Episode 10: What we've been playing in February 2024

This week's episode of Indieventure has a bit of a show-and-tell format, since it's been a while since we just checked in with the indie games everyone's been playing in their down time.

After our last episode on this February's Steam Next Fest, Rachel has mostly been playing loads more demos! Mech-pilot farming sim Lightyear Frontier has emerged as her most-played Next Fest demo this time around, and might even be poised to find its way onto the best-ever farming sims list of our resident connoisseurs of the genre. She also has a lot of good words for INDIKA, an experimental psychological adventure game examining religious orthodoxy — here's a link to the Polygon article we discuss at this point in the episode.

Never one to cruelly leave us without a recommendation for a great indie title we can play in full right now, though, Rachel has also recently checked out text-based horror game Home Safety Hotline. Long-time listeners will know that Rachel isn't always our biggest horror advocate, so rest assured that this one is pretty safe to play for anyone looking for a good creepy story, regardless of your comfort levels with some of the genre's more intense tropes.

Noted Valentine's Day sceptic Rebecca has nevertheless been in the mood for romance this month, specifically in video games that let her woo hot monsters. So she's been playing a few rounds of Doomsday Paradise, a Monster Prom-inspired multiplayer card battler that got a bit lost in the shuffle when it first released back in November. She's also revisited two monster dating mash-ups she previously bounced off of, Helltaker and Romancelvania — and quickly DNF'd one all over again while becoming hooked on the other this time around.

Liam, meanwhile, has been enjoying two very different roguelikes: early access city builder Roots of Yggdrasil, which sees a band of Vikings attempting to outrun Ragnarok by expanding their civilisation across the Nine Realms with the use of deck-building puzzles; and Go Mecha Ball, the twin stick shooter starring a cat piloting a mech through a pinball machine. You might remember we talked about the latter game before after playing the demo, which is when we first uttered the now-immortal line LIAM LIKE CRONCH.

In hyperfixations this week, Rebecca's obsession with the new Wicked movie trailer hasn't quite overtaken her desire to binge as much of the Pokémon anime as possible before Pokémon TV goes offline for good at the end of March. Rachel has recently visited the British Library's Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition, which leads to far too many good book, film, TV, and game recommendations to list in full here. And Liam has finally binned off The O.C. and started watching a TV show he'd actually recommend to others, namely the recent remake of Mr. & Mrs. Smith starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.