| Game Engine: Unity 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
There's no shortage of people that rebuke the 'walking simulator' for being a simple genre, but it takes true artistry to make a simple thing like choosing between one door or the other feel like a decision of immense gravity. How Fish Is Made finds in the role of a sardine flopping around without water out of a chute, and your day does not improve from there. You are given two choices, to go UP or DOWN, and the other denizens of the creature you find yourself in have some opinion or another on the choice. From here, the game becomes an absurdist play in which you flop haplessly from one scene to the next, hoping for something to make the 'decision' something concrete and finding yourself wanting. Wrong Organ have done something really special here, and is definitely a triumph of their skills as a developer team!
| Game Engine: MonoGame 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Part of the Stanford Game Designers' Winter Game Jam 2022
Coming to us from Eli Vazquez, a junior developer with Yacht Club Games, Pong Invaders is a fun take on the Space Invaders formula! Your goal is to prevent errant meteors from crashing through your defenses and smashing into earth. You play as a paddle sitting above twelve separate blocks that the meteors destroy Breakout-style upon hitting them. You prevent this by two means - bouncing them off of your own paddle, and shooting them until they glow red and burst, which earns you a point. The game gets progressively more difficult as different sized meteors come into play, but you get a bonus triple shot if you successfully hit a bonus star on the game board. Can you get to fifty points?
| Steam Net Revenue: $228,207.76 228k
An absolutely delightful tale of absurdist dark humor from the dev behind Lethal Company, The Upturned is a physics based platformer in which you are the newest resident of The Upturned Inn. You're on a long and trecherous journey to make it to your room, with the companionship of the owner Ik your only constant. You'll be beset by all manner of pests and misfortune that you have to fight against using your wits and whatever self defense you can fling at your enemies. You'll have a blast with this!
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ 
| Steam Net Revenue: $3,055,663.12 3.0m | Game Engine: Unity
Probably one of the coziest survival games I've ever played, Stacklands is a game in which you get a selection of cards to attempt to survive with. The primary goal is to keep your Villager cards alive (keeping them fed, improving their weapons, fighting off enemies) and gradually amassing a card base of buildings capable of fending off the attacks of an otherworldly enemy!...or you could always play in Peaceful Mode and forego all that silliness! The gameplay loop is as follows: each phase of player action is called a Moon, which is generally 2 minutes in length on Normal (the time constraints can be adjusted according to taste) and you have that length of time to craft card recipes/spend Coin cards to buy Booster Packs/fight enemies/etc. It's fun!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Part of the Clotilde Soffritti series (2 of 2)
Poor Clotilde! After getting a shabby deal on a used spaceship that almost sent her into a sun, she's been stranded on an asteroid with a zealous hermit! She'll have to use all of her wits to scramble together a solution to her problems (and the problems of others) to get herself back to civilization...and to be plagued with even more worries! Made by Lorenzo Boni as a sequel to Clotilde Soffritti in: Never Buy a Used Spaceship, Lorenzo brings their trademark cartooning chops in full force with beautifully rendered backgrounds, varied character design and clever puzzle solutions! It's a delight!
| Steam Net Revenue: $10,727.26 10k
It's a sci-fi genre classic: humanity has found a unique 'miracle' element known as viridium, and V-Corp is mining as much of it offworld as possible. One such mining operation has gone dark, and V-Corp has hired Gemini II Squad to recover as much as they can. What unfolds is a tightly paced Metroidvania that plays its cards very close to the chest. Developer Ivan Porrini has made a unique system in which the game is split up into multiple sections of a mining station, each with their own specific demand of the player's skill in movement and evasion - one level has you on a 3 minute timer to find a switch, one has you making use of your Super Meat Boy-esque movement system to dodge explosions, one has you in a battle mech; you get the idea. Not only this, but as a full squadron you have a bevy of different crewmembers all with differing loadouts that can be augmented and changed through black markets hosted throughout the game. As you explore the station, you find mounting evidence that V-Corp is hiding things from you and the rest of your squad. Can you escape from the station alive?
Steam | Epic Games | Nintendo e-Shop | Xbox
| Game Engine: Unity
Many decades after being left behind by the Guardians and left to fend for themselves in the midst of a famine, a hero is chosen from the Orchard to wield the Aurdos Bell and rescue the inhabitants of Anuchard! Brought to us by the team at stellarNull, Anuchard is an excellent action RPG in which you resurrect the unfortunate denizens of your homeland from the grip of a mysterious Dungeon keeping both them, and the Guardians, locked away. Your skillset is limited to a light and heavy attack, plus a Spire that can be used both for healing and an AOE attack, but you can also find ways to modify your base combo with upgrades and food before each dungeon. The more people you save, the more resources and opportunities are available to you! Wrapped within this tidy package is a bittersweet story about surviving tragedy and how we deal with the grief of knowing one's own god wouldn't save them. It's an incredible work!
| Game Engine: OHRRPGCE 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
A brief but fun game by Samanthuel Louise Gilson, FRANKEN is the story of a hero who's...honestly kind of getting the 'save the world' bit pushed onto them, but it's alright! What starts out as a farce gradually becomes a remarkably touching story at the end. Funny, satirical, and a really nice pick of music await you as FRANKEN draws near!
A delightful platformer by Robin Fox, dark kitty monsters have invaded the world, and it's time to don your witch hat and stop the invasion! Boasting a platforming style and upgrade system borrowing heavily from Kero Blaster, Downpurr includes the introduction of kitties you can rescue that in turn can be used to upgrade your powers! Can you find all the kitties and save the world?
| Steam Net Revenue: $239,255.11 239k
I had put off getting this one for a long time because the concept of a desktop simulator that wasn't Hypnospace Outlaw wasn't grabbing me the way it is now that I've become more interested in Solitaire, but that was largely my own loss because this is a magnificant addition to anyone's game library. Not only does the desktop itself have a lot of character by itself, but you begin to learn more and more about the person/people involved with getting it into your hands, which is remarkably in line with what Melos Han-Tani has spoken about with regards to the concept of ludoancestry. As for the games themselves, well:
20th Century Food Court - A highly technical automated food simulator where you use node editing and pipe puzzle logic to construct a conveyer belt to fulfill the people's need for nachos and pretzels. I'm going to be really straightforward and say that while I'm not particularly good at any of these games, this is the one i literally do not understand on a basic level. I can tell it's a blast to play, especially for those looking for something close to the aesthetic of old Nitrome flash games, but it's not for me.
Chipwizard™ Professional - This particular game is an edutainment title about how to properly construct components, disguised as a puzzle game, disguised as business software. The concept is to follow the specified parameters to make a piece of machinery that carries a charge in a specific way from an input to an output setting. I feel a sense of pride from doing something right in this game because it's a logic puzzle with real-world logic questions. I also just really love the aesthetic.
Dungeons & Diagrams - A D&D themed map-building puzzle game, the goal is to place walls inside a grid filled with monsters leading to a treasure chest. I'm not very good at it. You have a set amount of blocks you can put on each row and column of the dungeon, making the game a bit like a really nerdy Sudoku. It is a great slice of dungeon design that lets you really dig into the concept of making a dungeon out of scarce pieces.
HACK*MATCH - A matching game in the style of Puyo Pop, but with the wrinkle of shuffling a preset block layout as opposed to creating the layout with random blocks. You play as Hackmaster, a shounen hero commanding a small robot who can pick up one block at a time from the rapidly descending hoard of colorful blocks. This one has the added style of coming with it's own emulator, the JUiCEbox Arcade.
Kabufuda Solitaire - This version of solitaire really threw me for a loop at first, because I have zero familiarity with kabufuda, but is also a lot of fun. The concept is to arrange a deck of cards into sets of four in an empty space on the game board, with the caveat that you can only set like cards on top of one another and the top four shelves only take one card. The difficulity varies by how many slots are available at the top, but much like Sawayama Solitaire, it's entirely beatable if you just focus and stay strategic in your movements.
Sawayama Solitaire - As the name implies, this is the desktop's default solitaire program - at first sniff, it seems to be the basic straightforward Klondike solitaire, but with a highly inventive twist, where it's a 'draw 3' format, but with the wrinkle of having every card you draw stay on top of each other, with an extra space to lay a single card where the deck originally sat, similar to Freecell. Much like Freecell, I am also really, really bad at Sawayama solitaire, to the point where I thought the game was unwinnable in certain cases - the truth is that this is a solitaire clone that mainly just requires you to be strategic in a way that standard solitaire isn't. Because there is no 'undo' button, it makes the game a tough but fair challenge in comparision to the seemingly toothless 'draw 1' version I'm used to. It's a delightful version that really makes you feel accomplished when you finally win.
Steed Force Hobby Studio - This is the game that I associated Last Call BBS with the most before getting my hands on it. It's a fairly straightforward gunpla simulator that lets you build models from the fictional Steed Force anime, five in total. It is remarkably relaxing, and I quite frankly can't believe this isn't already a more common game type.
X'BPGH: The Forbidden Path - This is the game I vibed with the most, taking the commonplace puzzles up to this point and turning them into a grotesque gene splicing puzzle game. The goal is to fill a specified grid layout with a specific cellular growth of skin, bone, flesh, or metal. You have twelve slots to change the way the cells form inside the grid, but it will require logic to figure out which cell data is going to get the result you need.
Overall, this is a really in-depth, lovingly built game, where you can be playing this for hours and still not scratch the surface of what it's capable of. It even has a means of making your own websites in game by adding .js files! It's a lot to take in that this is to be the last game Zachtronics ever develops, I really feel like I missed out on something special by waiting so long to see this beautiful swan song.
Steam | Xbox | Playstation | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: Construct 3 
In 2022, Alfie Wilkinson submitted their game Egglien to the BAFTA Young Game Designers competition, and won the Game Making Award for ages 10 to 14 beating out 9 other finalists. It's not often that we're able to see devs be celebrated this early in their life, and Egglien is certainly worthy of the praise. You play an alien who hears a voice telling her to save the world, many centuries after Earth's downfall, and gains the power to pump out a lot of eggs. This sets her and her friend off on an adventure to retrieve the Earth's core and fight whatever gets in their way! Your character mainly jumps and attacks by spewing eggs until she runs out, and landing anywhere allows her to restore her Egg Meter. Your goal in each level is to destroy all enemies without getting hit, which is easier said than done in some places. 40 levels and 5 bosses make this a delightful experience!
| Game Engine: GameMaker 
| Steam Net Revenue: $252,568.45 252k
Coming to us from Caiys and a spiritual successor to their earlier game Skelly Selest, Boneraiser Minions is a auto-battler squad builder in which you control the wretched Boneraiser, incapable of attacking by themselves but taking bones from fallen enemies to bolster their ranks into fearsome bedlam! There are a multitude of ways to bolster your ranks, from surrounding yourself with demons to giants to melded gibbous horrors! Fight through 10 waves of enemies to defeat the King, run through a gauntlet of settings to reach the Queen Gigalicious, or play a rousing card game based on your various troops of the undead!
| Game Engine: Unity
A seemingly direct gas station visit goes terribly awry in Convenient as you find yourself in the clutches of a very dangerous individual! While being a fairly straightforward horror game, the main selling point is feigning captivity to avoid being murdered, but it's got quite a bit more hiding under the hood if you know where to look! If you know what to do, you can resolve a good ending very quickly, but since it's release Jonm has been adding more and more optional segments to the game, such as new areas to explore, new puzzles and new endings!
| Steam Net Revenue: $692,580.33 692k
Amid a spree of homicides and abductions in the 60s in the city of New Grandewel, an officer goes into a desperate search for answers for what is causing the mayhem, and gets much more than they bargained for. A solo dev effort by Jason Smith and published by 3D Realms, CULTIC: Chapter One is a worthy title in the vein of Blood, but without the limitations of the Build engine. You'll be faced against cultists and various eldritch monstrosities in your hunt for the truth, but thankfully you have a growing arsenal of weapons and an impressive jump height! Most enemies will go down with enough bullets but if you want to conserve resources, headshots are the name of the game. Fire is also a useful ally to get rid of clusters of enemies at once, but is of course very situational. Can you get to the heart of what's happening in New Grandewel before it's too late?
Steam | Playstation | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: GameMaker | Steam Net Revenue: $32,621.16 32k
Functioning as a meta autobiography by programmer Fujika Kanii and artist Yoko Kumade, GOODBYE WORLD is a short but bittersweet discussion of what it's like to try and work in the often cut-throat world of indie game development. Shown from the perspective of Kanii and her dinged-up Game Boy, the story follows her and Kumade's first meeting in college to their eventual entry into the market. While played input is minimal - outside of the puzzle platformer Blocks the game is functionally a visual novel - the graphics are lovely and have an immense attention to detail while also using a unique form of artifacting to give the graphics a sort of 'real life' look. It's good stuff!
One might call it unseemly to recommend a game where you get to break blocks by getting incredibly fat, but I'm a grown adult and I know what I'm about. The first game by Plubber/Plubsoft to be featured on Steam, Doughball Descent is yummy arcade rougelike fun where the goal is to eat a bunch of food in a descending dungeon grid full of sentient food and traps galore. You play a nondescript 'dough-cat' who changes shape the more pounds they rack up. You move through the level by either breaking the blocks underneath you by jumping, or by doing a 'belly bump' to your left or right. There are 5 dungeons with 3 levels apiece, with a random breather level where you can spend your weight to gain either new items, alter the dungeons' rules, or get a new power to make the game easier. I really have to give kudos to the sound design in this game, it makes the overall experience really delightful. I'm very excited to see what Plubsoft does next!
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone | Steam Net Revenue: $50,710.82 50k
This is a game that I am admittedly REALLY late to the party for, but this is a really staggering piece of post-Rareware art. Made by Marcus Horn and ported by Sebestian Kuepper, Super Kiwi 64 is a game where you play as a kiwi bird with a set of goggles and a backpack that can turn into several items. Gameplay-wise, you have a lot of options for mobility like a Ninja Gaiden-esque wall jump and a glide - the camera is really responsive to your movements as well, which is always well-appreciated in a platformer like this. You have little in the way of offensive manuevers but as you learn fairly quickly, you don't really need them. In a similar vein to 'creepypasta' games of this sort, the bright and cheery atmosphere is disguising a dark story of religious zealotry as the very first level presents you with a skeleton posed as though meditating inside the remains of an oak tree without any explanation. As you continue through the levels, you witness other pieces of the seemingly dead civilization that you're exploring, crawling out from the sewers that act like your hub world like some kind of Ninja Turtle, or possibly The Punisher. The graphics are a real stand-out feature of the game as it carefully nails the specific aesthetic of games like Banjo Kazooie and Jet Force Gemini (the ending scene even includes a nod to the ending of Star Fox 64) while also working in badass visuals that evoke imagery like Dark Souls, Evangelion and even Zardoz. I really can't recommend this game enough!
| Steam Net Revenue: $135,982.09 135k
Chop Goblins is a short but sweet FPS title by David Szymanski in which you accidently release a plague of Chop Goblins upon the world (think the gremlins from the titular Gremlins movies but with periodontitis) and are stuck having to deal with them as they get up to unsanctioned demolition and time travel shenanigans! This one's real goofy fun, five levels in total but there's plenty to do and several remix levels to chop into!
| Game Engine: RPG Maker VX Ace 
| Steam Net Revenue: $199,788.22 199k
Melody is a young lady on Sapphire Island, hopelessly in love with Allison and finding herself embroiled in the life of an adventurer she's not at all sure she's ready for. To make matters worse, the guild she's working with jusssst might have messed things up REALLY bad. Can Melody and her friends pull through? SLARPG comes to us courtesy of Bobby Schroder and is an absolute delight to play. The manner in which the game mechanics are given much-needed versatility in the form of spellbooks that unlock specific skills based on the holder helps make or break certain encounters. What more can I say? They're lesbians, they're animals, and you better believe they're super!