Blue Prince - ★★★★★
Blue Prince. Here’s the review: look at the rating, buy the game, grab a notebook – hell, buy a nice journal specifically for the game, so that you’ve got something better to remember it by than a few scrappy, crappy notes wedged between shopping lists and fantasy football line-ups – and spend your next month of evenings playing it.
The Darkest Files - ★★★★☆
The Darkest Files from Paintbucket Games sees players take the role of Esther Katz, a young prosecutor in 1950s Germany looking into historic crimes from the tail end of the Second World War. The game is a spiritual successor to Paintbucket’s earlier title, Through the Darkest of Times: both games are, unsurprisingly, pretty heavy experiences, going along with the studio's mission to develop video games that leave a lasting impact and focus on strong narratives.
Long-time readers won’t be surprised to hear that The Darkest FIles sounds like “my sort of” game: digging through swathes evidence and piecing together a story from various accounts… what’s not to like?
Urban Jungle - ★★★☆☆
Urban Jungle is the debut game from three-person studio Kylyk Games. In it, players take the role of Ayta Borisova during snapshots over almost thirty years of her life, between the years 1996 and 2024. As with many cosy games, it opens with Ayta during a fairly miserable moment in her life, worn down by corporate life and being yet another cog in an unappreciative system.
What she’s really passionate about is her plants, with the core gameplay coming from players placing plants to make each of those snapshots a cosy — and green — environment.
Spilled! - ★★★✮☆
Spilled! is the debut game from Dutch solo-developer Lente, in which players control a small boat cleaning up various environmental hazards. It starts with oil spills, which remain the prevalent issue throughout the game, but expands to patches of plastic bottles, oil barrels at the bottom of the seabed, forest fires, and more.
Knights in Tight Spaces - ★★☆☆☆
Knights in Tight Spaces takes the ideas introduced in Fights in Tight Spaces and attempts to build upon them. It comes with some fairly significant mechanical changes – more on that later – and eschews its previous, minimalist art style for a highly-stylised, hand-drawn aesthetic. I think the game looks wonderful: everything has been animated beautifully, and the graphics and UI are clean and easily readable. On appearance alone, I’d happily sink hours into Knights. Unfortunately, we don’t play games for their appearance alone, and when it comes to gameplay, it’s difficult not to feel let down.
Expelled! - ★★★★☆
In inkle’s Expelled!, you play boarding school student Verity Amersham, the prime suspect of the defenestration of another pupil. It’s impossible – you were fast asleep when it happened – but clearly someone is out to frame you, as all the evidence is pointing your way. Can you find a way to prove your innocence before you suffer the game’s eponymous fate?
Block Shop - ★★★★☆
In Block Shop, from FoolBox Studios, each puzzle has the player take various machines and conveyor belts to transform the level’s input blocks to those displayed in the output.
It’s a game that provides me plenty of personal “Eureka!” moments, but also impresses with its concept and level design.
Retrospective: Citizen Sleeper - ★★★★☆
With Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector dropping recently (and, for what it’s worth, IndieLoupe’s review of it coming soon™) we thought we’d take a look at the previous two games from Jump Over the Age (JOTA) - namely In Other Waters and, surprisingly enough, Citizen Sleeper. JOTA is the one-person game studio of developer Gareth Damian Martin, so it’s their brain we have to thank for these worlds and everything in them. Spoilers for both games to follow…
Retrospective: In Other Waters - ★★★☆☆
With Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector dropping recently (and, for what it’s worth, IndieLoupe’s review of it coming soon™) we thought we’d take a look at the previous two games from Jump Over the Age (JOTA) - namely In Other Waters and, surprisingly enough, Citizen Sleeper. JOTA is the one-person game studio of developer Gareth Damian Martin, so it’s their brain we have to thank for these worlds and everything in them. Spoilers for both games to follow…
The Roottrees are Dead - ★★★★✮
In The Roottrees are Dead, the Roottrees are Dead. Namely, the President of the Roottree Corporation, his wife, and their three daughters. You’re tasked with identifying all the remaining blood relatives of the Roottree family, ostensibly to sort out the inheritance issues that might arise with the family’s untimely demise.
It’s often compared to Return of the Obra Dinn - which is likely IndieLoupe’s only five-star game... can it live up to that hype?
My Little Life - ★★★☆☆
My Little Life from 9FingerGames is - to quote - “a life simulator that lives on the bottom of your screen, allowing you to focus on other tasks while periodically checking on your own little person.” Those tasks can be anything, from watching football to working, from writing reviews for My Little Life to fueling your crippling SuperTaxCity addiction… you get the idea. If you’re familiar with Rusty’s Retirement, it’s that, but with the Sims instead of Stardew Valley…
SuperTaxCity - ★★★✮☆
SuperTaxCity from Japanese developer soramame-koubou describes itself as a city-building/roguelite crossover. I thought I’d grab it for a quick little game to look at while working on a review for a longer game, and ended up playing it for almost nine hours - a number which is sure to increase. Suffice to say, it has managed to get its little roguelite claws into me: perhaps not to the extent that Balatro might have, but it’s certainly not loosening its grip yet.
Few Nights More - ★✮☆☆☆
My first impressions upon opening Few Nights More were not great. Despite being “released” - and I use the term loosely - this week, the game’s title screen welcomes new players with a Hallowe’en-themed skin, seemingly a three-month-old hangover from its time in early access. That the developers didn’t even put the effort into removing this (nor changing the game’s “You beat the final boss of Early Access " message) speaks volumes about their treatment of Few Nights More. The timing of its release, one day after None Shall Intrude’s, also doesn’t inspire confidence.
None Shall Intrude - ★☆☆☆☆
None Shall Intrude is a roguelite card battler where you play as a dragon who manipulates the elements to take down waves of enemies.
There are a significant number of parallels between it and Few Nights More. Both are published by Grab the Games, both are developed by Aeterna Ludi, and both were released within a day of one another. IndieLoupe knew that the games shared a publisher when we picked them up for review, but I have to admit that we only noticed further down the line that they were also created by the same developer. If a developer dropping two games one day after the other rings alarm bells for you, there might well be a good reason for that…
Pocket Lint - ★✮☆☆☆
Follow the Fun are probably best known for their - at time of writing - 66-game ‘I commissioned some…’ series. It’s a hidden-object smorgasbord which sees players finding bees, or finding cats, or finding frogs, or finding dogs, or finding bunnies, or finding abstract bunnies… you get the idea. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s a nice little series that executes the concept very well. Pocket Lint is a brief deviation from those games, offering a code-breaking puzzler where players attempt to get the correct combination of items in the right order.
Talented - ★★✮☆☆
Do you know what I like? Skill trees. My lasting memory of playing Final Fantasy X over twenty years ago is not so much Blitzball, or Chocobos, or even Tidus’ unsettling laughter, but the Sphere Grid. I’m not going to pretend my pre-teen mind had any idea what I was doing with it, but it was fun. I likely spent more time exploring it than the actual game, and ever since then, I’ve been a sucker for a good skill tree.
Therefore Talented from TurtleFox Games should be right up my street…
Digseum - ★★★☆☆
For someone who has played a fair few incremental games over the years, I have a confession to make: I somewhat despise the genre. What starts as a dopamine-inducing rush to hit each fresh milestone quickly descends into a part-time job that demands your attention for quarter of an hour each evening, until you question what it is you’re actually doing, fight against the sunk cost fallacy, and abandon it altogether. That is, until a shiny new idler turns your head, and the process starts all over again. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to enjoy that initial rush, without having to commit to it for the foreseeable future, all in the name of incremental progress?