Galcon and Galcon Labs, Fusion pits you against the rest of the galaxy as you fight for dominance. Featuring high-definition visuals, loads of interesting modes of play, and several fun bells and whistles, Galcon Fusion is a respectable successor in the Galcon line and a captivating casual Risk-like strategy game.
Games Featured:
- • BirdyWorld
- • Mr. Kitty's Quest
- • Bitworld
- • Dungeons of Fayte
The recently-completed TIGSource Assemblee Competition was all about artists and programmers working together as one big happy family-like unit. The two-part competition began with artists/musicians creating assets, then programmers came along, scooped up the goodies and used them to make games. The results, as you can see, are extraordinary, with over 70 games submitted in the end. Below are a few highlights of the competition.
Games Featured:
- • A very brief tale
- • Strangers
- • War and Peace
Sometimes you don't want an epic story or 80 hours of gameplay out of your game. Sometimes you just want to mess around, experience something quirky, and call it a day. All of the games below are extremely short. They're "just 'cause" games, because the only reason you play them is just because you can!
If you're a fan of first person skydiving games with lots of vowels in the title, Aaaaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity by Dejobaan Games is right up your alley. Your goal is to make it from Point A (generally assumed to be somewhere above you) to Point B (somewhere below point A) without crushing every bone in your body. Unfortunately the skies are littered with airborne buildings and architectural oddities. And birds. And cars. And large glass plates with numbers on them.
Games Featured:
- • TowerClimb
- • Sheep
- • Heartwild Solitaire Classic
Ahem. Here we go Loopty Loo! Here we go Loopty Li! Here we go Loopty Loo! Because it's Weekend Download that you can possibly read on a Saturday night!
In the mood for a seriously intense turn-based strategy game? Solium Infernum is about as non-casual as you can get, featuring no in-game tutorial and a 30+ page instruction manual. But it rewards players with superb open-ended gameplay that has as many paths to victory as you can conjure.
Games Featured:
- • TimeStill
- • Flood the Chamber
- • This Is How Bees Work
- • Probability Zero
Simplicity is often overlooked in modern games. Whereas early programmers had little more to work with than a few lines of code and a green-on-black screen, modern game makers can have armies of programmers, artists, and computers on their side. It doesn't take 3D visuals and realistic physics to make a good game, though, as indie game creators prove time and time again. This week's games are small in some ways, but enormous in others, and all have that special something that makes you treasure the time you spend with it.
Games Featured:
- • Wave Goodbye
- • Squid and Let Die
- • Wave Goodbye
Reflexes are a mixed bag, aren't they? On the one hand, they cause you to do things like uncontrollably kick people if they look at your knees (that's a reflex, honest), on the other hand, they jerk your hand away from painful objects and let you play insanely fast and chaotic games.
Terry Cavanagh's ambitious and charming little game of platformer-esque exploration contains a lot of fun, but may demand too much from your reflexes for some players. Seek out your missing crew across a sprawling map packed with secrets, symbolism, and a whole lot of challenge that will put all your skills to the test. Buckle up, Captain.
Games Featured:
- • Apocalypse Adventure
- • Penguinagain
- • Scavenger
- • Cat Planet
It's Ludum Dare time again! Ludum Dare 16 has come and gone, leaving with us dozens upon dozens of unique, quickly-crafted games to enjoy. The latest competition's theme was "exploration", and here are a few of the top games as voted by the LD community!
Games Featured:
- • ArGeeBee
- • Opera Omnia
- • Audia
It's the first Weekend Download of 2010! We thought we would go easy on you while you break in your new calendar, so all of the games below have a light download footprint. You can handle a few megs worth of games, can't you? Sure you can!
Games Featured:
- • Shards
- • Hydorah
- • Battle of Tiles
If games weren't challenging, we wouldn't bother with them, right? Games create a set of rules that cause certain actions to be difficult, then you, the player, must try to perform those actions. It's a narrow definition, to be sure, but challenge on any level is something that sits at the core of gaming. Each of the games below throws challenges at you in a different way, whether it's via enemies, puzzles, restrictive physics, or a combination of all three. Sometimes you have to form a strategy, but sometimes it's about fighting with the game itself to make it all work. Either way, it's fun.
Games Featured:
- • GunFu Deadlands
- • !
- • Sumotori Dreams
- • Magic Planet Snack
- • Dawn's Light: A Christmas Tale
Ever wonder what happens to the games we feature on Weekend Download? Think the respective developers just take a nap and start on something new? Oh ho HO! You would be wrong! Two of this week's games are updates of titles we featured in the past, proving once and for all (insert significant philosophical observation here).
Games Featured:
- • Lily
- • We Want YOU
- • Kaiser Kitty
I'm a sucker for cute, quirky games. Throw a few chunky pixels in my direction, slap on a coat of "retro, yet new" gameplay on the top, and you've got my attention. All three games this weekend have that quirky old-school charm, and all three were thoroughly played/nommed by yours truly!
Games Featured:
- • Focus
- • Dreamside Maroon
- • Saut
Exploration is most of the reason why many of us play video games. When a developer crafts an entire world for you to play in, it's easy to get giddy with the concept of probing every corner and climbing on top of every boulder. This week's selection features several games that are heavy on the discovery aspect of gaming. Whether it's a magical world filled with moonlight or a dark pixel cave, you never know what's around the corner until you look...
Games Featured:
- • Restraining Order
- • Focus
- • rComplex
- • Igneous
RUUUNNNN!!!!! Escape games of the non-point-and-click variety are well-represented in the indie gaming community. What could be more basic than "get away from the thing that's chasing you"? Two of this weekend's titles focus on running away from something really scary. And you'll have a good time doing just that!
One the surface, Gratuitous Space Battles, from Kudos developer Positech Games, looks like your run-of-the-mill space RTS, something in the vein of the Homeworld series or Star Wars: Empire at War. But when that glance turns into a longing stare, you'll realize it's very different from both of those series and isn't really, in fact, a real time strategy game at all. Gratuitious Space Battles has a whole new system of gameplay going for it that, in many ways, feels more like a tower defense game than anything else.
Games Featured:
- • Harmony
- • Featherweight
- • Dungeon
- • Devil's Tuning Fork
Two things the indie gaming community thrives on are experimentation and nostalgia. Some developers push their concepts so far the resulting experience is unlike anything we've ever seen. It may be fun, it may be frustrating, but we love it for the boundless innovation. Other developers take classic concepts and reinvent them for the modern player, resurrecting proven gaming mechanics for everyone to enjoy once again. The selection of games below illustrates both concepts quite well, with a few games blending both nostalgia and experimentation in equal parts. Gotta love indie game creators!
Once upon a time, an exceptional game designer decided to put his hands to making a 'cool' game. It worked. The result was Excitebike, a fast-paced and challenging motorbike racing game. Released this year is the strikingly similar debut game from Turborilla, the aptly titled Mad Skills Motocross. While there are obvious differences between the latter and former games, the general idea of "move right using a motorbike while making jumps and going fast" is here, and that's what we like to see.
Games Featured:
- • The Balloon Bros Tumble-Top Sideshow Spectacular!
- • Au Sable
- • Fetus
- • Tetripong
Alternate title for this edition of Weekend Download: The Balloon Bros. Return of the Attack of the Wrath of the Download: Episode 2 Part 4 - Tetripongfetusausable's Revenge.
Kiss your free time and your loved ones goodbye. Torchlight is here. The indie rogue-like/action/RPG title has been highly anticipated, but is it worth all the hype? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Stop talking to me, I'm trying to play. With randomly generated dungeons, an obscene amount of treasure and monsters to hunt, and a faithful animal companion at your side, Torchlight is a stellar example of indie gaming at its finest.
Games Featured:
- • ButaVX: Justice Fighter
- • Umbrella Adventure - The Castle of Cake
- • Home
Who needs bajillions of colors, seriously? The games below illustrate that all you need for a visual presentation are a few well-placed shades of gray (or orange and black, for the last one) and you've got yourself a visual style!
Games Featured:
- • ButaVX: Justice Fighter
- • Umbrella Adventure - The Castle of Cake
- • Home
Who needs bajillions of colors, seriously? The games below illustrate that all you need for a visual presentation are a few well-placed shades of gray (or orange and black, for the last one) and you've got yourself a visual style!
Games Featured:
- • Heartland Deluxe
- • The White Chamber
- • Unbound
Lots of movies, books, TV shows and games try to scare people around Halloween. Instead of shocking you with things that jump out and go "BWAGGA BWAGGA!!!!", let's get a little more disturbing with a few adventure games that will make you question your sanity. Without further stalling for time and taking up valuable page space... Let's. Get. Scary.
Eufloria, formerly known as Dyson, is a real-time strategy game built around the concepts of simplicity, ambience, and gentle pacing. It plays like an evolved version of Risk or Galcon, where sheer numbers and a good strategy are all you need to dominate. Eufloria isn't about warriors battling over blood-soaked soil. It's a slow, organic game that uses plants as its inspiration, challenging you to expand a seedling empire one asteroid at a time.
Games Featured:
- • Excavatorrr
- • GunFu Deadlands
- • Angry Gorilla Machine Monsters
Digging games and shooting games go together like eggs and peanut butter. I'll let you sit and ponder that one for a while, then feel free to come back and play the harmonious selection of games below!
On the list of things that are more useful in video games than they are in the real world, grappling hooks are certainly near the top. Acquiring a grappling hook in the real world is positively thrilling, until you start thinking of ways you can actually (and legally) use it. Fortunately, the aptly-titled Grappling Hook isn't grounded in reality. The puzzle platformer from SpeedRunGames is filled with 22 levels of quick-thinking grappling goodness that is sure to keep you zooming around for hours.
From Amanita Design, creator of the famously brilliant Samorost series, comes Machinarium, a game so well-conceived and implemented it can confidently launch as one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time. Machinarium is nothing short of a playable piece of art. Similar to Samorost in style and gameplay, you play a lone robot thrown out of the city working his way through desolate mechanical slums. Solve puzzles, find and combine items, and encounter loads of creative characters in your quest. Machinarium is one of those rare games you can't praise enough.
Games Featured:
- • You Can't Possibly Expect Me To Do That
- • Mr. Splode and the Fireworks Factory
- • Hatman
A handful of tiny, quirky, off-beat kinda games to enjoy this weekend. Want to step on spikes, die, then come back to life? Gotcha covered. Want to blow things up then run for your life? Check. Want to toss your hat? We're so into that, too.
Gridrunner Revolution is a frantic, visually-intense shooter from Llamasoft. You play an unnamed little spaceman, alone and braving the neon, explosion filled depths of space. Suddenly, enemy ships approach. Do they want your ship? Your knowledge? A key piece of technology you have? Nobody knows. All that we can be sure of is if you blow enough of them up, space sheep wander on to the screen — and you can collect them.
Game of the week
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