Cool Indie Games That You Might’ve Missed

There are a lot of indie games releasing every week and not enough time to track them all down. Luckily, we’ve done the hunting for you.

 

Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation

When we find a cool new shooter to show off, we’re going to take that opportunity. This time around, we’re shining the spotlight on Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation, another example of a GZDoom developed boomer shooter similar to Mela Petaka, a game we’ve mentioned previously. If you’ve even been in the mood for some classic shooter thrills, albeit with hand drawn visuals and plenty of crusty pirate jokes, Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation is the booty you’ve been looking for. Guess we’re not immune to crap jokes either.

Like many pirates, Captain Wayne has lost one of his hands, this time in an encounter with the Vampire Whale. Unlike other pirates though, Captain Wayne doesn’t feel like a hook is quite good enough for a replacement appendage, and instead grafts Captain’s Ol’ Reliable to his left arm. It’s a double barrel shotgun, if you’re wondering. Apparently, Ol’ Reliable wasn’t enough to stop Wayne from getting marooned on Orca Isle by a group of evil mercenaries, but it is going to be useful when it comes to blasting everything and everyone to smithereens. With fast-paced action, a killer soundtrack and gorgeous visuals, Captain Wayne is a blast from the past that’s worth your time.

 

CTRL ALT EGO

CTRL ALT EGO is about as wildly ambitious as an indie game can possibly get honestly, and with that ambition comes complications. When you’ve got a game that lets you solve puzzles and combat encounters in a near limitless amount of ways, you’re going to intimidate some casual players who are more used to just sprinting down corridors and murdering everything that moves. That’s the beauty of immersive sims like CTRL ALT EGO and others though, giving players true freedom and hoping that they don’t accidentally break the game in the process. If that sounds like your kind of sicko fun, CTRL ALT EGO should be shooting to the top of your must play list.

Instead of playing as a character with a set body, you control a consciousness on a space station, referred to as the EGO, that’s able to transfer between the different robots that inhabit the station. The other robots and the ones running the show don’t like your existence all that much though, so you’ll need to use a range of tricks, including whatever items you have to hand or the army of robots you’ve already controlled that can be re-summoned, to solve the game’s various situations. Like all good immersive sims, you’re free to play CTRL ALT EGO as sneaky or trigger happy as you like, but if you want to have the most fun possible, CTRL ALT EGO encourages you to make a mess of this sandbox.

 

DriveCrazy

Perhaps the only way to truly describe a game like DriveCrazy is by saying it’s like Katamari Damacy but behind the wheel of a kei truck. That’s not to say you’re racing around, trying to roll up a bunch of objects hoping to get bigger and bigger. Instead, the Katamari comparison is purely based on how ridiculous the game truly is, so that, like playing Katamari, you just need to sit there with your mouth agape. This is pure, unadulterated, Japanese bonkersness, if that’s even a word, and we’re all about it. Given the game left early access just a few months ago, after spending a few years in development, there’s never been a better time to enter the wacky world of DriveCrazy.

The game opens with the player controlling a kei truck as they complete a time trial from the mountain countryside, only to find aliens invading as you reach the finish line. From here, the action ramps up about as quickly as you’re expected to drive from one life or death ridiculousness to the next. The levels themselves have a variety of locales and threats, including a few boss fights if you can believe that, but you’re given plenty of stunts and tricks, including racing on walls for a bit of gravity defying fun. Seriously though, name another racing game that has you face off against a giant black bear with glowing red eyes. Take that, Forza Horizon 6. This version of Japan seems way more fun.

 

Grunn

Stay around the gaming landscape for long enough, and you’ll notice that there’s plenty of cozy games out there for players to experience a life without stress. Well, less stress. Trying to get your late-planted peppers to harvest before the end of the season in Stardew Valley can feel like a lot of stress, and that’s without talking about the horrors that lie in wait in the mines. Still, for the most part, cozy games are all about chill vibes and cute aesthetics, and it feels like whenever you turn around, there’s like six more that pop up out of the woodwork, which is probably why there’s been a steady push for cozy games that are actually designed to make you feel uncomfortable. There’s coziness, but there’s something… off.

Set in a remote town in the Dutch countryside, you play as a gardener hired to maintain the grounds of someone’s house. Sounds like the premise for a pretty cozy time, right? You’d think so, but the owner is nowhere to be found and most of the tools are missing. Oh, and you’re forbidden from leaving the house after dark. There is a surrounding village to also explore, with plenty of unsettling discoveries to find, along with polaroids that hint at some of the puzzles to solve, and there’s even a whopping 11 endings depending on your actions. Do the majority of those endings go well for the player character? Don’t worry about that, just keep trimming those hedgerows, I’m sure everything is fine.

 

I Am Your Beast

If you want a studio that truly embodies the spirit of indie creativity, look no further than Strange Scaffold. Whether they create games that are personally to your taste is another conversation entirely, but the fact remains that they’re about as unpredictable as can be. You could start with Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, a game that’s very literal about what you’re doing, then move on to a supernatural Max Payne homage in El Paso, Elsewhere. Just when you think they’re making more normal games though, they hit you with Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, a match-3 horror comedy RPG, if you can believe it. I Am Your Beast is one of their more normal games, but it also, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking whips.

A shooter with the same bite-sized level design as something like Superhot, but with the replayability of a high score arcade game, I Am Your Beast follows retired secret agent Alphonse Harding who’s really quite opposed to doing that one last job. His former handler isn’t too happy with this, and has now swarmed the snowcapped wilderness with more goons than a porn convention. Fortunately for you, guerrilla warfare is your specialty, so you’ll have to use your superior speed, mobility and improvisation to murder everyone in sight. Each kill gives you more time, with more elaborate kills offering more time, giving you a game that demands style as much as skill. Some of the later levels can be tough, but this is shooter magic. Also, the soundtrack is utterly incredible. Worth playing for the OST alone.

 

Keep Driving

Perhaps one of the most recognisable games of all time is The Oregon Trail. We don’t really need to explain it to viewers, but we can likely all agree that the game is basically one extended road trip, with players dealing with events and challenges throughout the journey. You’d think with its cultural penetration, there’d be more games that would try and emulate The Oregon Trail’s formula but for a new audience, or even just a new twist on that old structure, but the only one springing to mind is The Organ Trail, which is basically just “what if Oregon Trail but zombies?” Keep Driving takes the idea of a challenging road trip though and gives it a more modern-ish skew, evoking the memories of road movies about teens setting out into the wider world filled with wanderlust.

The game opens in the early 2000s with a youngster hearing about a festival on the other side of the country, so with little more than the clothes on your back, a meager amount of cash and your new (used) car, you set out to reach the festival on time. Along the way, you’ll encounter various events, meet interesting hitchhikers and make choices that’ll determine whether or not you’ll make it to the festival on time, or if the festival even ends up being your end goal. There’s several endings to pursue here, and the best part is that once your journey has been completed, you get to view the map and see where things could’ve gone differently, before getting behind the wheel and going again.

 

The Drifter

For the most part, the point and click genre has become a bit outdated. Without trying to sound mean or dismissive about an entire genre, they’re a bit slow, and can be stupidly convoluted in their puzzle solutions. It’s all “appease the local cabal of stray cats by finding a ball of yarn behind the painting of the manor’s deceased owner so that they move out of your way” and never just “scream loudly so the cats run away”. For the most part, the genre evolved into third person narrative games like Life Is Strange or Lost Records. The Drifter is a throwback to the old school then, but it isn’t concerned with overly elaborate solutions like older point and click games, instead offering an adventure game that gives you classic genre conventions but at a rate that could be considered lightspeed by comparison.

The Drifter begins with an interesting premise: you’ve died. Specifically, you’re a drifter by the name of Mick who’s returned to his hometown only to witness a murder, and then quickly be murdered by the same group of people. That’s just the start of Mick’s crap day though, as his consciousness is quickly ripped into out of his body then shoved straight back in but a few seconds before his death. Now aware of his fate, Mick manages to escape but finds himself framed for the first murder, and must now find a way to survive and get to the truth as this vast conspiracy begins to unveil itself. Breakneck pace storytelling, beautiful pixel art graphics and strong point and click gameplay make The Drifter a highlight of the entire genre.

 

This Bed We Made

So you know how in the previous entry, we explained that the point and click genre kind of evolved into the third person narrative game? Games where you occasionally solve some puzzle, but for the most part, you’re just making dialogue and narrative choices that determine various consequences throughout your journey. This Bed We Made is a textbook example of that formula, but instead of focusing on teenagers going through a coming of age tale, you’re instead learning about how curiosity kills the cat. It’s also set in the 1950s, making it a bit of an outlier when it comes to settings. How many games can you think of that are set in a time period when McCarthyism was still going. It’s harder than you’d think.

This Bed We Made follows Sophie, a chambermaid for the Clarington Hotel whose nosy nature absolutely gets the best of them one night in 1958. Sophie manages to stumble on some interconnected conspiracy though, with several guests at the Clarington involved in a deadly plot, and the only way for Sophie to solve it is by rifling through their personal possessions. Depending on the choices you make, the people you speak to and even just the rooms you access and the job you do of cleaning them, This Bed We Made has several endings, which is ideal as this is an experience on the shorter side. If you’re someone who thrives on gossip, this is going to feed that inner demon.

 

We Who Are About To Die

For as recognisable and as iconic as the Roman Colosseum is, there’s very few “actually good” games that are focused purely on gladiatorial combat. Shadow of Rome had those stealth sections, Ryse spent like half a chapter in the Colosseum and the only good one we can think of without needing a VR headset is Colosseum: Road To Freedom. Even then, that’s not without some flaws. Plus, who has the cash to buy a VR headset and Gorn? Anyone looking to prove themselves in front of the emperor and the people of Rome would have been chomping at the bit when We Who Are About To Die was released in Steam Early Access a few years back. Sure, it’s still in Early Access now, but it’s well worth your time and attention.

We Who Are About To Die has possibly the best justification of all time to be a roguelike, as you control a gladiator thrown into the meat grinder of the colosseum. Win, and you unlock more gear and abilities to become stronger and rise through the ranks of the colosseum. Lose, and well, time to reroll a new gladiator. What makes We Who Are About To Die so unique though is the game’s physics-based combat system, which requires you to make smart, momentum-based attacks against an opponent’s weak spots instead of just flailing randomly and hoping for the best. It’s a game that requires a lot of patience from the player, but if you’re willing to tough it out, you’ve got a new favourite colosseum sim on your hands.

 

Wheel World

Look, we’ll acknowledge the elephant in the room on Wheel World ahead of this last entry: Annapurna Interactive as a publisher may not be the most “indie” publisher we’ve ever covered. You’ve got a multi-million dollar film and TV production company, and they’ve also broken into video games? Sure, it’s not the likes of EA, Capcom or other big gaming companies, but it’s also not exactly a solo developer creating something off their own back. Still, we’ve been waiting for a bicycle racing game that’s as good as Downhill Domination on the PS2, and while Wheel World isn’t about going downhill, the exploration and customisation on offer here makes Wheel World quite the enticing prospect.

Developed by the same studio who did Nidhogg, if you can believe it, Wheel World follows Kat, who’s a cyclist chosen by the spirits to collect a bunch of legendary bike parts that’ll help perform a ritual that can save the world. In order to do that, players explore an open world that can best be described as Breath of the Wild on a bike, competing in races to earn bike parts that can completely alter your bike’s stats. Along the way, you’ll uncover a story of a corporation ruling over it all, causing suffering by exploiting the world for all its energy. There’s plenty to discover, exciting racing to be had, and enough comedy to keep you going from one race to the next. It’s a great example of an indie racing game, one that’s worth hopping on your bike for.

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