There have been a lot of good indie games this year, and this gal hasn’t found nearly enough time to play all of them. Game of the Year is slowly approaching and I know my personal list is going to be filled with a handful of embarrassing omissions. To save enduring the wrath of my colleagues and random strangers on the internet, it’s time to get theꦏse sore spots out the way with a very official and very professional list. Please forgive me for my gamer sins.
To celebrate this week’s indie column, here’s a selection of smaller games currently causing a stink on my backlog of shame. The jury is still out on whether I finish them before the end of the year, but please rest assured that I have at least started a few. Playing video games as an adult i🥃s really ha𝓀rd, okay, even if my professional life revolves around them.
Butterfly Soup 2
I’m about 30 minutes into Brianna Lei’s visual novel sequel and it’s just as authentic and heartfelt as the first. It follows the lives ♊of four Asian-American teenagers finding love and themselves in the early noughties. Acting as a direct continuation to the first game, we are treated to a greater expansion of Diya and Min-Seo’s relationship, while Akarsha is busy dealing with sudden romantic feelings for Noelle.
There’s an adorable honesty to how this game depicts the reality of being a queer teenager, especially those belonging to immigrant families who must not only deal with cultural i🍷dentity, but a personal one. Characters struggle with escaping authority to spend time with friends or escape the ingrained prejudice that often comes with queerness. So much of its dialogue is a nostalgic reminder of growing up with a love for anime, video games, and internet culture before the advent of social media, and despite the sweetness it still managed to hit hard.
Citizen Sleeper
Citizen Sleeper i✨s this year’s The Forgotten City. Maybe, I didn’t play that either so I don’t really know, but the sci-fi narrative adventure is being treated with a similar level of reverence in every si🅘ngle conversation it’s a part of. It certainly does more for me on the surface with its bright aesthetic and compelling subject, and not playing like a fancy Skyrim mod will definitely help matters too. Features Editor Ben Sledge has sold me on this one, and his tastes align with mine at least sixty percent of the time, so it’s worth a punt.
Tunic
Some wrote off Tunic for being a rather shameless clone of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but it manages to💯 replicate that classic feel so effortlessly that I feel it deserves more credit. Playing as an adorable little fox on a valiant mission, you must fight enemies, solve puzzles, and decipher a fictional language that underpins its gorgeous fantasy world.
It control🀅s beautifully and looks even better, each stage a mixture of saturated colours and biomes filled with secrets to uncover. So far, I’m still bouncing around in the first world after downloading it on Xbox Game Pass, but there’s an alluring charm here I want to see more from. That is if I can finish God of War Ragnarok and a few other juggernauts.
Vampire Survivors
Despite editing several pieces on it and seeing so many tweets about it, I h༺ave no idea what sort of game Vampire Survivors is or what it even looks like. I am heinously out of the loop given my occupation, and this game has me sitting installed on my Xbox Series X taunting my lethargic ass for weeks. Is it Souls-like? A rogue-lite? An idle ꧙game? A visual novel? I have no idea, all I know is it plays really well and my friends can’t get enough of it. I bet it doesn’t even involve the survivors of vampires. Where does the lie end and truth begin?!
Weird West
Guys, I hear the west is pretty weird these days, so much so the guy behind Prey and Dishonored went and made a game about it. Prey is well good, mate - so you’d think a more story-drivꦫen RPG with plenty of important decisions to make would be right up my alley. I mean it would be if I had the motivation to start a playthrough and see what all the fuss is about. Compared to other gems on this list though, from an outside perspective it feels like this deserves more love.
Rogue Legacy 2
A sequel to one of the greatest indie games ever made, Rogue Legacy 2 improves on what came before in almos🙈t every way. Gameplay is faster, more responsive, more satisfying, and more varied than ever with myriad different traits and classes to choose from with each new run. Unfortunately for me, I’ve barely touched the game since its 1.0 release, failing to level up enough to make it past the first boss and see what else awaits me in the other stages.
Neon White
It’s coming to PlayStation now so I finally have incentive to play it♐. Watch this space!
Stray
I have two cats at home who won’t leave me alone so the appeal of watching a very realistic cat in a fairlꦿy predictable narrative platformer wasn’t the most appealing thing to me, but that🥀 didn’t stop critics and fans from falling in love with it. I was a few hours in before I tapped out, so maybe it’s worth seeing it through to the end and making sure the cat survives.
