| Game Engine: MonoGame 
A demoralized Bimbob's clerk stands over the contents of a busted trash bag, wet with rain and pig blood, and now her tears. Suddenly, a stranger with round glasses and a toothy grin approaches. Thus starts the story of the up-ad-coming street gang known as the Thornz. Star Fetchers is a game currently in production from LKsvavelstickan with a Kickstarter and the pilot available for free off of Steam and releasing in 'episodes'. True to this format, the game is heavily informed by anime with its choice of graphics and gameplay style. Similar in execution to Katana Zero, you use the mouse to swing a sword and defeat enemies, either fighting off sword-wielding gang members or cutting down bullets before they reach you. There's also a heavy undercurrent of the future of the world under AI and consumer culture informing the setting around you. An excellent work!
Steam || Xbox || Nintendo E-shop
| ESRB Rating: Teen 
| Steam Net Revenue: $21,402.72 21k | Part of the Existential Dilogy (2nd of 2)
While very different from the other work by Yeo, this is an important milestone not only for the amount of influence it would have on games like Fading Afternoon but for helping establish what kind of work he's capable of outside of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's mold. You play an unknown mercernary in France getting contracts to kill people. You don't know their names, or locations. All you know of your player character is they're an expert marksman and they have insomnia. Beyond that, their life is depressingly sparse and bleak in sharp contrast to the dull, brutal beauty around them.
Steam (SUPER METBOY! Ver.) | Nintendo e-Shop (SUPER METBOY! Ver.) | Google Play Store (Freeware Ver.)
| Game Engine: Unity 
| METBOY! Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
The first self-developed game from Rebuild Games, who mainly do third-party design work on Pokemon games. Metland is being besieged by enemies, and it's up to a crack team of Mets to stop them. SUPER METBOY! has a fascinating control scheme in which the Met you play as bounces around and hops into the air when shooting a projectile. While strange to get used to, the game works beautifully around this mechanic as you use your shots to take out enemies all around the stage and survive waves of enemies. Each wave has a specific number of enemies you need to clear before it ends, and so you have a push-and-pull mechanic in choosing between easier enemies or stronger enemies that offer more money upon defeat. Your choice of Met also impacts gameplay - Metboy himself has a standard straight shot attack, while Metgirl has a heart attack that has homing properties, Metbomber has bombs that move in an arc, and so on. If you manage to complete the game, you get access to a 'special US version' that's harder but offers greater rewards. Those rewards come in the form of Diamonds that can be spent on Chips which alters things like your Attack strength, your HP, and the amount of Gold you get. It's a fantastic game!
Steam | itch.io | Google Play Store
This is another fine solitaire game, albeit one with a lot more bells and whistles than most others. The game looks and sounds like it's running on early equipment, with a bitcrushed announcer saying the name of every card that's produced. This particular game is a random version of 'draw 3' Klondike but with a specific twist on the formula; instead of having to start over when you get deadlocked out of available moves, the game has the option of taking the currently selected card in the deck and 'getting Radical' with it, changing the game into a horizontal breakout clone where the ball hits against the card at the end of the stage and changes it to an available card on the playing field at random. It's a fascinating twist on an old classic, and is worth checking out just for the aesthetics.
Steam | itch.io | Playstation | Xbox Store | Nintendo e-Shop
From Joshua Hollendonner comes a brief but highly replayable rougelike! You play an elderly fellow using their trusty single-shot pistol to escape the grim confines of the Gutwhale. With a myriad of enemies, a bullet replacement system that feels similar to Heavy Bullets, and several hats to change game conditions, this game really has me coming back for more every time!
| Game Engine: Unity
A very pleasant point-and-click adventure game by Rusimitu, you play the treasure hunter Noracam on their quest for the treasure of the ruined city of Macaron. The style is charmingly lo-fi as you guide a clay figurine away from videos of Rusimitu's household pets and solving cryptic puzzles on the hunt for the treasure. It's fun!
Steam | GOG | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Mature 
| Steam Net Revenue: $74,202.00 74k | Game Engine: Unity
Having just got a recent sequel, SLUDGE LIFE is the story of a grafitti artist named Ghost living in sludge. It could technically be considered a town but it's really more of a set of pillars and wreckage in a midst of oil like that one level of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Meet weird people, spray some tags, scare off pidgeons, smoke cigarettes, it's all possible in SLUDGE LIFE!
Just a very nice and intricate level! The color lighting and design aesthetics suggest more than a little Quake influence. Every corridor and setting has enough information to make moving through the level without a map intuitive. It is also complimented by music made by the WAD maker herself, which is not common in my experience! I played on Ultraviolence and found to my delight that the difficulty was just right for the amount of challenge you're asked to take on. You're made to work with smaller weapons before even sniffing out the Super Shotgun, but each part of the level is built to accomodate this setup beautifully. I would complain about the trick of teleporting monsters behind you to take you off-guard, but this is also a level where there isn't a single Archvile, not even on UV. What it DOES have is multiple unique enemies that really add some spice to the typical encounters. The Haedexebus, Aracnorb, and Aracnorb Queen are new enemies provided by community members on top of sever other environmental items, and they're a hoot to fight! The Aracnorb is a floating Arachnotron who is far more dangerous than their Arachnotron cousin owing mainly to its mobility; the Haedexebus and Aracnorb Queen both have TWO seperate attacks that behave in ways that make shooting at a distance a major priority, and learning attack animations critical, especially in the last fight in which the arena throws Aracnorb Queen fight one after the other, bolstered by higher ranked enemies than the last wave. It's an delightful time!
Coming to us from Woolie Wool is a pleasant mini-sode of techbase levels! The opening level, Landing Zone, is almost quaint in how easy it goes on the player. Following soon after, however, is a series of claustrophopic hallways packed full to bursting with Pinky demons and only a non-Super shotgun as your main damage dealer for most of the run. As a PK3, there have been modifications to standard gameplay, and the most obvious one is the Watchers. The Watchers are replacement cacodemons, closer in design to their Dungeons and Dragons counterparts. They move faster and their projectiles are much faster too, but they go down with two shotgun blasts compared to the 6-7 needed to take down a cacodemon. They add a much needed wrinkle to the action and mix well with the episode's roster that would otherwise be chaingun fodder. Speaking of, the chaingun has been replaced with a rifle that functions in basically the same way. The levels also boast a points system, in which acquiring pickups (high fantasy themed, such as chalices filled with blood and arcane treasure chests) adds to a point system similar to Wolfenstein 3D. It's good!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Godot 
A duck taking their seat on the porcelian throne / goes and gets themselves flushed into the Toilet Zone! Made by Wolfenrahd for the first Miz Jam hosted by miziziz on itch.io, Toilet Zone is a tough little game where you have to make audicious use of the stream of water escaping from your toilet as a way of accelerating and decelerating within the walls of your confinment, locating the keys that will get you back home!
| Game Engine: Unity
Borislav just lost a flexing competition to decide the mayor of Swoleville for the next year, and only has 24 hours to contest the results! As fate would have it, an explosion far off in the distance and an unconscious man in a nearby clearing herald far more important matters. Heart is Muscle is not only a scientific fact but the game's central thesis as you have to balance your time wisely on the things that actually matter in the grand scheme, or risk misleading Borislav down a darker path. The story is extra sweet and has a delightful aesthetic, though the UI is spotty in places, but is still commendable for the dev's first time working in Unity. I enjoyed it, and I believe you will too!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: PICO-8 
A delightful example of the kind of work the Pico-8 engine is capable of, High Stakes is a fairly straightforward premise: you've had all but 20 mL of your blood stolen by vampires and must play card games to get the blood back. The gameplay loop is similar in card placement to Golf Card, but with the premise that each 9 card layout has eight numbered cards and one face card - the Vampire. Your goal is to turn over as many cards as possible without getting the Vampire per round, and the gameplay is about attempting to use the various tools at your disposal to figure out just where the Vampire is so that you can either avoid or stake them. Play your cards right and you'll be laughing all the way to the blood bank!