Indie-Penance Day – Round-Up

PC, Switch, Xbox, PS4

Yesterday I was handed the keys to Kotaku, and given permission to spend the entire day just posting about indie games. Any hopes I might have meant things like Hades and Among Us were quickly put aside. Instead, I grabbed the chance to give some high-profile coverage to some low-profile games, and over the course of the day managed to feature 46 indie games, most of which have received little to no coverage on any other major gaming sites. Yay! I’m highlighting this all here, because this is nearly 50 unknown indie games that haven’t been covered on BT before, either.

On previous Kotaku takeovers, I’ve put together a single super-long post featuring as many indies as got in touch that day, but as the last one was 35 games long it was getting a bit out of hand. So this time I planned things a bit better, had developers email me about the games ahead of time, and then spread the coverage throughout the day across four large articles. It turned out it still took a solid 10 hours to write it all up, along with a post solely devoted to Black Geyser, and another mentioning how Russian Subway Dogs could be one of the last games released for Vita.

Clearly I am very proud of most almost-meaningless pun, “Indie-Penance Day”. If there’s a rationale to it, it’s that people should pay penance for their AAA worship by taking notice of indie games? Let’s pretend that’s convincing. So the first list of ten games began with a simple greeting.

Happy Indie-Penance Day!

This featured Patron, Tails Of Iron, Déjà Vu, Serial Cleaners, normal_fantasies.exe, Endlight, Midautumn, Vesper, Scarlot Hollow, and Bang On Balls: Chronicles.

Indie-Penance Day: Resurgence

The second list of ten contained The Fermi Paradox, Eternal Starlight, KEO, Heading Out, Kingshunt, House, Ember Knights, Micro Works, Venus: Improbable Dream and Dead Letter Dept.

Indie-Penance Day: A Retrospective

Third was a list that, as I was compiling it, I realised was containing only very retro-looking games. So I dug out the retroist from my remaining list and decided it was a theme. That was made up of OmegaBot, Der Geisterjäger / The Ghost Hunter, Hack Grid, Dark Sheep, Time Bandit, Star Explorers, There May Be Ninety-Nine Of Us, But We Have To Win In Ninety-Nine Turns!, Tentacle Typer, Alpha Particle and Bahnsen Knights.

Indie-Penance Day: We Did It, We Bloody Did It

Finally came a list of 14 games, because I still had 14 in the email pile, and I was so painfully tired when I finished it I just expressed that in the title. It was only in bed later that I realised I should have used a victory quote from ID4. It’s too late now. This contained Peglin, Forlorn Memories, Planet Crafter, Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown, City Of Beats, Heart Of The Woods, Asterism, Slime Heroes, Induction, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, Derail Valley, Harmony’s Odyssey, ANNO: Mutationem, and Hello Puppets: Midnight Show.

Yes, I too was sick of the words “Indie-Penance” by the end of yesterday. But we did it! Some absolutely incredible/incredible-looking games, all over a site that according to this has 12 million readers. (I’ve honestly no idea what Kotaku’s actual audience numbers are.)

Please, please look through all those articles, because like I say, there’s proper gold in there. I’m going to be over-filling my wishlist, but also taking a closer look at the ones already out for further coverage on Buried Treasure.