Festive Feature #2 - Five 2023 Indie Games You Might Have Missed

In one of the strongest years in recent memory, it’s doubly worth taking stock of some of the smaller games that may have ducked your attention. The following is a list of independent releases, many of them made by small studios, all of them worth your time.

That’s the trouble with years, as they slip past: it’s impossible to know them in as much depth as you would like. The most valuable thing about lists such as this is simple stock-keeping. When you make it through the upcoming blizzard of cards, presents, and plates of food, devote the bloated early weeks of January to catching up. Or else screw the rest and start playing now.

Venba – Why don’t more games make us hungry? So much is given over to sights and sounds; rarely does a developer deal in tastes. Venba, from Visai Games, is worth playing purely to see if you can resist reaching for the phone and ordering takeaway. It tells the story of an Indian couple, Venba and her husband, Paavalan, who emigrate from Tamil Nadu, in Southern India, to the slushy winters of Toronto. The plan? To relish the thawing possibilities of life in such a city, and to raise their son, Kavin, giving him a future as bracing and blank as possible.

The bulk of Venba is spent in the kitchen, readying dishes in accordance with the spattered and faded rubric of the family cookbook. The hope being that the family at the game’s heart will suffer no such fading – that fresh spatterings, indeed, will enliven their link to home soil. Mechanically, you sift crushed peppers and spices, you rake sauce through bowls of rice, and the plot wafts through it all. Lost jobs, domestic loneliness, and the widening gulf between generations: heavy stuff, for a game that has the look of a light cartoon. One scene, as you scroll through messages on a phone, and the pain of missed opportunities is laid bare in electronic bubbles, guarantees a lump in the throat. Play it, eat good food, and call your mother.

El Paso, Elsewhere – The troubled relationship of El Paso, Elsewhere is slightly more concerning. In one sense, it’s pretty down to earth: boy meets girl, they fall in love, they break up. The problem is that girl, in this case, is a vampire queen, Draculae, who is raising the stakes and stirring up the end of days. Boy, a man in a brown trenchcoat named James Savage, keeps crunching down palmfuls of pills and monologuing. His plan is to stop Draculae with a pair of handguns and the coat-swishing power of slow-motion.

In other words, the developer, Strange Scaffold, is taking after its villain and trying to resurrect the dead – or at least the missing-in-action. El Paso, Elsewhere is Max Payne. If you wish to call it a love letter, I wouldn’t stop you; love, after all, has the capacity to warp into longing, obsession, and world-snuffing pain. Hence the ceilings of the game’s mazy motel setting, a vortical pattern of humming colours, recalling those dream sequences in which Max ran along thin lines of blood, trapped in a black void. And look at the art style here: the characters are entombed in the cardboard graphics that held quivering sway at the turn of the millennium. This is action gaming at its most focussed and fierce, and it makes you realise just how few developers followed in Remedy’s hard-boiled footsteps. We all broke up with Max, and things haven’t been right since. Strange Scaffold wants to reunite us. The world be damned.

Planet of Lana – Five minutes into Planet of Lana, and damned is pretty much exactly what the world is. The developer, Wishfully Studios, paints that world in seafoam greens and aqua skies, with a huge papery planet hanging over the horizon. When doom arrives, it does so in similarly elegant style: vapour trails claw down into dark craters, from which emerge scuttling robots, H.G. Wells-style, replete with zapping rays and blood-red eyes. They scoop up the inhabitants of Lana’s village in spherical cages and fly them off, presumably to slather them in garlic butter and grill them over a slow flame.

This is a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer, two-dimensional but pressed, with cinematic crispness, into emotional depth. It reminds you of Inside, if the grim panoramas of that game saw fit to bloom from all those chalky greys into wild colour. Our heroine is cleanly drawn – pattering legs, cloth, and a clump of dark hair. She befriends a plump feline creature with a tail that curls into a spiral. The prevailing joy of Planet of Lana is movement. Note the layered busyness of the bushes in the foreground, rustling as the camera slides by; and the measured weight of your gestures. It wasn’t until the halfway point that I realised what it reminded me of: Flashback, the 1992 masterwork from Paul Cuisset. (This year saw the sad and crumpled appearance of Flashback 2, but Planet of Lana is the superior successor.) If you crave games that take you places, this is for you.

Laika: Aged Through Blood – The landscape of Laika: Aged Through Blood may not be the sort of place you have in mind, when you plot your escapism. A desert, scattered with bones and peopled not by people but by anthropomorphic animals. Laika, a coyote, rides a motorbike through this barren prairie, looking out for her fellow-villagers. This means wielding a gun, donning a skull helmet, and rumbling into combat with the Birds, while meeting all manner of other beasts along the way. The marketing for this game labels it a “Motorvania,” presumably because “Mad Max: Furry Road” would have resulted in legal action.

Laika: Aged Through Blood is a reminder that even the most exhausted of genres can still cough up marvellous fumes. Your bike controls as if you were playing Trials, only every backflip reloads your weapon, and every frontflip refreshes your ability to parry incoming fire. How? By whipping your bike in a circular motion and bouncing the bullet back to sender. True to its title, this adventure has puddles of blood, and there is a bright-dark stickiness to its tone; its characters keep high spirits in a low place. This is equally true of the developer, Brainwash Gang, who pays joyous homage, in its backdrops, to Metal Slug. Check out the machinery, chunky and vast, penned with heavy detail – as if the days of the Neo Geo had never passed.

Frog Detective: The Entire Mystery – This was a good year for sleuths. If you thrill to the prospect of picking at the knot of a conundrum, then you were well covered. Frog Detective: The Entire Mystery concerns a detective who is also a frog. He doesn’t hop, rather he strides along on two loping legs. He sports dark trousers, a brown jumper, and boxy shoes. He also carries a magnifying glass, swelling his gaze to even more bulbous proportions. The action plays out in first-person, and most of your time is spent looking, talking, gathering items, and bringing them to the right place.

This may sound like a dull routine, but it’s enlivened by the characters (sheep scientists, panda sheriffs, lizard beach bums) and the sunbursts of warm humour. It may be the funniest game of the year, with one case ending in a dance competition. What’s more, our hero is wrapped in mad schemes, assailed by the logic-free jabbering of his peers, and often compared unfavourably to someone called Lobster Cop. His response? A permanent smile, covering the entire width of his head. What a relief. How many heroes greet their opposition like this, unarmed and utterly disarming. The developer, Worm Club, has made a game about the heroic force of happiness. The world around our hero may be bringing to the boil, but he doesn’t even notice.