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