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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by a meaty walking truck, opportunities for hubris, slime cleanup troubles, submarine dilemmas, and more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!
Solo developer Billy Basso’s enigmatic Metroidvania Animal Well has been dated for May 9th, publishers Bigmode announced yesterday. In it, you’ll explore a vast labyrinth of tunnels, solve puzzles and escape its many mammalian-based horrors, all of whom are out to gobble you up in one fell swoop – though as a strange, tiny little blob creature the size of a chicken nugget, it’s unclear both what you are, and why exactly you’re so appetising to them. Well, it probably has something to do with looking like a sentient chicken nugget, I suppose. Come and watch the release date trailer below.
It’s GDC week over in San Francisco at the moment, and such a high concentration of video game developers in one place can only mean one thing: The Maw has turned its ever-dribbling gaze to America’s west coast, and is preparing to bask in all the fresh learnings being shared about how last year’s best video games were made and created. Edwin is one the ground there for us, so we wish him well in his news gathering and interview appointments. Back home, the news cycle still continues apace, with lots of great releases big and small coming up over the next seven days. Here’s what we’ve got our eyes on.
Having spent close to 40 hours hanging out with Cloud and co. on my (entirely accidental) Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth holiday last week, I’ve been absolutely bowled over by the sheer size and scale of its big, open world map regions. I’ve only seen three of them so far, out of its total of eight, but it’s immediately obvious just how much of a step-up these places are compared to the dusty plains and rolling hills of the most recent Final Fantasy game to hit PC, FF15. An obvious take, perhaps, given that FF15 first came out eight years ago in 2016, but I’m sure anyone (all right, mainly me) who’s ever despaired at Noctis’ seeming inability to climb even the smallest hillock in front of him, or how everyone always rides right into your backside while gunning about on a chocobo, will feel some mild, tangible relief at how elegantly Rebirth has solved both of these particular problems. Not only can everyone’s chocobo navigate the world seamlessly without getting tripped up on either yourself or the nearest pebble, but Cloud can also jump, leap and haul himself up crags and rocks with one easy button press.
But there are aspects of Rebirth’s approach to open world adventuring that also feel distinctly underwhelming at the same time. When you look past the splendour and rich reimagining of this once flat and detail-less world, it’s ultimately quite a standardised take on what modern open world games have become in recent years. There are towers that reveal more points of interest on the map; there are special monster encounters to find; summon temples to discover; and lifestream springs to analyse that also reveal more and more about your immediate surroundings. There are proper sidequests with their own multi-part story objectives, too, which is arguably where Rebirth feels most alive, but most of the activities you’ll be doing between critical story missions all generally fall into the same identical categories in each region. FF15 had some of these, too, of course, but it never felt quite so formulaic in how you went about them.
I’ll be honest: fried eggs are my least favourite way to enjoy the versatile food. But even a noted fried-egg hater like me was left salivating over a pan full of sizzling yolks by my first look at strange yet mesmerising upcoming sci-fi cooking sim Arctic Eggs.
Mojang have announced a new Minecraft subscription service, the Marketplace Pass, which grants access to a catalogue of “150+” community-created Minecraft thingy-ma-bobs. Skins, adventure worlds, survival spawns, mashups, bizarre textures – with a Marketplace Pass, the wider monetisable universe of Minecraft is your (rented) oyster, except that this being Minecraft, the oyster looks like a weird underwater trapdoor. Here’s a trailer.
Port-o-remaster publishers Aspyr yesterday launched the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, bundling together the two ‘What if Battlefield but Star Wars?’ shooters originally released by Pandemic Studios and LucasArts in 2004 and 2005 (not to be confused with Dice and EA’s uncolonic Star Wars Battlefront games from the mid-tensies). It’s one of those rereleases that exists mostly for consoles which never saw the games in the first place, made a bit useless on PC by the fact that you can still buy and fully play the originals for half the price. It’s made even less useful by launching in a right wonky technical state, with bad lag, crashes, and reportedly only three 64-player servers online at first.
What do you reach for when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting in a shop doorway for the rain to stop, or even while you’re waiting for a game to finish downloading? I don’t mean to assume, but let’s face it, it’s probably your phone, where some idle doomscrolling likely awaits you, or some other, time-wasting distraction that will help fill the dead air between one task and the next. Well, While Waiting is a game that delves into precisely this fundamental human question: what is the best thing to do while waiting for something else to happen? It’s from the makers of the very good puzzle game Moncage, and its newly released Steam demo is a pure, fidgety brilliance.
My day in Lightyear Frontier starts out with a bit of farming. On a good day, it’s raining, so I don’t need to water the crops. On a bad day, there are weeds spontaneously spawning from the sky and I need to catch them before they land right on top of my precious plants. Either way, when I’m done, I’ll put the day’s harvest into the processing machines to work while I’m away, and then go exploring for minerals.
My goals are clear. I need to build a new machine, or upgrade my mech so that I can clean up a new area of the map and get new resources in return. Those will – you guessed it – let me build new machines or upgrade my mech again. There might be a few steps to juggle on the way, but nothing that needs me to hold long recipe flowcharts in my head. When I get back I’ll have everything I need to take the next step. It always feels like I’m making forward progress.
If you’re fond of the fairly specific blend of doomy theology, rich art direction and Soulslike-tinted metroidvaning encapsulated by Blasphemous, you might also enjoy Saviorless from Cuban team Empty Head Games and publisher Dear Villagers, which now has a PC release date of 2nd April.
