| Game Engine: Unity 
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A brief aside: You may notice that I don't use a classification system like ranking games out of 5/10/100/etc. or ranking things like gameplay and graphics. I feel personally that these sorts of rankings enforce a strange formalist mode of thinking about games based on how they function as opposed to how they feel, and so I forego their inclusion. Simply put, any game that winds up here has my personal recommendation as a title worthy of your time.
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GAMES AND COUNTING!
Games By Country
Games by Year
Games by Engine
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: Unity
The date: April 15th, 1917. As the citizens of Verdun-sur-Meuse had believed the fighting along their city had finally waned, the bones of all the fallen soldiers could only look on as a lone Fokker Dr-1 takes flight against a threat too outrageous for words. 1917: The Alien Invasion DX takes place in an alternate WWI where the world is violently beseiged by aliens. You play Dr. Brunhild Stahlmüller, performing an solo act of vernichtungsstrategie against the aliens and flying her 'Red Beezlebub' to the heart of the interplanetery menace. The game has a nod to the developer's earlier title Sturmfront: The Mutant War as the assistant to Dr. Stahlmuller, a Dr. Hartmuth Griesgram, is a key character in Sturmfront. The game functions well as a tate shump with plenty of risks and rewards for good flying. One specific factor in the gameplay loop is the use of a score locking pickup, in which the combo you build from downing enemies increases as long as the combo is unlocked, but can quickly drop if you're not careful. Once the combo is locked by a pickup at the end of the level, the combo can be continued into the next stage, and so on. The Red Beezlebub also come equipped with two different firing modes, a green weapon that does modest damage, and a heavy hitting weapon that pushes back your ship with each shot. Sebastian de Andrade shows their trademark capabilities with pixel art as every portion of the game is lovingly rendered and easy to read. Can you get through all eight levels and defeat the Chessmaster?
| Game Engine: RPG Maker 
As Karbonic was working through high school, they were working on this game to the detriment of their grades, but released this treasure in 2016. You play Nicholas, an unhappy fellow thrust into a dimension rapidly closing in on itself, known as the Garden of Vurrus. From there, he gets roped into a wild story of disparate and anachronistic characters as they attempt to halt the full collapse of the universe. Bracing stuff!
| ESRB Rating: Mature 
| Steam Net Revenue: $44,795.16 44k | Game Engine: Unity
You are the walking apocalypse, an unstoppable killing machine come to destroy the remants of humanity...but humanity's putting up a fight to remember. BUTCHER is a 2d platformer/arena shooter where you face off against fearsome enemies and machinations of death, literally tearing apart your enemies with lead, fire, and shrapnal. It has a lot of similarities in tone and difficulty to Teleglitch but from an android's perspective. A vicious delight.
| Steam Net Revenue: $10,314.68 10k | Game Engine: GameMaker 
Deep within the confines of a foreboding castle lie a cavalcade of enemies, dutifully working on a terrifying device that could alter the path of history as we know it! You play as Moth, a jovial and good-natured sort on an excursion to see just what's happening in Creepy Castle! With an aesthetic sensibility of early side-scrolling games, dopterra was able to secure funding for this game through a Kickstarter back in 2014 with an excess of $2000 USD and would later publish through Nicalis. It's very cute and a lot of fun!
| Net Revenue: $4,073.83 4k
From the mind of Anton Riot comes a world made entirely of plasticine to explore! You play as the newest recruit to get hazed out of a massive Megabomb to blow up the door leading to strange new worlds. The world you come from is strange enough, right? But there's plenty to explore and lots to do. Brew and drink compote, level up weapons, locate books on the other side of the dreaded doors...this is a real diamond in the rough, highly recommended!
| Game Engine: Unity | Part of the Tomato Way series (1st of 3)
Developed in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. An FPS game that follows the tribulations of Tomate, a lone warrior whose had a bounty put on his head amidst the land being taken over by cultists and other rotten fruit. The gameplay loop takes some getting used to, as you have four base weapons, two of which are principally melee, and you reload manually with the right mouse button. The melee weapons also have an alt fire - the sledgehammer can be thrown at enemies while Tomate's signature fork releases an AOE attack at the cost of some health. There's what seems at first like an exacerbating design decision in that your attacks on enemies have no meaningful feedback like blood or hitsparks, but there's a trick to combat - all of your enemies have one or more strange looking 'eyes' embedded in their person, and getting rid of these eyes puts them down for good. This is easier said than done as your enemies are all pretty fast and have odd hitboxes that will hit you multiple times in a single attack animation, so restarting is a fact of life with this game. The game is thematically a samurai story, and the cutscenes are filmed and scored with this in mind, but the plot itself is more akin to 12 oz. Mouse by way of Veggietales. There is something very big and very strange happening in the world Tomate inhabits, and it's hard to discern just what is really going down, but it all points to the lone warrior. This game gained a small but committed fandom over the years, and once you get used to how it works, you might find yourself becoming part of it!
Knock knock, the Health Inspector Cats are here and you are in SOOO much trouble! A short and sweet platformer by Sink, you play as Crow, a crow with a jaunty red kerchief as she putters through her hotel attemping to fix things for the inspectors, battling cockroaches, ghosts, and her own plumbing skills. There's some really creative game mechanics in here as well as an emphasis on using inertia to your advantage. The save points are sign-in sheets which is just a cute detail that other devs might have left on the cutting room floor. Music is provided by captbeardd and kayfaraday giving the whole game a really funky character! There's also a prequel game called Croaktel that you unlock for beating the base game, where you play as Lilly the frog on their morning commute getting bullied by flowers and dealing with the challenges of office life. It's a tiny bit shorter than Crowtel but provides a healthy challenge to people already familiar with Crowtel. Absolutely give this one a shot!
Steam | itch.io | Xbox Store
| Game Engine: Unity
As AI becomes more and more of a permanent fixture of everyday life, it will become critical to have material from before its meteoric effect on the world around us as a means of grounding us in what our fears and hopes were for the future. From Sylvius Fischer, Fumiko is a love story, turned horror story, about an artifical intelligence developed for uncertain reasons and the denizens of the I.M. - human consciousness uploaded to a digital realm and the forces that are gradually driving it to tragedy. Mechanically, Fumiko offers the greatest freedom of movement I've ever seen in a game like this - running and jumping gives way to double jumping, gives way to quadruple jumping, giving way to endless running and jumping which is necessary to navigate the worlds you find yourself in. Visually, the game is remarkably gorgeous especially considering the audicious use of default cubes as architecture, because everything is designed to fit in seemlessly with the extreme digital environment. The story is a truly prescient one and it unravels beautifully. Check this one out!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Unity
It's all a façade. As you gain consciousness, a mysterious woman asks you to help her disperse negative energies in HAPPY WORLD. But something is off, isn't it? What's really going on here? Why are some of these tasks nice and some make you feel repulsive? As you traverse the ZONEs and make people happy, these are the sorts of questions that will bubble to the surface. Made by Jimmy Malaski, HAPPY WORLD is an incredible work about how a jolly atmosphere can disguise and even smother the darker feelings that are a part of human life, and how we find meaning in meaninglessness.
Steam | Playstation | Xbox | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 
| Steam Net Revenue: $6,542.45 6k | Game Engine: Unity
Coming to us from Bony Yousef and originally for the iPhone, this is a platformer that will demand a lot of your logic solving and reflexes! You play a box with a bandana that must traverse a series of platforms and traps to reach a gem. The sparse visuals are an important design decision as the color grading lets you know straightaway which items are safe to touch or not. Wall jumping is a necessity for most puzzles and works in much the same way as Super Meat Boy, and you also have a sprint that activates after moving in a single direction for two seconds, that one's also important to surviving most challenges. There are 155 levels in total, and while most of the levels can be completed in less than 15 seconds, beating one always feels rewarding, especially if you get a 3-star rank. I recommend it!
Steam || Xbox || Nintendo E-shop
| Game Engine: GameMaker | ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $297,055.63 297k | Part of the Existential Dilogy (1st of 2)
We owe an immense debt to The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's meteoric success for giving us the immense body of work from Yeo and their team. You play Ringo Ishikawa, a listless delinquent in their last semester of senior year. All of his friends appear to be moving on, but what is Ringo to do now that school will be a thing of the past? You spend two months worth of time trying to find that answer, the answer only you can find. A truly moving work!
Originally an entry for the 2018 A Game By Its Cover game jam, THE DEVIL HAUNTS ME marks an important point in lum's game dev work as this game would become the template for both PARANOIHELL and Search Party. You play a young person (possibly named Daniel) as they attempt to survive in the wilderness floating in what appears to be a type of purgatory. Many themes and game mechanics in lum's later titles appear here as you chop down trees, collect water, hunt for food, and evade the wrath of the devil while investigating the world around you. An excellent survival horror!
Steam | GOG | Playstation | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $4,879,301.73 4.8m | Game Engine: Unity
Sometimes the net revenue of a game speaks for itself, but DUSK is an incredible FPS game by your friend and mine David Szymanski, and published by New Blood Interactive as their first major get. You play the Dusk Dude, a treasure hunter who narrowly escapes from being mounted on a pair of sickles and ripped apart by cultists. Now is the time to turn the tables! An absolutely outrageous amount of firepower and physics-based platforming co-mingle with David's classic dark sensibilities and storytelling prowess and the incredible musical stylings of Andrew Hulshult and a surprise guest star! Every moment of this game felt like being trapped inside a horror movie in the best way! Absolutely give this one a shot!
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo Switch | Xbox | Playstation
| Game Engine: Construct 2 
| ESRB Rating: Teen 
Look, let's just be straightforward here - if you managed to end up on a Neocities cite run by a furry, you probably have already played Hypnospace Outlaw and don't need me to tell you how great it is. Just in case you haven't, though, here's the rundown: You play the role of an Enforcer, a glorified hall monitor important member of the Merchantsoft™ family whose job it is to narc on innocent people maintain the integrity of Hypnospace. As your role on Hypnospace increases, you become embroiled in a cyber-noir that seemlessly blends the atmosphere of pre-Web 2.0 internet with corporate malefactions and the sorts of behaviors that only come from the truly desperate. The final act of the game's story is one of the most pleasing denounments I've had the pleasure of playing. Please do yourself a favor and check this one out if you haven't already!
Steam || Epic Games Store || Nintendo e-Shop || Playstation || Xbox
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Steam Net Revenue: $529,160.19 529k
In the post-apocalypse, someone has to be the one to tend the fields. In this game, that someone is you! Grow your plants and keep them big and happy while staving off the threat of gun-toting rabbits and other hungry pests. You can spend your days tending the farm while occasionally exploring to get better supplies and increase your crop yield. But beware, as you're far from immortal and being careful is the the only way to survive. Can you make it through the years to keep the homestead fed?
Erica Yu is a bartender at The Only Bar in town. It's early morning, and she's ready to go home to her girlfriend. But her relief is short lived as she finds herself beseiged on all sides by murderous cops, impossible geometry, and strange red mannequins. Death and danger await around every corner, but is death truly the worst you have to worry about in this town? Coming off of the success of THE DEVIL HAUNTS ME 13 months prior, lum creates a delightful atmosphere of torment as you work your way through this survival horror!
| 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!
| Game Engine: Godot | Steam Net Revenue: $5,825,919.78 5.8m
"It's a sadistic game born almost entirely out of spite." - Ville Kallio
A man on the phone promises you a financial future as an activer shooter lays waste to the streets below your window. So it goes in the grotesque world of Cruelty Squad, an FPS game/finance sim in which you are assigned wetwork tasks by your handler that become increasingly unpredictable. At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is the purest example of a cyberpunk game I think might be possible in the modern sense. Every part of your very being is stripped and torn apart in the quest for money and continued employment, everything is a jumbled nightmare of textures bereft of meaning, and the social satire is biting. This game is very much an acquired taste but it's a taste worth acquiring. Check it out!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Cyber Purge is a great cyberpunk action title from The Green Herring. You are Takami Bluesky, contracted hacker for the Cyberspace Bureau, trying to stop a cyber-terrorist by the name of Darkscythe. Darkscythe has unleased a hostile program called the Death Seal that could kill anyone who tries to disconnect from their VR headsets, thereby making everyone in the server his hostages. The game is split up into challenging sections that all reward a key and relevant lore, and hub areas to use said keys. The attention to design principles throughout the levels is great, and the programming on some enforcer enemies is fantastic and makes for a solid action experience even within the limited resources in stock ZZT. This one's a real gem!
itch.io (Original Freeware Ver.) | Steam (satryn deluxe) | Nintendo e-Shop (satryn DX)
You and your friends have been forcibly abducted to a hostile world known as 'satryn', and as the Former, it's up to you to save your friends from certain extinction and rebel against the forces of satryn. The enemy design is a varied roster from the easily distracted Bulbs to the sinister Devoiders mutating your friends to the Blooms who mainly defecate stage hazards - they all come together in devestating patterns that will punish you if you're not moving and shooting. As for shooting, your default shot is a single beam attack that can be set up to auto fire, but the real delight comes from the powerups you get for every 75k points, which alter your weapon to push away enemies or light them on fire, or sometimes just an extra hit point! Delicious arcade action.
Zenith Into Maronarium is the fifth title in the Samozbor series, and is one of the most fascinating entries in the series. The Samozbor Empire, former Russian rebels who evacuated to another dimension, have begun a devestating assault on Earth and the only hope left is the survival of a pilot in her Kotel One. Episode 1, you take to the skies and shoot down an alien menace, while intermittedly exploring cave systems armed only with a rake. You successfully shoot down the alien queen and her envoy, only to crash your own plane and scramble into a featureless landscape for help. In Episode 2, you must traverse a series of platforming obstacles on foot in order to obtain a working ship and kill another member of the Samozbor forces, the one known as Winged Doom. Winged Doom appears to be a satanic creature, but in Episode 3, you are shot down once again while attempting to bring the entity known as Winged Doom under your command and hopefully swing the tide of the war in your favor. In addition to all of this is the option to play the Orika Protocol from the Options menu, which appears to be a training module/brainwashing system. In it, you play as the dev's mascot character Kotel in a clone of a Mario game but with more difficult movement, a more distressing aesthetic and what sounds like the Pilot sing-talking in Russian. The difficulty in each chapter ranges from trivial to patently unfair, but the efforts to move the Pilot are hampered both by an exceedingly glitchy interface and persistant chatter from an HQ that appear to be having several unrelated conversations. Every chapter you play has you only take one hit point of damage before dying, including the ship sections, and they all open with a scene of the Pilot in some sort of physical or mental distress. These elements all add up to a specific commentary on the senselessness of the conflict being presented, but in a way vastly different from how other war games illustrate their point. Any delusion of a power fantasy vanishes instantly once you realize a single enemy bullet rips through your ship like paper. This particular game is one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since playing it!
| Game Engine: Stencyl 
The simplest way to explain Sparkles & Gems is to take the games Breakout, Columns, and Puyo Pop - and then throw them all together into a cotton candy machine. An enchantingly weird offering from resnijars, the core gameplay loop involves hitting cascading gems with a ball and paddle, aiming to hit as many gems that have three or more of the same type grouped together to destroy them. Gems with sparkles cause multiple gems to explode. You play against an opponent trying to make your paddle hit against a gem or block to win, and just like in Puyo Pop, you can get multipliers on your score to cause the blocks on your opponent side to multiply. The gems respawn as though by magic and will take a quick wit to handle them all! There's a Story Mode in which you get to know the characters of the game, from OAT the ferret plushie to Sandway the business horse, and presents a fun tale similar to a fighting game storyline. Treasure Mode is a game mode where you play rounds of Sparkles & Gems against the PC to rack up stocks, battery power, and jam to help improve your future runs, and to gain treasure in the form of special items you can use to decorate your room in Treasure Mode. Naturally there's a two player mode as well. This game is CUTE, and really really fun! Try it out!
| Steam Net Revenue: $45,548.76 45k
SNKRX is a rougelite arcade game in which the goal is to complete 25 waves of enemies without losing all of your units. You play a crew of various classes that move around a play area like a snake, with only two keys for movement, and no way to stop your movement. This system gets very complex very fast as your enemies are tiny colorful pill-shaped creatures with a variety of powers that demand you think on your feet. You'll find yourself having to figure out how you'll approach enemies and what you'll do if a hero falls in combat. Typical strategy is to pick off enemies from afar with one or two Ranger classes, though you can always build a team of Forcers and breach through enemy lines and throwing them across the room. I personally have gotten a lot of mileage out of using Zoner classes like the Sage and the Psykino to disrupt enemy movement and hit them with psy orbs floating around the snake, similar to a challenge run in Binding of Issac. Heroes have a set number of hit points and cooldown on their powers, and losing enough HP boots them out of your snake, You get any fallen heroes back after every stage, as well as a shop to spend money you've earned on upgrades and new heroes. You get a maximum of 7 heroes, and not all of them are guaranteed to synergize well with each other, so making money decisions with whether to hold your cash or reroll the shop could make the difference between a winning run or a quick run.
| Steam Net Revenue: $122,644.43 122k
Coming in three years after their last game Rym 9000, Sonoshee is back and with one of the most enticing stories of kinship, betrayal, and rebirth that I've seen in a while. While it would be crude to compare this game to something like World of Horror, the comparisions are unmistakable as you wrestle hopelessly against a tidalwave of eldritch horrors and seemingly inescapable fates. But beyond those obvious comparisions is how Sonoshee merges the stylings of Satoshi Kon with a magical realism similar to works like Achewood. You participate in five stories, represented by the 'critters for sale', as various people who all seem to be connected through a web of fate in which everyone and everything hang in the balance. This is a game you'll need to brace yourself for - the endings in these stories are not happy and frequently uncompromising, with one very happy exception that I won't reveal out of respect for the artist. Needless to say, this is one you'll be very happy to have picked up, and here's hoping that Sonoshee can deliver on more stories in this game's universe in the future.
| Game Engine: Unreal 
You enter into the Fuzz Dungeon through a vault that appeared in your workplace and made the Sasquatch Sex Amulet disappear, along with your path back home. You have to go through several mini-games to recreate society within the Dungeon and get the amulet back. The game has a specific viewpoint on the cruelties of modern life and how the dreams of a new society are difficult to reconcile with the material realities we live with, but acknowledging in the player a desire for things to change for the better. A project by Jeremy Couillard, an accomplished artist who has been working since 2008, Fuzz Dungeon is a beautiful and fascinating work!
| Steam Net Revenue: $518,846.05 518k | Game Engine: LÖVE | Part of the Intravenous series (1st of 2)
As the sequel to this incredible game has been announced as of this writing (and it looks beautiful) I figured it was high time to put it on the list here. I still get chills playing this game, trying to figure out where precisely the enemy is coming from and how best to approach them. For all the allusions to the Hotline Miami games this style of gameplay may conjur up, Intravenous is a completely different animal. Stealth is the name of the game here, and the AI for your enemies are extrememly sophisticated. They'll perform safety sweeps, fall back, position themselves, work in groups...all things that make your decisions on how to progress carry more weight. The use of light in this game is wonderful, too - you can feel the sense of creeping dread as you hear footsteps of a patrol moving in and out - are they coming from the left or the right? - and all the while trying to find the best way to avoid detection. You want an intense action title? This is the one for you!
The seventh solo WAD by Doom modder Benjogami and runner-up for the 2021 Cacowards, Down the Drain is coming at you full-tilt right out of the gate! Monster closets full of Revenants and occasional Archvile gangs are just a handful of the problems you'll face. The level Here n There, Now n Then is a blistering rite of passage, featuring a clown car's worth of Revenants that get dropped out of the start of the level like a gumball machine in order to progress. Of similar note is the Tricks and Traps homage, Doors of Opportunity, which nestles you in a hallway full of dysfunctional doors and having to use lateral thinking (and save-scumming in my case) to overcome what it's throwing at you. The whole production is wrapped snug with MIDIs of Radiohead and Sailor Moon OST rips that give the familiar walls of Hell a distinct feel from the usual. Fantastic work, definitely worth your time!
Call it a consequence of getting older if you like, but after a certain point this month after seeing several game announcements come and go, i realized that what I really want out of gaming is the baseline stuff that's been there the whole time - solitaire. While there is a fancy Microsoft solitaire that comes pre-installed on Windows 10, Big Klondike has a signifigant advantage of not making you have to look at ads for predatory gambling apps unless you pay for a subscription to a solitaire game. No thanks. This game has a choice between 'draw 1' and 'draw 3' styles, as well as regular and Vegas style Klondike. The cards make a very satisfying 'plap' as you turn them over, which is a small thing to note but it really does make a lot of difference on how good a card game feels to play. Actually, this game comes with a lot of small touches that feel really cozy, from a clock at the top right that lets you know how long you've spent on solitaire and help you keep time management in mind, to thoughtful little axioms that are included when you win a hand or exit the game. There was a point where I thought it wasn't actually possible to lose a game of solitaire, but Vegas style made a humble enby out of me. And, there's also paid DLC for spider solitare, freecell, pyramid, and tri-peaks. Overall, a delightful addition to anyone's game collection!
Steam | Google Play Store | Nintendo e-Shop | Playstation | Xbox
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Game Engine: GameMaker | Steam Net Revenue: $147,051.85 147k
It's difficult to explain the appeal of SUPER CHICKEN JUMPER without waxing poetic about the era of earlier indie work that inform its design, most notable BIT.TRIP Runner, and certain stages that are reminiscant of Paul Robertson's work. You are a spy chicken ordered by the president to take down the insidous XX forces and eliminate their leader once and for all! There are 36 levels in total with six unique stages and bosses. The goal of the game is to run and jump across 1 kilometer's worth of stage hazards. While this doesn't sound so hard, the persistant movement of the stage means you have to think fast to avoid most enemies. Certain levels can be cheesed with the right weapons and tools, like using the Uzi to clear out hazards section by section, but the final third of the game makes this a non-option and demands higher skilled play. Getting through each level unlocks a boss rush and challenge stages with unique gameplay modifiers. It's a really solidly built title!
| Game Engine: GDevelop 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Part of the 💀 SCREAM JAM 2021 💀
One of the earliest games from Luthfialdi Nouval, you play an unfortunate kid named Dave who is now a ghost, defied by Death and now must retrieve his body! It's a very small game, all of four levels in total, but the material makes for a pleasant logic puzzle for its sparseness. Scare people, possess them to open doors, and avoid the clergy who are dead-set on banishing you from the earthly realm!
The secret research station nestled within the Arceon asteroid has just experienced a cataclysmic failure of containment, and the resulting breach has altered the course of Arceon directly into the star it orbits! As one of the last remaining survivors of the disaster, your only hope is to activate the gateway that will get you onto one of the ships that managed to flee the station. Arceon boasts a level design that encourages incidental combat, and in that capacity it's victorious - I've never been as worried about seeing imps in a group of enemies as I am when playing Arceon, which speaks to DMPhobos' talent in making every enemy dangerous! Six levels plus one finale level make for a tight but tough experience!
| Game Engine: Unity | Steam Net Revenue: $16,247.89 16k
"The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future. In the mountains the dead live: our dead." - Remarks at the opening ceremony of the Encuentro
Coming to us from our friends at Brainwash Gang and publisher Digirati comes a marvelous stage play in which you are the brightest star, for better or for worse. You are the Soothsayer, a hermit living in a dank corner of a great mountain. You are visited by many who seek the counsel from the stars, and you find yourself in an unflattering position. You become entwined with the fates of the members of the tribe seeking you out, and the voices you hear in the dark with no one present. The advice puts you at the mercy of those that would shoot the messenger. Are you truly helping anyone? At first, your advisors are your own conscious, but as the plot continues apace, you find yourself seeking guidance on decisions from the long-dead and the soon-to-be. It's a truly beautiful piece of artistry!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
A very simple and straightforward arena shooter from The Green Herring this go-around! You are a hapless human who has been yanked from their home into the pits of hell for the amusement of a goat demon. Your escape depends on moving around an arena rapidly filling up with ravenous fire-spitting felinoids whose entry point must be destroying with explosives. Upon doing so, you go up against the goat demon itself, who is impervious to your bullets and has to be exploded to death. It's a nice tight little gameplay session with three seperate skill levels - Normal is close in difficulty to her earlier ZZT game Cyber Purge with locked doors preventing the red felinoid variants from from overwhelming the player; Hard, which removes said doors and turns the arena into a completely open space, and Evil which is the same as Hard but the enemies spawn faster and shoot more often. Can you defeat the goat demon in time?
December 25th, 2021 - The James Webb Space Telescope is launched as part of a joint effort with NASA, ESA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. The purpose of the telescope is to conduct infrared astronomy and glean stronger insights for the fields of astronomy and cosmology.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Lily is a nine-year-old girl on a mission to save someone trapped in a well! It's up to you to guide her around her homestead and find suitable materials to make a rope long enough to descend to the bottom. Made by Sam 'Ice' Woodrick, Lily's Well is a horror game with lovely easy-to-read CGA style graphics. It is also in the vein of titles like Space Quest in the sense that death is frequent and gruesome. This game merits a content warning as some truly awful things happen to Lily throughout the course of getting the True Ending. However, the game rewards sharp thinking and strategic use of your items to improve your odds of making it down the well intact. The story wraps you up like so many vines as what initially starts out as a call to action gradually reveals itself to be a mission to help a victim of nauseating abuse stop the cycle of trauma plaguing her. Are you up to the challenge?
| Game Engine: Unreal | Steam Net Revenue: $3,860.72 3k
In case you didn't get it from the title, your player character intones at the start of every level "I'm going to die if I don't eat sushi!" He's not joking, either - if you let your 'Inochi Gauge' run out from lack of sushi, he explodes and goes "I'm dead." I'm going to die if I don't eat sushi! is a 3D platformer in the vein of Super Mario 64, in the sense that a number of missions you have to finish are heavily influenced by Mario, specifically the ones where you have to collect eight red clams. Oftentimes, however, the game is a hunt for sushi in a specific environment with a handful of modifiers to keep things interesting. Platforming is a bit of a hassle in some places, as your characters horizontal leap makes some precise movements tricky. Thankfully, you have a shop in your hub world with a host of optional upgrades to your jumping that can help keep you eating sushi for longer. 40 levels and a peculiar storyline await you to rise to the challenge!
| Game Engine: GameMaker Studio
Developed by Wishes Unlimited and published by Klei Publishers, the demo for Beastieball is really cute and sweet and funny - really, I don't have a lot of notes about the core concept of this game, or it's execution. You're out to save your hometown's natural habitat from getting bulldozed for a coliseum that the Beastieball league almost certainly doesn't need, and to get the league's attention, you need to get to the top 50, which means coaching like you've never coached before. In short, I had a really great time with this one, both as a concept of being a coach to your not-Pokemon and the concept of winning a game by virtue of playing well and out-maneuver instead of worrying about hit points. I can also relate to it as an old fella whose gotten burned out on so many things like Pokemon and similar because it all feels like a mad rush to develop the most devestating meta to crush your opponents - "Beastieball used to be fun." I have to say, I'm really looking forward to this coming out next year.
