Been on an end of year indie kick and picked up a bunch of indie stuff during the last steam sale and finished up these ones:
Chasing Static - Horror sci-fi themed walking sim with light gameplay elements. You follow the radio to echoes of what happened in the past to unravel the story. Story was sorta interesting, but nothing special and not really worth the time. Decent VA work.
A Castle Full of Cats - Metroidvania structured hidden object game about finding cats in Dracula's mansion. Was pretty fun for a hidden object game. Worth the couple bucks if you like finding objects and cats. Has some fun secrets.
20 Small Mazes - Free game on steam. Drag around 20 small mazes and solve them. Does a few interesting things with mazes connecting to other mazes. It's free and only takes an hour or so. Worth it for the creative ideas.
Felvidek - A 5-6 hour jrpg made by a Slovakian dev that takes place in 15th century Slovakia. Despite the jank, it plays it mostly straight with an interesting location and some hilarious dialogue. The combat is actually pretty hardcore turn-based since you don't get levels and everything is gear and item based. Can die pretty easily but the game gets easier as you go along and get more gear and items and party members. Combat reminds me the most of some of the DS Mistwalker type games. Pretty good game and the soundtrack is fuck awesome. Also some great art.
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow - Pretty solid point and click adventure game that's folk horror. The story is engaging and the VA is some of the best I've heard all year. Really impressive VA work. The gameplay and puzzles are just kind of eh and I think whether it sticks the landing is divisive, but the atmosphere really nails folk horror of living in a weird and creepy backwater village.
A Date in the Park - One of the first games by the same dev Cloak and Dagger games. 30 minute free point and click game that's creepy and uses digitized sprites and backgrounds. It's not amazing or anything but I thought it was interesting and the ending sticks with you for a bit. Feels like the story would fit well in any horror film anthology series like V/H/S.
How Fish is Made - By the dev who made Mouthwashing. Sorta prequel to it and free. You are a fish and you flop around to the exit. Pretty fucking terrible.
Mouthwashing - Space sci-fi psychological horror adventure. I liked this but have issues with it. The story is good and the way it's told is really well done. The art is cool and the gameplay which is an adventure game mostly is passible. But the story really drags towards the end and when the gameplay does things that aren't point and click basic, it is terrible because man this dev can't do gameplay. So I enjoyed the story but don't think I'll be there day 1 for this dev's next game because they suck at gameplay. Also it's kind of similar to Signalis being a sci-fi space horror with Evangelion inspirations and Signalis is a ton better game because it actually has decent gameplay to back up the story.
Iron Lung - A game where you blindly control a submarine through a blood ocean on a moon after every living planet mysteriously vanishes leaving only humanity that is on space stations and space ships remaining and searching for answers. This is by the dev that did Dusk, which is an amazing FPS. Iron Lung was surprisingly really engaging once I got the hang of driving a submarine blind using only way points and a map and radar. Really intense game with great atmosphere and cool lore. Liked this a lot.
Sludge Life - Sandbox platformer where you explore and platform and interact with NPCs and environmental storytelling to get to 100 tag spots and tag them. It's solid and I had fun, but the platforming controls are kind of slippery and there's a lot of backtracking until you get certain items that cut backtracking down. Liked it enough that I'll play Sludge Life 2.
The Norwood Suite - First Cosmo D made game I've played and this was a really polished and interesting adventure game around 2 hours long. Has a bit of that late 90s adventure game aesthetic. Very cool setting and great music and good weird writing. It felt like a Suda game but polished instead of janky. Will play more of Cosmo D's games after this.
Fatum Betula - A very weird PS1-aesthetic game where you start at a church where the roots of a new world are growing and you're given three test tubes to fill and pour into the root's water to determine what the new world will be like. You go around 3-4 immersive environments interacting with NPCs and solving small questlines to get all kinds of materials to use in your test tubes to get tons of endings that reflect the new worlds you create. It is very much "my first 3d game in Unity" feel, but it's also kind interesting once you get in the hang of it and the endings are well done and make you want to get them all. The dev's next game "Mysteries under Ophelia Lake" is a weird fishing game where you fish for 5-6 hours to get to the mystery trench under the lake, but it sounded like it wasn't worth the time so I just watched a youtube breakdown of it and it was kind of interesting. Otoh Fatum Betula is worth the couple of hours to get the endings though at first it's pretty confusing how the game plays.
