Aug 8, 2024Indie Highlight
Embark on a wholesome and cozy mail delivery adventure in Letter Bunny, developed by Dramatic Iceberg! You play as Anne, an adorable and small bunny who has been tasked with delivering the mail on a big island. A nasty storm recently hit the island leaving many letters and packages lost. Your job is to not only deliver the lost mail, but to do so much more around the island, too!
Explore the island and deliver the mail in creative ways. Use different tools to get the job done, too. Like the tool that lets you grab a package from down below and reel it up to you! Even glide and slide around the island to get from one place to the next. Just be sure to look around for some hidden secrets.
Delivering the mail in Letter Bunny is your top priority, but there’s no reason not to get to know the folks you deliver too, though. Help them out with some tasks or just listen to their stories and make friends. But that’s not all there is to do on the island. Go fishing, catch bugs, or even prove your skills in sled races!
The adorable Letter Bunny is coming to Steam soon! Add it to your Wishlist to be notified when it releases.
Jul 12, 2023Indie Highlight
Grab some friends and hop into a chaotic multiplayer co-op game of gathering resources and crafting railroad tracks to travel across the world in Unrailed! Encounter different inhabitants as you journey across more than five biomes in an endless procedurally generated world. Master challenges as you encounter them to keep your train moving.
Unrailed! is a co-op game, so working together is of course important, but make sure to polish your communication skills! There’s only one of each tool necessary for gathering resources, so you and your friends will need to coordinate in order to succeed. You’ll also need to upgrade your train to prepare for the challenges you’ll face. Get an atomic engine, upgrade your crafting car, or upgrade one of the many other options.
You can find Unrailed! on Steam, Epic Games, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.
Want more chaotic co-ops? Checkout Overcooked, Moving Out, Farm Your Friends, and Witchtastic.
Jan 5, 2023Indie Highlight
Venba isn’t your average cooking game, and certainly doesn’t feature the usual recipes. Instead, the game serves up a delicious array of Southern Indian fare that will make your mouth water. Plus, you’ll embark on a journey through the life of Venba and her family in the 1980s, who have just immigrated to Canada.
Spend time with Venba and her family in this stylistically and visually cozy game as you experience love, loss, and so much more. Cook up authentic Southern Indian dishes, sometimes from memory. Venba’s precious cookbook, her connection to a home left behind, was damaged in the move to Canada. Now, it’s up to her to solve some puzzles and remake the recipes.
Venba also features a soundtrack inspired by Indian Musicals, and poems from Tamil poet Valluvar. Developer Visai Games has left out no details, and Venba feels like it will be an exceptionally immersive game.
Developer Visai Games announced on Twitter that Venba will release for Nintendo Switch in Spring of this year. The game will also be available on Steam this Spring, and is currently available to Wishlist!
Check out more cooking games here, or take a look at Yum Yum Cookstar!
Nov 16, 2022Indie Highlight
City building games certainly aren’t a new concept. We’ve even covered a few of them, like The Colonists, where you control a fleet of robots who do your bidding. Harvest resources, refine them, and use them to build your city. There’s also Before We Leave, which has you rebuilding settlements on the surface of the earth and eventually colonizing space. You’ll have to manage your resources, build, and harvest crops. SimCity is also a popular one where players have to make certain decisions to keep their citizens happy while building up the city. Gourdlets stands slightly apart from the rest.
Gourdlets is a cute city builder by developer AuntyGames promises to be even more relaxing. There are no tasks to complete, no resources to gather or refine, and no citizen requests to meet. It’s simply a delightful little sandbox city builder perfect for those who want the creativity of a city builder without the pressure of tasks and requirements.
You start the game with a railroad, a small piece of land, and a bench. It’s up to you to grow the land and make it the city you want to see. You can lay down several types of terrain, like grass, sand, dirt, and snow. There are trees, flowerbeds, and even fences to use for decoration. And of course, there are a few different homes you can place. Design and build the wonderland of your dreams in this charming pastel sandbox, and watch as the Gourdlets move in and live their little lives. What will you create?
Gourdlets is available now to play for free on itch.io. It is also coming to Steam, but currently has no release date available. You can add it to your wishlist, though. You can also follow the developer, AuntyGames, on Twitter for updates, or read the comments on itch.io for information on updates, as AuntyGames is active there too.
For another city builder, check out Biz Builder Delux!
Jun 6, 2022Indie Highlight
This just in! Newly-founded small indie game studio based in Italy, Dramatic Iceberg, is currently working on two adorable games; Racoonie: Legend of the Spirits (more on this later) and Garden In! To start with, Garden In is a relaxing and peaceful game about planting seedlings in pots and watching them grow. Perfect for casual gamers.
Much like Unpacking, you focus on small rooms within a house that you get to decorate to your liking. In this case, you can also change the background design and colour outside of the room to set the mood you want.
Each plant is unique and has different needs. Some will need certain soil to grow its roots, others get their nutrients through their leaves and only need objects like rocks in the pot, and there are others that only need water as they can float. Furthermore, you can discover different combinations to complete your herbarium by combining seedlings. Two compatible seedlings can be placed in a bigger and larger hybridization vase to create a new seed.
For now, you can Wishlist Garden In on Steam here. There isn’t a release date yet, however more information and another trailer will be announced during The Summer Game Fest this weekend. Furthermore, on June 13th, 2022, you can find a demo for Steam Next Fest. *Updated: trailer below*
Nov 9, 2019Reviews
Donut County, devoloped by Ben Esposito and published by Annapurna Interactive (What Remains of Edith Finch), released on Steam, PS4, GOG, the App Store, and the Mac App Store in 2018. Thanks to the awesome Steam’s Halloween Sale, I was able to play this hilarious physics-based puzzle game. It is indeed reverse-Katamari from the gameplay mechanics and premise, to the colorful and whimsical world of strange characters. In Donut County, you control a hole and put everything and anything in it! My only complaint is that I wish the game was longer because I enjoyed it so much. You can check out my full gameplay of 2 hours below!
The idea of starting with consuming smaller objects so that you can grow-in-size and move on to larger ones, had me sold. But the game goes even further by adding a fully-formed and ridiculous plot about raccoons building a bigger trash empire through use of their technology. Apparently that includes this remote-controlled hole that brings what it swallows 999 feet underground. So don’t worry, no animals were harmed during your enjoyment of total destruction.
To shake things up a little, certain levels require a tad more strategy like with hard-to-reach objects. For example, you can upgrade the hole to have a launcher to shoot things upward, such as a frog to catch the flies. You can’t die and you can’t really mess up so you can just keep trying different things until they work! Eventually our friend the raccoon, BK, gets stuck down under with the entire town and helps to come up with a plan to send everyone back.
To check out the official website of Donut County, click here!
Nov 2, 2019Quick Bits
Coffee Talk is a casual talking simulation game developed by Toge Productions. This game caught my eye in early development due to your customers being fantasy characters! Now, not only do we know that Coffee Talk will be releasing January 29th, 2020, but that it will also release simultaneously on PC, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One! Anyone else excited about serving coffee and listening to the stories of elves, orcs, mermaids and the like?
You can wishlist Coffee Talk on Steam here or for an amazing physical copy for the PS4 and Switch version in Japanese, go here. That package consists of the game, 2 soundtrack CDs, and a mini artbook! The developers assure us that “Even though it’s only available in the Japanese version, the game will still feature the same language options as the digital version (EN, JP, KR, CN, RU, and many more). The artbook also has some developer commentaries in English and Japanese.”
Let’s not forget that the Nintendo Switch is region-free. Meaning, you can pop in a Japanese disc into your Switch, and even select the language you want as mentioned above! Sounds like the physical Switch version will be accessible to all!
You can already download Coffee Talk’s updated demo on Steam now, or wait for a possible upcoming Switch demo.
Oct 12, 2019Indie Highlight
We’re nearing Halloween, a wonderful time of year, and I wanted to keep you all in the festive mood this month! Although, I’ll never understand why people love pumpkins in October so much. I mean, potatoes are awesome every day of the year! Last month in September 2019, a creepy and cute little indie game gem was released for Steam, Origin, GOG and Humble Bundle. It’s a short casual and story-driven game with dark undertones but the narration by Mr. Voice and other voice acting really has me interested! If you’re a fan of A Series of Unfortunate Events, then you should probably check out this title.
Little Misfortune is an interactive story, focused on exploration and characters, both sweet and dark, where your choices have consequences. Starring Misfortune Ramirez Hernandez, an imaginative 8-year-old, who seeks the prize of Eternal Happiness, as a gift to her Mommy. Led by her new friend, Mr. Voice, they venture into the woods, where mysteries are unraveled and a little bit of bad luck unfolds. Sharing the same universe with the cult video game Fran Bow, created by the visionary dev-duo Killmonday Games.
Stay tuned for more news on announcements for PC, console and mobile versions! For another interactive and spooky narrative game, check out this article here: A Juggler’s Tale – A Sidescrolling Puppet Theater Game.