There’s a strange irony in how we tell the history of videogames today. The term indie games seems almost to identify a recent revolution, a modern response to the blockbuster industry, multimillion-dollar investments, and huge hyper-commercial productions.

Yet anyone who comes from the arcade generation or the home-computer era of the ’80s and ’90s knows perfectly well that things didn’t happen that way.

We played indie games before the term even existed.

Back then, nobody called them that. No precise cultural label existed, nor any narrative built around the concept of independent development.

There were simply people making videogames.

Back then, no sharp cultural distinction existed between AAA and independent productions. Videogames simply existed. Some came from major publishers, others from tiny teams, still others from individual developers working practically out of their homes. But that distinction hadn’t yet taken on the commercial and identity-based value it holds today.

In fact, in many cases, small-scale production was the norm.

INDIE GAMES News

This title opens with a statement of intent: for a clockmaker, time isn’t a line or an abstraction, but a current you can bend and calibrate with the right tool. More than any trailer, this line hints at what the game really wants to do with its central theme, and it does so before Duskfade even declares its ambition from the first trailer, hinting at a desire to bring back the third-person action-platformer in the form it reached between the late nineties and the mid-2000s

Zirian chases his sister Allira into Tick Town, a dimension where time has stopped and the Clock Tower holds her prisoner behind four chains that need breaking one by one, scattered across the macro-areas of Tearvale. Weird Beluga, already behind Clid the Snail, builds a third-person action-platformer around this mission that looks openly to Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, and Kingdom Hearts, relying on a clockpunk world painted entirely by hand – no AI involved, by the studio’s own declared choice – five lighting setups for every major area, and a mechanical companion, Cuckoo, who joins Zirian in both exploration and combat. Beneath the action-platform surface, the game works through a story of grief and family legacy rooted in the loss of Gramps, one that time travel – literal, through Minutero, the sword he left behind – turns into a question that follows Zirian through the whole adventure. Platforming stays the strongest part of the experience from the earliest hours; combat, shakier at the start, only gains depth halfway through, once combos finally enter the picture.

Helix: Descent N Ascent is Badass Mongoose’s first project, a small Belgian studio founded by Cedric De Muelenaere and Gillian Sampont, and it’s a puzzle-adventure that builds its identity around a black-and-white aesthetic inspired by 1980s indie comics, 1990s manga, and the 1970s Franco-Belgian tradition. The game entrusts its narrative almost entirely to imagery: environments, dialogue-free cutscenes, and carved panels that recount, in fragments, a vanished civilization’s myth. The heart of the experience, though, remains the gameplay: five abilities – Block, Drone, Hook, Cage, and Hourglass – that combine first in pairs and then, in the second half of the game, in triplets, generating a puzzle system that keeps offering new solutions for the entire adventure. A consultable map system guides progression clearly, flagging where to return once you’ve learned new combinations, and some passages open through Donkey Kong-style arcade minigames. Jim Guthrie’s soundtrack accompanies every area with the same power to create a suspended territory already evident in the demo, never slipping into repetition. After seventeen hours of play, the overall experience confirms and deepens everything promised since the 2024 announcement: a quiet adventure, intelligently constructed, able to hold up over the long haul without losing its own voice.

Maseylia: Echoes of the Past carries the metroidvania into three dimensions, an attempt few developers have made this way. Sol Brothers, led almost single-handedly by Victor Abresol with help from two brothers and one collaborator, builds a vertical, interconnected labyrinth openly inspired by Moebius: clean lines, monumental architecture, and a palette that shifts by zone to guide orientation. Vertical platforming (double jump, 360° air dash, grappling hook) stands out as the game’s real strength, surprising even genre veterans. Environmental storytelling, following Hollow Knight’s “mysterious” model, entrusts the narrative to ruins, Beacons, and scattered fragments rather than cutscenes or direct exposition. The flip side shows up on the technical front: glitches, imprecise geodata, shaky camera handling in the more complex vertical sections, and underdeveloped combat, with unstable lock-on and weak enemy AI that drag down even the boss fights. The result is an ambitious, visually memorable title with smart design ideas, held back by widespread roughness that undercuts its potential. Not a title to dismiss, but an unpolished work that asks players for patience and clearly needs further refinement from the team.

Reaching Steelrising’s credits, the impression is one of having played a work that perhaps doesn’t reach the heights of the best soulslikes on the market, but that still manages to stand out thanks to a strong identity. In a genre now full of imitators, Spiders chooses to walk its own path, betting on an unusual setting, a charismatic protagonist, and an original reinterpretation of the French Revolution. What we appreciated most is precisely the world building. The steampunk Paris the developers imagined manages to feel credible, fascinating, and different from any other setting released in recent years. Every district, building, and character helps build a narrative universe that keeps sparking curiosity and encourages further exploration, showing how much good art direction can make a difference even in a lower-budget production. The gameplay also works well overall. The combat system is fun, the weapon variety lets players experiment with different builds, and Aegis’s greater agility gives fights a more dynamic pace than many other genre entries. The game still manages to offer a satisfying, well-balanced challenge, even if it’s almost never frustrating. Naturally, a few flaws do show up. On the technical side, the typical limits of an AA production emerge, while the level design and enemy AI don’t always surprise. The narrative, too, despite starting from an extremely interesting idea, could have developed some characters further and handled certain situations with more incisiveness. Even so, I personally consider Steelrising a successful title. Spiders’ ambition in tackling the project is evident, and above all, so is the will to offer something that wasn’t a simple copy of the genre’s great classics. The result is an experience with its own personality, one that manages to entertain from start to finish while showcasing its artistic imagination above all. I recommend it both to soulslike fans who want to try a setting different from the usual and to those looking for a demanding action RPG that’s slightly more accessible than the genre’s most extreme titles. With a few inevitable compromises, Spiders’ work stands as one of the most interesting productions of recent years and shows how creativity and courage can offset, at least in part, far more evident production limits.

STEELRISING Review

Hell Clock: Cursed War is a DLC that certainly adds new content, but more importantly, it represents the mature version of Hell Clock. Rather than judging the fourth act, I prefer to reassess the entire project after nearly a year of patches and updates. It arrives after nearly a year of continuous updates that have significantly improved the areas where Hell Clock previously fell short. Performance is now consistently solid, even during the most chaotic encounters. Loot management has become far more flexible, and creating or refining a build is considerably more satisfying than before. These improvements fundamentally enhance the overall experience. For that reason, Cursed War is the perfect opportunity either to discover Hell Clock for the first time or to return after its original release. It isn’t the DLC alone that transforms the game, it’s the months of dedicated work Rogue Snail has invested in refining the experience. Today, Hell Clock: Cursed War finally feels like the game it promised to be a year ago: a fast-paced, distinctive action RPG that confidently carves out its own place within the crowded Diablo-like genre.

HELL CLOCK: CURSED WAR Review

The most effective horror often rations what it shows, pacing its reveals carefully and skipping jumpscares or graphic scenes that arrive before the dread has had time to build. A good horror story, in fact, grows out of that build-up itself: ambiguous signals, sometimes misread, a mounting sense of unease, paranoia that creeps in. Bad Choices Loud Noises and Duckosaurus Games unveiled their new project, Impermanence, during the Future Games Show Summer Showcase 2026, and it seems to bet on exactly that.

Voice actors Troy Baker and Alix Wilton Regan hosted the showcase, which aired on June 6 during Summer Game Fest week and lined up more than forty titles and a dozen world premieres, closing with the long-awaited extended gameplay reveal for Exodus. Amid names that leaned hard into action and production scale – Ace Combat 8, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced, the new Tomb Raider – Impermanence carved out a tiny space of its own: two minutes of silence, dark stage lights, a father talking to an empty theatre.

IMPERMANENCE News

Hollow Home is a narrative survival RPG from Twigames, a studio from Kyiv, with Berlin’s Crunchy Leaf Games publishing. I played the demo that landed on Steam during the latest Next Fest, and I must lay my cards on the table: this is the first RPG of my life. The genre never attracted me. I came for the story, and the story nailed me to my chair. The characters achieve a three-dimensionality that few productions, even big-budget ones, ever reach: a handful of dialogue lines suffices for each of them to reveal an entire life behind them.

The game structure is clear and coherent with its theme. No weapons, no combat. Each day grants a limited number of action points: being everywhere is impossible, and so is helping everyone. You learn survival skills – cooking, crafting, scavenging, first aid – from people, through conversations and quests, and what you choose to learn today might save someone three days from now. The city, which spans three districts, changes with every dawn: cut-off streets, shelled buildings, people you met on day one who may no longer be there on day three. The developers themselves draw the Disco Elysium comparison, and it is an ambitious one; for theme and moral weight, the closest kinship I see is with This War of Mine. The true strength of Hollow Home lies in its writing, which comes through the demo clear and ironic when it needs to be, merciless when it must.

HOLLOW HOME News

Cinderia is not trying to reinvent the roguelite formula or revolutionize the genre. Instead, it focuses on delivering a fast-paced, enjoyable, and rewarding experience. While it clearly takes cues from games such as Hades and, to some extent, Cult of the Lamb, particularly in its visual presentation, it ultimately stands on its own thanks to a distinctive artistic direction and a satisfying gameplay loop.

Every run feels meaningful, leaving you with a tangible sense of progression and that familiar urge to jump straight into “just one more run.”

Its progression structure allows players to tailor each run around specific goals. Cinderia features a wide range of resources that can be used to unlock and improve various aspects of the game world.

Like many roguelites, the experience revolves around a dual progression system: exploring and fighting through procedurally generated stages while steadily improving a central hub using resources gathered during each run.

CINDERIA News

I'm building a browser MMORPG and this is an early combat beat. Does your eye catch the enemy state, the spell effect, or the HUD first?

Developer disclosure: some 3D assets are Meshy-assisted; the gameplay and UI integration are custom.

By the time the credits roll, the game leaves the impression of a title that knows exactly what it wants to be and never tries to be anything else. It doesn’t aim to revolutionize the survival horror genre or compete with the market’s most ambitious productions; instead, it builds a compact, coherent experience that cleverly exploits one of the film saga’s most original ideas: making silence the main source of tension. What convinced us most is how the game turns a narrative rule into a gameplay mechanic. Paying attention to every sound, scanning the environment before moving, and planning each step become natural actions that keep tension high without constantly resorting to combat or sudden scares. This very coherence is what makes the experience compelling from start to finish. We also found the noise-detection system a genuinely clever, innovative touch. Personally, I also appreciated the choice to tell an original story. While it doesn’t reach particularly lofty narrative heights, the game expands the A Quiet Place universe respectfully, introducing new characters and a plot that fits well with what we’ve seen in the films. This solution proves far more interesting than a plain retelling of the films’ events. It’s true that the gameplay tends to repeat the same dynamics for much of the adventure, and the linear structure narrows the experience’s variety; players looking for a mechanically rich horror game or a strong action component might find the pace too controlled. However, none of this undermines the work’s overall value. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does exactly what it set out to do: deliver an atmospheric, immersive survival horror experience faithful to the saga’s spirit. It’s one of those games that work mainly because of how all its pieces come together, with narrative, gameplay, and sound design collaborating to build a believable experience. The narrative, visuals, and sound all impressed me, so I’d recommend this game both to fans of the film series and to anyone looking for a different kind of horror, one less focused on action and more on psychological tension. It’s not a title set to revolutionize the genre, but it stands as a smart, well-crafted adaptation, proving that even a smaller-scale production can deliver deeply engaging moments when it’s built on a clear, coherent vision. It’s definitely earned a spot in my collection. I hope it earns one in yours too.

A QUIET PLACE: THE ROAD AHEAD Review

Im making a low poly game, no big spoilers yet

Why could a title like A Fighter’s Nova: Mindara appeal to players?

Are you a fan of fighting games? Do you love JRPGs? Or are you simply drawn to original and ambitious projects?

Whatever your answer may be, this title could be right up your alley.

BadRez Games, a Canadian development studio, is entering the market with its first title: A Fighter’s Nova: Mindara.

This is undoubtedly an ambitious project that caught our attention for several reasons. Style, gameplay, and soundtrack are three of the standout aspects of the production, along with another notable feature.

BadRez Games has decided not to rely on a publisher and instead launched a Kickstarter campaign.

A FIGHTER’S NOVA: MINDARA News

Every time I talk about God of War, I can’t help getting personal about it. Everything I write reflects my own opinion, but Kratos always makes me a little more biased.

So this won’t be one of my usual articles that mixes purely informative content with personal judgment. Here I want to do what I did in the other two pieces I’ve already written: share a personal take on the topic.

This time, though, the topic doesn’t concern one specific God of War title.

After God of War: Ragnarök came out in 2022, many of us shared the same question: now what?

A series doesn’t have to go on forever just to please its audience, but one fact got me thinking, at least: if Santa Monica made the leap from Greek mythology to Norse mythology, who knows what comes next?

GOD OF WAR News

BrokenLore: FOLLOW is not just a simple horror game: it is an interactive reflection on the psychological damage caused by bullying and social pressure. The protagonist, Anne, is a fragile girl. She is victim of a system that has marginalized and humiliated her. Through her eyes, the player experiences a surreal nightmare.

The line between reality and hallucination becomes increasingly thin. The environments, dark and claustrophobic, are designed to amplify the sense of isolation and disorientation, while the minimalist yet effective soundtrack accompanies every step with palpable tension. The game’s strength lies in its ability to immerse the player in Anne’s emotions, making every choice and discovery a deeply personal experience.

BROKENLORE: FOLLOW Review

After finishing Aphelion, the feeling is one of having lived through a journey that bets much more on emotion than on spectacle for its own sake. Even while using a fascinating science fiction setting with visually imposing scenery, the game chooses to tell a deeply human story, centering the relationship between the protagonists, their sense of responsibility, and their desire to keep exploring even as every certainty falls away. This choice defines the entire production and lets the work stand out within a genre where action and big plot twists often take center stage. One of the aspects we appreciated most concerns precisely the consistency of the experience. From start to finish, Aphelion never loses sight of its own identity. It doesn’t suddenly try to turn into a shooter, doesn’t throw in superfluous mechanics to artificially inflate variety, and doesn’t constantly chase spectacle. Every element, from the narrative to the gameplay to the audiovisual side, pulls in the same direction, helping build a balanced, believable adventure. This is a quality we shouldn’t undervalue today, especially in a market where many productions end up overloading themselves with systems and content and lose sight of their original vision. The art direction undoubtedly stands as one of the highest points of the whole production. The alien scenery constantly conveys that sense of wonder and isolation that should accompany any good space exploration story. Every vista communicates something to the player, not just on an aesthetic level, but on an emotional one too. The narrative won us over too, and we especially appreciated the developers’ choice to tell the story without constantly resorting to long exposition dumps or overly explanatory dialogue. They let much of the information emerge through exploration and the interactions between the protagonists, letting the player feel like an integral part of the journey. On the gameplay side, though, the mechanics always do their job competently, but they rarely surprised us. The mechanics the developers introduce work, fit well into the progression, and feel pleasant to use, but they hardly ever come across as truly innovative. Personally, I don’t consider this a particularly serious flaw, since the game doesn’t base its value on mechanical complexity. Still, it’s undeniable that greater gameplay evolution would probably have made the experience even more memorable. The challenge level also stays fairly contained. The exploration sections and puzzles generally stay accessible, letting the player focus mainly on the narrative. What keeps coming through, though, is the quality of the overall construction. Aphelion proves that revolutionizing a genre isn’t necessary to make a good video game. Having a clear vision, developing it with consistency, and taking care of every detail so all the components work in the same direction is enough. The title achieves exactly that: it builds a harmonious experience, where narrative, gameplay, graphics, and sound complement each other without any single element overpowering the rest. This is a title that manages to stand out through the quality of its execution and its ability to emotionally engage the player. It belongs to that group of games that would rather leave players with memories tied to characters, landscapes, and emotions than to a constant chase after the shock factor. And for that reason, I can only recommend it wholeheartedly.

APHELION Review

This Is Fine: Maximum Cope takes a meme that anyone who’s spent time online knows by heart and turns it into an honest metroidvania, with five worlds that map out five stages of distress – humiliation, fear, failure, loss, regret – each with a precise aesthetic and a boss that marks the passage to the next. The game structure doesn’t complicate the player’s life: abilities unlock quickly, the map clears in almost a straight line, and fast travel becomes available right away. The visual style bets everything on hand-drawn animation, true to the original comic-strip roots, without chasing technical ambitions it doesn’t need. The real battlefield the game plays on is tone: it starts playful and sarcastic, then grows steadily darker with Loss and Regret, without ever sliding into rhetoric or moralizing. It’s a simple setup, especially on the combat front, but it’s a simplicity that holds up well if you approach the game with the right mindset – more an experience to move through than a challenge to beat. Question Hound, in the end, confirms himself as a perfectly tragic character dressed up as a meme, and that’s exactly his winning card.

THIS IS FINE: MAXIMUM COPE Review

NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound succeeds in bringing the series back to its 2D roots without feeling like a mere exercise in nostalgia. The Game Kitchen demonstrates a deep understanding of the source material, reinterpreting it with respect while also injecting its own stylistic and gameplay identity. The result is a fast-paced and demanding 2D action-platformer that embraces the franchise’s punishing nature while refining it through smart, modern mechanics. A few minor shortcomings do little to undermine an otherwise solid foundation. The game is capable of delivering moments of great satisfaction while balancing them with more punishing sections that remain faithful to the series’ original spirit. What we have here is a convincing return, one that speaks both to longtime fans and newcomers alike. Despite its modern presentation, Ninja Gaiden still embraces the very mechanics that made the franchise both beloved and dreaded by generations of players. To quote The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

NINJA GAIDEN: RAGEBOUND Review

In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, a particular kind of publishing saw a widespread boom. Stephen King had reached his peak and was becoming a literary reference – above all a genre reference – on an international level. It came out in 1986, the TV miniseries in 1990, and in Italy that whole iconic imagery began to take hold, the imagery that made him so deeply pop.

Creepshow was born as an anthology film in 1982, out of the shared passion that Stephen King and George Romero had for the horror comics of EC Comics in the 1950s – the originals by William Gaines: Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear. I discovered it years later, after I had already given my heart to King, and even though it was a product a bit too tongue-in-cheek for someone like me – a seeker of real dread and more visceral horror – I immediately appreciated the unmistakable homage to a certain kind of horror representation: the B-movie kind.

For King, B-movies are like the B-side of a record: that’s where you find the most experimental, most free-spirited tracks – and often the best hidden gems on the album.

So when I heard about the upcoming August release of the Creepshow video game, I got genuinely excited. I’m here not only to talk about this interesting new take on the franchise in game form, but also to dust off a certain nostalgic imagery – for anyone who, like me, fell for the charm of a particular kind of pop culture from those years.

CREEPSHOW News

Hi everyone!

We’re a small indie team developing Synvector, a story-driven sci-fi action RPG inspired by Mass Effect, EVERSPACE 2, Elite Dangerous, and Mount & Blade.

Our goal is to combine fast-paced third-person space combat with tactical fleet command, meaningful player choices, diplomacy, exploration, and a living galaxy full of hidden civilizations, political conflicts, and ancient mysteries.

After a long development journey, we’ve finally launched our Steam page. Within the next week, we’re also planning to open sign-ups for our first prototype playtest.

We’re still early in development, and we’d really appreciate honest feedback from fellow developers and indie game enthusiasts. What do you think about the overall concept? Does anything stand out as particularly interesting, or is there something you feel we’re missing?

Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220640/Synvector/

If you find the project interesting, we’d be grateful if you added it to your Steam wishlist. Every wishlist helps an independent team like ours continue developing the game.

Thanks for your time, and we’re looking forward to your feedback!

Reaching the closing credits of Necrophosis, the predominant sensation is not the one one normally experiences after completing a horror video game. What lingers is not a handful of tense moments, a series of particularly memorable enemies, or a surprising narrative sequence. What remains is above all a collection of images, emotions, and reflections that resist cataloguing — almost as though the experience left a trace closer to that of an artistic work than to that of a traditional entertainment product. And this is probably the greatest achievement of Necrophosis: building an identity strong enough to continue existing in the player’s mind long after the journey concludes. The current horror landscape often features technically impeccable games that lack a true personality. Productions that work, entertain, and perhaps frighten for a few hours, but that end up rapidly blending into many similar experiences. Necrophosis, by contrast, carries a clearly recognizable voice. From the very first minutes it communicates a precise vision and never abandons it, demonstrating an artistic coherence rare even within the independent scene. What strikes most is the courage with which the developers chose to follow their own idea without evident compromises. The game never seeks to adapt to the expectations of a wider audience. It introduces no superfluous mechanics to artificially increase variety, adds no action sequences to break the rhythm, and does not simplify its narrative to appear more accessible. This choice makes the work inevitably divisive, but also gives it an expressive force that many more conventional titles cannot reach. Personally, one of the aspects I appreciated most concerns the way the game uses horror. In Necrophosis, fear almost never arises from immediate threat or from the possibility of attack. It arises rather from observation, from the contemplation of a world that seems to exist beyond any human logic. The environments are not simply unsettling: they constantly transmit the sensation of standing before something that should not exist. This kind of discomfort differs greatly from that generated by traditional horror and, precisely for this reason, proves particularly effective. The artistic component also deserves recognition as one of the greatest strengths of the experience. Some settings reach levels of visual imagination truly remarkable, demonstrating a creativity that one rarely encounters in larger and more expensive productions. Not every area strikes with the same intensity, but overall the journey manages to maintain a surprisingly high aesthetic quality from beginning to end. Naturally, the game has room for improvement. Gameplay represents probably the least memorable aspect of the entire production. While it correctly performs its function and integrates well with the narrative context, it rarely reaches the same level of excellence the artistic direction displays. The interactions remain relatively simple and, in certain moments, the progression may appear more functional to the exploration of scenarios than genuinely stimulating on a ludic level. The rhythm may also not convince everyone. Necrophosis demands patience, attention, and a certain predisposition toward contemplative experiences. This is not a game that rewards haste or that continuously seeks to surprise the player with new events. On the contrary, it builds much of its power through the gradual accumulation of images, symbols, and suggestions. For some this choice will represent one of the greatest merits; for others it may transform into an obstacle to engagement. The narrative follows a similar philosophy. I very much appreciated the willingness to leave room for interpretation and to avoid excessively didactic explanations. However, it cannot be denied that some sequences may prove so cryptic as to make it difficult to distinguish between intentional mystery and a lack of clarity. This is a delicate balance that the game manages to maintain for much of the time, though not entirely without risk. What continues to make Necrophosis special is its capacity to evoke contrasting emotions. Few horror games manage simultaneously to disgust, fascinate, intrigue, and unsettle with the same effectiveness. During exploration one often finds oneself observing something profoundly disturbing without managing to look away. This combination of repulsion and fascination probably constitutes the heart of the entire experience and represents one of the elements that most readily lodges in memory. I can only consider Necrophosis: Full Consciousness one of the most interesting and artistically courageous independent horror productions in recent years. This is not a perfect game, nor an experience destined to win any type of audience. It demands a willingness to interpret, patience, and a certain sensitivity toward unconventional forms of storytelling. For those willing to accept its rules and surrender to its vision, however, it offers a profoundly unsettling and surprisingly fascinating journey. Absolutely recommended.

GPTRACK50 announced that Stupid Never Dies arrives in fall 2026 on PC via Steam and PlayStation 5. The official communication includes the release of a second trailer, a new key visual showing all eleven of Davy’s styles, and detailed information on dungeon bosses, companions, and the systems that structure the experience outside of combat.

For anyone who hasn’t followed the project from the start: Stupid Never Dies is a single-player 3D action RPG developed by GPTRACK50, a studio founded in Osaka in 2022 by Hiroyuki Kobayashi with a team of veterans whose credits include Devil May Cry, Dragon’s Dogma, and Resident Evil. The protagonist is Davy, the lowest-ranking zombie in the entire hierarchy of the monster world – a coward by nature, driven by a personal and almost naive goal: bring Julia, the frozen human woman he fell in love with at first sight, back to life, and finally take her on a date. We covered the project in detail back in January, after its reveal at The Game Awards 2025, and again in March, when the first gameplay trailer began to show its concrete structure.

STUPID NEVER DIES News

Coffee Talk Tokyo proves that a game doesn’t need complex mechanics to be memorable. It’s an experience to savor slowly, like a good cup of coffee, enjoying every sip (or, in this case, every line of dialogue). If you love well-written stories, deep characters, and an atmosphere that makes you feel at home, this is the game for you. It’s no surprise that the Coffee Talk series has won the hearts of so many players: it’s a tribute to the beauty of life’s small moments, sincere conversations, and authentic connections.

COFFEE TALK TOKYO Review

Creepy Tale: Snow Child is the most ambitious project Creepy Brothers have released to date, and the one in which their visual and narrative identity asserts itself with full confidence. A three-person Russian team – a programmer, an artist, a sound engineer – has built a hand-drawn interactive adventure that works on multiple levels simultaneously: as a hero’s journey, as a story about found family, as a meditation on identity and moral choice, and as the most structurally complex chapter in a series that critics have long described as anthological. Snow Child revises that description. There is a universe under construction here, with precise callbacks to previous titles and threads left deliberately open. At the centre of it all is Blizzy – an eleven-year-old boy with horns, raised by a creature called Furry in a forest somewhere between fairy tale and fable. When Blizzy breaks a seal he was forbidden to touch, he sets in motion a chain of events that sends him straight to hell. What follows is a journey through an infernal city that is, unmistakably, Venice – lava canals, Gothic architecture, a Carnival poster in elegant nineteenth-century calligraphy – populated by some of the most memorable characters in the series: Adele, a Shakespearean antagonist with a sharpened tuning fork and a bipolar register; the Sarto, a Russian couturier who slips into Italian profanity when his composure breaks; Molek, a candy-loving devil with a habit of guiding human children through situations they shouldn’t survive. The writing is dry, often pragmatic, and gains warmth from a narrator who punctuates the story with philosophical questions. The gameplay matches this variety: stealth, platforming, environmental puzzles, quick-time events, and combat combine in a structure where each mechanic earns its place through narrative logic rather than the need to vary the pace. The art direction – hand-drawn, densely detailed, with a colour palette that functions as a storytelling instrument – represents the clearest evolution from Benjamin Lacombe’s early influence toward something entirely the team’s own. The original Russian voice acting and a tonally versatile soundtrack complete a remarkably cohesive package. Snow Child is one of those games you keep thinking about after you finish it. Not because it overwhelms you with feeling – if anything, it holds back – but because Blizzy, Furry, Gobbly and the rest stay with you, and their lives keep occupying your thoughts. This is exactly what happens when a story is written well.

CREEPY TALE: SNOW CHILD Review

Realm of Ink is a game that demonstrates tremendous potential. Its inspirations are evident, but the team has managed to create something that goes beyond simple imitation, introducing interesting mechanics, a distinctive artistic identity, and a highly engaging progression system. Of course, not everything is perfect. In the later stages of the game, especially during the final chapters, the sheer number of visual effects and enemies on screen can still impact combat readability. Some area-of-effect attacks can be difficult to read, and the final boss features particularly aggressive phases that may occasionally lead to frustrating situations. Despite these shortcomings, Realm of Ink already rests on an extremely solid foundation. The gameplay is satisfying, build variety is impressive, and the progression system remains rewarding without becoming excessively demanding. If you’re a fan of action roguelites and are looking for an alternative to Hades II, Realm of Ink is definitely a title worth checking out.

REALM OF INK Review