Backpage Of The Magazine Indie Games
Can you hear the ocean calling? Pulling on your blood? Dragging you deeper? Has the way I’ve yearned for the ocean my entire life made me draw a subconscious paradise in it? A place of deep cool water on my skin and the rays of sun blurred into that deep aquatic green. “Eating fruit in the ocean and hanging out” is about as much life as any of us could ask for.
Endless Blue
But we have to build, and in Endless Blue, out now on itch.io you will travel into the places we have to keep going in all of our science fiction. Deep structures of metal and rivets tied together under the crushing pressure of the ocean. Like as if something blue was telling us to take care of each other up here, but no, we all have to look for secrets everywhere we can find them.
Endless Blue is a fixed-camera survival horror title that leans first on associations with the original PlayStation, and then works in a little bit of The Cell and Underwater, casting us instead of a shaved-head marine as some kind of super sexy sleek spy woman. A mixture of Joanna Dark and Aya Brea – polygon pasts reunited together under the subtle stare of those fixed camera angles and all too awkward aiming.
Is it terrifying? No – there’s no cold fear of the depth here. Not remarked on in the era of PS1 horror was just how cool everyone was: there’s a reason Leon Kennedy’s cop outfit looks like it’s something out of tokusatsu. Endless Blue brings the cool of the ocean at all times, crisp greens and ambers dominate cold steel and halogen lighting, and monsters giggle and laugh in the darkness.
More importantly, Endless Blue is available for free on Itch.IO.
All of this actually really started with me going and playing Endless Blue. I download a lot of games on itch.io, and other places all over the internet. If it has a “free” tag or only costs a couple of bucks, I’ll throw in for a dangerous new experience. Life is filled with alleyways – about all the internet really has going for it anymore are all of the little video games that fall through the cracks. I need to clear up space on my hard drive, and to tackle the project I have a plaintext word processor and a lot of spare time.
Welcome to my nightmare desktop.
Project Shoreline
I want to clean. I want it to be my choice – not a calling, not a job, not a rubber suit in a hot garden in August cleaning up someone else’s house so I can make a paycheck. I didn’t know it either, but I also want to be a mouse who cleans: and in Project Shoreline, you can do just that.
This is the real promise of video games – not that we have to yearn for the jobs we wished we did, the lifestyles, the homemakers and power wash simulators. But to be a mouse and clean up the world. Inside the screen is a new fantasy….will you join me?
Project Shoreline is currently in development and available for free on Itch.io.
SYMBIOSIS
what vicious flower can toxic yuri ever truly make blossom?
YURI RATING: 3
symbiosis is available for free on itch.io
TANK PIG
Tank Pig is a porcine puzzle platformer with oinking elements.
It is available for free, on itch.io
ROYAL GOBLIN HUNT
a first-person goblin eradication sim focused on strafing and Retro Visuals. A bottomless well I am afraid of spending any more time on for the safety of my other hobbies.
it is available for free, on itch.io
cyberlancer
THE KING MUST SEE THE WORK GOES ON
A hyper-shape-based kingdom finance spreadsheet. There are goblins coming and little else you can do but keep working.
It is available for free, at its own home.
NUCLEAR LIZARD ISLAND RAMPAGE
A first-person lizard-stomper. Godzilla is in the news lately kind of a lot, haven’t you heard? The kind of thing I want to install on every computer as a desktop toy, great for long train rides, airplanes, airbus, the works. Also made the excellent FIRST PERSON STAPLER.
closeout with a review of one of dari’s games?
DOOMSDAY DREAMGIRL
Ah yes. The adult visual novel. The calcified relationship between a bovine woman and the mysterious narrator, us, ourselves. Would come bearing a WARNING: TOXIC YURI tag but what’s most interesting about it is the whole game is a push towards the end – the final death, the end of all things. The feeling of growing old while you’re still young with only strangers around you. A house that becomes the limits of the edge of the world with no way to escape but going deeper and deeper into the head of the stranger you’ve invited into your house.
It left me with a good feeling, all things must collapse, turn to ruin, and end. And so does this article! Now get out there and play some video games.
