Indie Roundup: Winter/Spring 2025
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
———
What’s left when we’ve moved on.
———
I’ve had an interesting gaming year. I’ve played one AAA game (Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth) since January that I am still playing, and everything else has been an indie game, and a small one. This year has been crazy for games of all kinds and a lot has slipped through the cracks. Recently I had the thought, this is primarily a column about indie games but I don’t often directly recommend them. So, I want to use my column this month to highlight indie games that I think are interesting and have gotten somewhat overlooked.
I’ve listed six games and three demos that I played this spring. While I don’t necessarily recommend all of these, I can see someone liking each of them for their own particular reason. You might find something to play while we’re all waiting for Fields of Mistria 1.0 to come out. Here we go!
Games
Mudborne
I started Mudborne three or four times because I was so sure I’d like it. It’s a pixel art game about frogs! (a frog-management sim). I made the exact same mistake I made with Apico, a beekeeping sim from the same developer. In simulation terms, this is Factorio, not Minami Lane; it is way more intricate in systems than I wanted it to be.
To be fair, it feels weird to complain about there being too much depth. The game is very thoughtfully made. There’s a custom encyclopedia where you get rewards for doing tutorial stuff. The worst thing is that through the achievements I can see there’s a whole world of magic and story things that are way more interesting to me than frog breeding and I’ll never reach it.
I don’t feel too bad about it, because both games donate toward animal conservation.
Rift Riff
Rift Riff is a tower defense game where you survive three or four waves of enemies on a highly stylized planet. You click to select and plop down towers, nice and simple; I can imagine it playing well on iPad. The game is tough for newcomers to the genre (me) but it’s a good entry-point because you can rearrange your towers after each wave, making deaths a matter of about 30 seconds.
The design decisions make this game special. For example, you start the level at the point where the enemies start and have to run through it to get to your tower, giving you a preview of the route you have to defend before anything happens. Even down to the style, the game gets it. Each level has a minimalist color palette where monochrome towers and enemies pop. The player character hums when you stand still. (So cute!) This is a laptop game for me, and I can see myself doing runs well into the future.
Into the Restless Ruins
(I was provided a key for this game by Ant Workshop Ltd.)
What is it with this year and games where you play as a house? I won’t not compare this game to Blue Prince, but rather than a puzzle-roguelike hybrid this is firmly in the latter category, where a spirit asks you to build paths through ruins in order to reach a boss. Every day, you build part of the level. Every night, you go through the rooms you placed and fight enemies Vampire Survivors-style.
Like the previous game I thought it was slightly too hard, but unfortunately here a failed run means half an hour rather than a minute or two. I really don’t know what formula it is that makes people, including myself, OK with certain roguelike loops and not others. (To go back to Blue Prince, whose loop people either loved or hated.) I played enough to realize that the difficulty would resolve not through getting more resources but by me getting better, which was not in the cards. However, in the moments I was doing well the reverse-level building was satisfying and made me look forward to the next night.
Dragon Ruins 2
I think I learned about this game from Brendan Hesse on The Crawl. It’s a very simple dungeon crawler in minimal color-tones. What does “minimalist dungeon crawler” mean? In this case there is an environment to walk around in rather than a grid, so in some respects this is less minimalist than Dungeon Encounters.
Even so, it’s very aesthetically cool. I love the stylish (and multi-color) character art before you go into the dungeon. Combat happens automatically, so the only strategy is what gear you have and how long you go before you turn back. Each dungeon feels different enough, but overall, I didn’t need to concentrate too hard on the moment-to-moment and could listen to my podcast and zone out until… oops, I died to a slime and lost $200. Oh well.
Kabuto Park
Of all these, this is the one where I feel most strongly Play this game!! Do you like the beetle minigame in Boku No Natsuyasumi? Do you like Animal Crossing’s bug collecting? (Statistically speaking, you do.) Then you will probably enjoy this game. Collect beetles, grow them stronger and fight other bugs while exploring the countryside in the summertime. Please play this so the developer makes another one.
Formless Star
This game is Weird! You wander around an alien spaceship and talk to monsters who you write down in your encyclopedia. One of the monsters is a house whose limbs are other houses who talk to you about bus timetables and such. The world changes when you go in and out of your spaceship, which lets you find more monsters.
Like Rift Riff, this game is very permissive but here it’s to the point where there is no combat or other mechanic besides meeting new monsters. (Ok, you can also build bridges to cross water.) I’m not finished with it yet, and I can’t recommend it as a “game” per se, but as a wandering-around-experience (admittedly yes, a kind of game) it’s quite funny.
Demos
Becoming Saint
Becoming Saint’s loop is straight out of Cult of the Lamb, but with less blood. In fact, the “conversions” you accomplish as you march through Italy are completely bloodless. I sort of thought the battles would involve more choice, not just me pointing my followers at the enemy and watching them go. What I am looking forward to seeing develop is the political spectrum system, where you develop an ideology by issuing regula. I think Becoming Saint has avoided the trap of historical realism and focused on the aesthetics of medieval art – a la Pentiment – but I’ll reserve my judgement there for the full release.
Consume Me
Ok, I don’t know that this one counts as overlooked. Consume Me is about being a teen and feeling uncomfortable in your body, using food as a metaphor for a whole bunch of stuff. At a time where GLP-1 ads grow on trees and fashion is throwing it back to the early 2000s, I’m excited to play the rest of this game about eating disorders.
One thing Consume Me captures is how boring it is to have a restrictive eating disorder. Every morning is the same for Jenny, and every food-balancing minigame is met with failure or the game-inspired sad tinge of “I can do this next time!” I look forward to playing this on full release.
Cast n Chill
Years of too-complicated videogame fishing has biased me against Cast n Chill’s simpler vision. You roll out to the lake, drop anchor and click twice to catch fish, no bars or tension mechanics required. You sell your fish automatically and the only choices you make are when to upgrade your bobber and what direction to cast your line. It’s very beautiful pixel art, but I think it’s for people who don’t want to “play a game” so much as “veg out” – a semi-confusing divide for a medium that usually treats those things as one and the same.
The full version will add more fish and locations (as well as something called Idle Mode) but this is pretty much it. If you are interested in something one step up from an idle game, you might like this.
That’s it – thanks for reading!
———
Emily Price is a freelance writer, digital editor, and PhD candidate in literature based in Brooklyn, New York. You can find her on Bluesky.
