Stealth Crossword needs you to help guide covert letter operatives into the correct puzzle positions to prevent international incidents. While I’m not especially into crossword puzzles, something about adding a touch of espionage makes the prospect of figuring out words a lot more interesting. In this game, you have access to all of the letters you may need to solve a puzzle. All you need to do is type a key and that corresponding letter will pop up in the various metallic underground bases you’ll be sneaking your way through. Once your letter appears, you’ll have to dodge the various letter guards (you can see their cone of vision flitting back and forth) to make your way to the right spot in each crossword puzzle. Solve all of them to move on to the next step in your mission. The game feels pretty straightforward at first. I managed to figure out the first stage without looking at most of the clues (which were conveniently laid out right on-screen). However, things get more complicated as you progress through each area, requiring you find computers with hidden information or locate other sources of intel that will help you figure out the right word to solve each puzzle. As you do so, an overarching plot starts to take shape over the course of the game as well. It’s not especially serious given the nature of the game, adding more fun to this already silly concept. Stealth Crossword is a delightfully clever take on crosswords that injects a little bit of tension and complexity to the mix. Having to sneak about without getting caught and find information that will help you figure out the clues makes the game a bit more playfully demanding than most crosswords, creating something fun and funny in the process. Stealth Crossword is available now (for free) on itch.io. About The Author

Abyss Vaulter has players hopping their way up through a sinkhole filled with monsters. Thankfully there’s weapons and an economy down here. You have fallen down into a huge pit and somehow survived the long, long fall on the way down there. Also, a gun has fallen down with you. Both of these things are very unfortunate for the creatures living down here, as they all seem to be made of valuable gems and you’re determined to blast your way out of here while collecting bejewelled riches along the way. Considering you’re the one who stumbled into their underground home, your behavior is pretty sketchy. But it’s also really fun? I am thinking I might just be a terrible person. You’ve got a long climb ahead of you as you crawl out of this pit. You can string a few jumps together before you hit the ground, though, making you highly mobile as you work your way through the rough terrain. Your gun has infinite ammo for you to cause trouble for these critters, but there are also a variety of upgrades lying around down here that make your gun even more of a menace with lasers, rockets, and homing shots. Considering most of the wildlife is pretty tame, it can often feel like overkill. And it gets even wilder when you collect gems from your fallen “enemies” to use in the shop to buy even stronger upgrades for yourself. You’re a real menace down here. Abyss Vaulter is, despite my mixed feelings about blasting wildlife in its depth, a really enjoyable, playful platformer that offers a ton of great upgrades that keep it entertaining during its brief playtime. It’s a perfect bite-sized experience for when you just want to feel powerful and do some cool jumps. Abyss Vaulter is available now on itch.io. About The Author

Hungry Horrors is a deckbuilder with roguelike aspects where you need to cook meals for monsters instead of fighting them. You are a little princess, who is looking to feed those who want to attack you, instead of fighting them off with some sort of weapon. Using your magical cooking pot, you must draw a hand of cards and then spend them to satiate monsters. The foods you make all have their own flavor notes which can combo up when you match what a monster wants, allowing you to fill them up quickly. Clearly inspired by the likes of Slay the Spire, you can choose where you go next, picking paths that might lead to adding new cards to your deck or even boss fights against even bigger monsters. You can also play cards on yourself from time to time to increase your health, or use potions if you are in a bind in order to slow down the monsters. They just want to get close enough to eat you! When playing Hungry Horrors at New Game Plus, I found the way that these combos work and the variety of foods cooked through these cards felt unique. Some of the combos that I ended up creating, through a bit of luck, overfed these hungry monsters. Each time you do die, though, you make your way back to your castle where you can just try again and reset your card deck by cooking up more treats to take with you on your adventure. Hungry Horrors doesn’t, in its current state, feel as intense as other deckbuilders I have played, but it has its own unique aspects and mechanics that I very much enjoy seeing the results of! Some of the monsters are also quite challenging in their own ways. Hungry Horrors is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can grab a demo or add it to your wishlist on Steam. About The Author

REPOSE makes every step through its gloomy, monster-filled halls count as you search for precious oxygen tanks. But does your death matter? You wake up to see someone getting torn apart by... The post ‘REPOSE’ Puts Horrifying Pressure on Your Every Step appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Tea for Sana has you trying to avoid letting on on that you’ve lost your memories while making food for people who need it. This is a story-driven adventure game that’s clearly inspired by a Slavic fantasy world. You play as an old witch known for her ability to cook meals that heal people. However, in more recent times, your memories have started to fade, leaving you unable to find your items or remember your recipes at all. You don’t want to admit that your memory has been fading or that you aren’t the witch that you once were, so instead you are just trying to fumble through life, talking to people in the area and finding objects that might jog your memory. There are some spirits who are able to help you out, although there are others who aren’t very helpful at all. This all comes to a head in Tea for Sana when your friend Sana visits but is hiding her face. You need to make a drink to help her, but cannot quite remember what her favorite is. Thankfully, everyone is patent, so you have time to exit your home and start gathering ingredients which you can then use to make different foods or drinks. Wandering around your home, you can find chestnuts, flowers, and even the coffee beans that you have been growing in your garden. You can also interact with creatures and humans nearby. The people in Tea for Sana actually have a lot of different dialogue. Talking to them once won’t get you far, so it’s worth speaking to them again, seeing what new lines of conversation appear and what they say. I found it surprising when I played the demo at Develop Reboot Blue that I needed to continue to talk to people right after speaking to them to gain more information and understand their needs. The creatures are less talkative, but still very interesting in what they need or how they speak. Tea for Sana is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist. About The Author

Pack needs you to load up a suitcase, but doing so involves carefully seeing what items can be put inside other things to make it all fit. You’re off on some sort of trip and you need to pack up everything you’ll need to go on a handful of excursions to a couple of different places. Each one sees you trying to stow a whole bunch of different things inside your suitcase. You also appear to have a tendency to pack to the point where you’ll fill the exact dimensions of your suitcase, leaving absolutely no other space left over. So, best plan out where everything is gonna go if you’re going to make your flight. The immediate thought when you start this game is to start plunking things down, Resident Evil 4-style, in the suitcase and then move them around to make them all fit. It doesn’t take long before you see that this is pointless; there’s just not enough room if you try to shove everything in the suitcase. However, once you unzip your laptop bag and see that you can fit additional things inside of it, your plan becomes clear. I admit, I felt I had the game pretty muchy figured out at that point and it would be an easy road to the end. I was wrong, as the ability to store things in other objects opens the game up to get really creative about what things can go inside of other stuff. Thankfully the game doesn’t judge me for mixing up my Magic and Uno cards. Pack managed to take me by surprise a few times during its brief play time, delighting me with its art style and the creative solutions it makes you come up with to get that suitcase closed. Pack is available now on itch.io. About The Author

Captain Corgi: Planetary Problem Solver takes a pair of helpful puzzle-solving dogs on adventures across planets inspired by fairy tales. All dogs want to be good boys, but in this game, you take helping people to the next level as you explore different planets in the galaxy. A lot of these planets and their stories are based on classic story books which you may already know. Captain Corgi: Planetary Problem Solver isn’t a very long game, but you will have some puzzles to solve and some problems to try to fix along the way. Sometimes, you might not even be fixing a problem anyone has presented to you, but instead, you’ll be following rumors of the town in an attempt to find an issue and then fix it. The characters within this game are a little… quirky, with their own personalities and suggestions on how you can help. You are also not alone either – your brother Lem is trying to help you with your quest. The cutscenes where he is talking logically and you are ignoring him are quite funny, giving a good break from problem solving! I got the chance to play the first chapter at The Mix, where I enjoyed this twist on Little Red Riding Hood (who maybe didn’t even need my help after all). Flying through the galaxy is also fun, as your ship sort of sails on a wave of time, making its way to new areas and new planets that might-maybe-probably have some sort of problem for you to solve. Captain Corgi: Planetary Problem Solver doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that’s where a lot of the fun is. It’s a little narative game that feels full of silly moments and adventure while somehow being slightly familiar in the stories that you are trying to put yourself into. Captain Corgi: Planetary Problem Solver is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist. About The Author

Mars Attracts combines the Mars Attacks IP with Rollercoaster Tycoon to create a very strange and captivating zoo management game. When I tried this at The Mix, I found it was a pretty interesting idea. Aliens want to capture people from different time periods and put them into a zoo for other aliens to look at. To make this more of a fulfilling attraction, aliens also can do experiments on the humans to see if they would make good rides. The feel of Mars Attracts is very much like any other zoo management style game. You can design your park, research new rides and attractions, hire different people to work jobs, see if aliens visiting are happy, etc.. There are a lot of different items to place and choose from, as well as tons of freedom when it comes to where you want to put stuff. You do need to place things like septic systems to plug into toilets and the like, making the game pretty in-depth when it comes to management. The unique parts of Mars Attracts is both the use of the IP and the fun experiments that you can do on your people. The humans that you collect are from different places at specific time periods. Instead of having different types of animals or monsters, this is what divides them. You can make their new zoo homes like where they came from so that they feel most at home. Inside each of their pens, you can also put research labs which can contain aliens that will do research and experiments on the people inside. These aren’t the most human at all, but the other aliens seem to really like watching and seeing exactly what happens! It’s also quite interesting to watch the animations and see what sort of rides they want to turn humans into. Mars Attracts is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can grab a demo from Steam and add it to your wishlist. About The Author

Red Finger sees you using an elevator and carrying out strange work in a facility filled with dodgy wiring and mechanical monsters. It’s your first day on the job at an old research complex, arguably the safest of places to find yourself working. You just know there definitely isn’t anything wrong when you have to take an elevator deep underground so you can input some weird codes into strange terminals. And there’s certainly nothing strange about the elevator having a working sink built into it. Still, you probably paid for an expensive ride to get yourself to work, so you’ll end up making negative money for the shift if you don’t complete the night. So, let’s get to it. This elevator is your main means of getting to the stations you need to locate throughout your shift. You have a paper list of all the codes you have to input at the various terminals. It’s not technically hard to go down the elevator, but it does sting like hell. The wiring in the buttons for the elevator have something wrong with them and they get extremely hot when you press them. You also have to hold the button down to move, resulting in a badly-singed finger as you work through the night. A little cold water from the sink will straighten you right out. If the mechanical monster in the shaft sees you, though, that’s another story. The switch that turns off the light to keep you safe from that critter is messed up, too. This results in having to take care as you work through Red Finger. You need to keep making steady progress toward the basement and the end of your work tasks, but you need to take care not to burn your finger so bad that you can’t keep the lights off when the monster arrives. It’s simple, but deviously tense when you’ve over-burned your finger and you see that machine beast rear its head. Red Finger is available now (for free) on itch.io. About The Author

ZOE Begone! is a frantic bullet-hell with a bunch of hand-drawn enemies all attacking you when you just want to have a rest. Your character, a little triangle, wants to get some rest. However, an animator has made a bunch of different frames of characters that you will need to eliminate before you sleep. These looping arenas of film are full of enemies that you can shoot at and dash through. However you do have a set amount of energy that depletes when dashing or flying. This means that you need to manage the time you are flying and dashing with the enemies that are coming at you. However, there are blue orbs at the bottom along with health orbs that you can dash and collect to keep yourself going. Everything in ZOE Begone! is one of those games that sort of becomes muscle memory, but I really do like how the arena changes over time. Some of your dashes remove color from the background and destroying enemies takes away from the frames of the animation that are currently being created. There is an interesting and exciting view of the world that seems like so much fun to dive into. I got the chance to play a demo at The Mix, which, even for someone that doesn’t play a lot of bullet-hells, felt really engaging. ZOE Begone! is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can grab a demo from Steam and add it to your Wishlist. About The Author

Midnight Mansion sees you trying to solve murders in a former lab/escape room filled with boxes that are more dangerous than they seem. You’re Agent Milla Yang, and you’ve been sent to... The post ‘Midnight Mansion’ Dodges Killer Boxes in a Creepy Place appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

Cozy Dungeons is a game about clearing monsters out of crypts and castles, then renovating them for new folks to move in. There have been a lot of games that have mixed different play styles and genres. Often, when you are destroying everything in a dungeon, leaving piles of slime and blood behind, you don’t really think about who is going to end up living or using the space afterwards. Well, this game has you defeating enemies then putting the rooms back together to complete specific requirements so that everyone can be happy in their home. The actual dungeon fighting in Cozy Dungeons feels simple and fun. You can use your sword to destroy all of the enemies in each room, clearing it out. Some rooms also have block-pushing puzzles or button puzzles like you’d see in most dungeon crawlers. Where this game then feels different is through the decorating. Rooms have different requirements to be sold, which you might only really figure out through listening to the NPCs that are currently trying to live in the room. They’ll give you hints as to what they want. You will then need to design the room, adding in specific items they want or getting rid of things that have grown old and tired in the rooms. It’s quite fun to decorate and there is a lot of freedom, especially as you unlock new items to place and mess around with. Some rooms, from moving items, have secret doors into new areas that you might have not even discovered if you didn’t take the time to fix the place up. I got the chance to play through a few rounds of Cozy Dungeons at The Mix, where I found these two very different concepts of fighting and designing fit together perfectly. The cutesy graphic style also makes it all link up, even if there are puddles of slime that need to be swept up before you are able to start decorating! The dual phases mean you do not have to worry about enemies when trying to design, which is another plus. Cozy Dungeons is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist. About The Author