Roundtable Games Studio have certainly put their best foot forward with Dying Flame. Fans of layered psychological storytelling and atmosphere will be intrigued, and fans looking for a dialled-up-to-11 spoopy adrenaline rush will be more than satisfied. The RPGMaker genre has another great title in its library, and indie gaming has another promising studio to look out for.

Here’s a disclaimer, if you’ve already got the first two Overcooked! games, do not get this. However, if you’re new to the series, then Overcooked! All You Can Eat is an absolute joy. The feeling of panicking your way around a kitchen with friends is incredible, and the chaos it brings is unrivalled. There are a few online issues at the moment though, but I’m scoring this assuming they’ll be fixed.

Inkslinger is a promising debut from the three man outfit at Gateway, showcasing their ability to weave in potent themes in a brief, intimate plot, making this a text-adventure that’s moody and evocative. There’s so much packed here, its short time serving as a brief, albeit tantalising glimpse into what this team is capable of.

This game presents a very normative, happy retrospective for what was the basis of our interactions becoming commodified by surveillance. It’s impossible to untangle the complex mess of pop culture and corporate harm from one another. Yet, Emily is Away <3 seems to only remember the sugary sweet poke wars. That doesn’t make it a bad game, but it does make it a naïve one.

Voxel Battle Simulator wants you to pit tiny little voxel pixel armies against one another in an all-out competitive battle. You are given an amount of money to defend your base with, from the most basic of infantry that battle on foot, to artileries that can fling munitions across a vast distance. Once you’ve deployed them, you can watch them clash with the opposing team, both armies yelling with all the excitement and confusion of overly energetic puppies as they do so, and unlock more defenses with the spoils of war. However, while the game functions on a fundamental level, it’s barely compelling or innovative enough to keep me playing.

Mad Devils has good ideas, but it feels like a botched mission, as if the original order got lost in transmission on the way. The action is good when it works, but the contrasting tone and narrative bog down the broader experience. Still, conflicting story and visual design aside, if Mad Devils’ frenetic twin-stick shooting and setting are too good to pass up, make sure to take a friend. It’s dangerous in hell.

It may be punishing at times, but Jetboard Joust is truly at its most exhilarating when it’s firing on all cylinders.

Repetitive as My Child Lebensborn is, as a video game it falls short of what most players might consider “fun.” But as an education about Lebensborn and the poignant struggles of war children to this day, it leaves an enduring impression. Way more than any history class ever did.

As distasteful as the title is, it doesn’t seem particularly triggering for most people. The game’s comical tone and frivolous approach stave off any potential triggers its gruesome title might suggest. When you approach the game as a virtual escape room, wherein every time your character dies, you get one step closer to the real world, the whole affair becomes more palatable. But without a potent narrative and puzzles that increase in complexity, Suicide Guy ultimately doesn’t offer anything new to the genre.

Moving through Summertime Madness, the art gallery comparison reminded me more and more of an art pop up in Manhattan called Color Factory. In Color Factory, guests move through spaces of bright, saturated, colorful designs of atmospheric spaces, playful ball pits and selfie-perfect sets with slogan-plastered objects ready for instagram. The more I walked through the colorful playspaces of Summertime Madness, the more fitting the connection seemed. Rather than thinking of some video games through a cinematic lens or painting frame, Summertime Madness is a reminder of real world spaces like Color Factory. While that isn’t too lofty an aspiration, maybe just walking through a world and feeling something is enough.

Ultreia, too, leans heavily on religious themes, with forgiveness being a saving grace that unlocks a secret true ending, reducing the story into an uncomplicated, religious tale with robots rather than a more nuanced story about adversities. It’s a pity that it ultimately misses the opportunities to delve deeper into the rich world it’s built for itself.

The blindingly abrasive strobe effect that will make this an utterly miserable experience for some, no matter how much you want to see the pretty pictures and explore every corner of the Critters world. But if you’re willing to just ruin your vision for an afternoon and commit to the developer’s description of their own work “to make your eyes bleed” (for their other game, a shooter called Rym 9000), Critters for Sale is an oddball dip into a very particular vision of hell.

On the surface, Garbage is a homeless fighting simulator that carries parallels to Punch Club: train hard, win fights, and take showers–the only twist being that you’re a homeless man who now has to live next to the dumpster. But take a closer look beyond its hood, and you’ll find that Garbage is a game that is barely serviceable.

Rather than a full-bodied explosion, every gunshot is instead akin to the gentle patter of raindrops on concrete pavements–an almost maudlin description that’s probably the furthest thing RAZE 2070 wants to be known for. Much less can be said about its android enemies, which more closely resemble crash test dummies than the high tech cyborgs of sci-fi shooters. Then there is its introduction video–a snapshot into RAZE 2070’s intergalactic setting–which is made up of mostly stock footage of space from sites like Getty Images. Probably.

It’s a base defense strategy game that dabbles in realism rather than pointless commotion, and it’s a very captivating one. There are minor issues, such as the need for more precise controls (you can’t choose which worker you wish to station at every barricade), but aside from a few frustrating moments, these mostly don’t detract from its strengths.

Promesa attempts to convey a moving, intergenerational tale through its spaces, as it shuttles the player to various locales, interspersing these journeys with quotes shared by a grandfather to his grandchild. You don’t really need to do much; you just walk until you can’t anymore, and then you’ll be transported to the next place. But these spaces are also mostly devoid of meaningful context; I wasn’t even aware I was reading a familial conversation until I read the synopsis on a website. Then there are the purportedly haunting and surreal spaces, which are as sparse and lifeless as the memories you’re supposedly traversing through, having been mostly constructed with far too little subtleties to pique my curiosity. Compounded by the absolutely glacial speed I was travelling at, and I found myself making an early exit.

There is a reasonable game lurking somewhere inside Radio Viscera. The early knockings were enough to show me that there is a lot of fun to be had with this concept. However, the attempts at including variety often miss the mark, and a string of technical problems exacerbate the game’s shortcomings. It is certainly a novel attempt to subvert the genre, but, ultimately, it falls incredibly short. Instead, it makes me yearn for a more traditional twin-stick shooter, even if that would offer no surprises.

Outsider: After Life shows in its opening section that it knows what it’s doing. The process of repairing HUD-ini is finely tuned, and sets up intrigue for what comes next. It’s a shame that it only gives way to increasingly repetitive, sometimes painful gameplay, and mismatched pieces of story that don’t quite fit into the full picture.

Ultimately The Protagonist: EX-1 is another addition to the turn-based strategy game that requires no strategy, with a squad that provides no interest. I cannot begin to care enough about this game to continue playing it, and cannot find a reason to recommend it.

Devoid of music and the ups and downs of an engaging narrative arc, the happenings in Horror Tales: The Wine becomes stale quickly. Coupled with some arcane puzzles that can only be resolved by loading a previous save, Horror Tales: The Wine leaves a sour taste in the mouth after a few chapters.

The story, while occasionally perplexing, is full of heady material to chew through. It’s the kind of narrative that would require an additional playthrough, totally possible thanks to its roughly 2-4 hour campaign with selectable chapters. The gunplay may be a tiring affair of shooting lemmings in body armor, and the other elements are both underwhelming and frustrating, but Foreclosed is a gorgeous game with a big-ass brain. It just hasn’t quite figured out how to apply that yet.

As an Early Access title, Death Trash is still incomplete, with a few more chapters still in development and waiting to be unveiled. But even then, it’s a game that’s incredibly easy to sink your teeth into. Its backdrop of debauchery, monster flesh and body horror, while not altogether foreign, conjures a compelling image of humankind in a parasitic relationship with our post-apocalyptic host. We often hear of hostile worlds that want to kill us, but not so much of civilisations that are slowly and literally devouring the planet, as they rip apart the still-breathing planet muscle by muscle. Death Trash shows us that our insatiable hunger makes us the biggest threat, even as the world is in the throes of death. [Early Access Review = 85]

Escape from Naraka takes the best–and unfortunately, some flaws–of classic platformers; making precise leaps can be challenging when you can’t see your feet. At the same time, it also injects some of the studio’s own culture and twists into the environments, letting you immerse in a Southeast Asian-inspired universe that’s as mystical as it’s alluring.

In an attempt to elevate itself beyond just an action-based shooter, Green Phoenix has unfortunately become more humdrum than invigorating.

Can Androids Survive is a game that is working to be a simulator (an unruly hybrid in the best of cases) that positions itself as a sequel to a story. If it doesn’t really quite pull any of these things off successfully, there is at least some consolation in the fact that in the end, as promised, the player gets to blow up the moon. I’m not sure that it works as a message, but it’s nice to get some consideration for not having hit the escape key an hour or so earlier.

Even while the gorgeous alien botany is alluring and forms the artistic backbone of this curious little game, I found myself wanting more options—perhaps a narrative mode for players focused on the world and its strange inhabitants—and a change of pace.

Ultimately. I can’t say I expected much from AAA Clock. It ticks off the necessary features, bringing a functional clock to the Switch with some nice cosmetic touches, but after a tedious run of the Retro Game, I’m ready to clock out.