I spent the past week dredging through the slop, trying to unearth interesting gems that are (as far as I can tell) free from generative AI. While it demanded a lot more effort and time than usual, I am happy to report that there are still promising, interesting and human indie games out there being made.

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Standouts

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Inkblood

A young inquisitor, her heart physically ripped out of her body and transplanted into a carriage she can now never leave, where it sits as the engine powering her vehicle’s strange machinations. A hunchback with a living map tattooed on his back, smoking a chantarelle pipe and pulling your carriage from location to location at the crack of a whip. A strange land of the weird and the occult, a mysteriously missing predecessor whose cart you’ve inherited, slapping a peeling sticker over the final digit of his serial number as you investigate his disappearance…

Inkblood was by far the highlight of NextFest for me. It’s been a while since something came out that had such a strong, singular and unique point of view, that permeates every aspect of it: the gorgeous art, the wonderful art direction, the sound design and music, the world building, the tone of the writing… I think the last time I played a game that was giving me this strong of a unique vision was Titanium Court, and that’s high praise seeing as that’s probably my Game of the Year.

It’s also nice to see some expansion on the usual deduction game mechanics. Actually manually taking photos of the evidence yourself and compiling reports is a nice touch (as opposed to just sorting a set of pictures you’re given), and does make the gameplay a little more hands-on and engaging. I found it quite fun. The puzzles - outside of the crime scene investigations - were also well designed and fun to do, and not too hard or unintuitive.

If you are even remotely into puzzles and deduction games this is a must to wishlist.

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Curse of Resthaven

Pentiment meets Euro-style board game, with a time loop and a Lovecraftian setting. It might sound odd, but it’s an interesting and curious mix that all just kind of works. You play as the newly-arrived governor of a mysterious and cursed island, who took the job to investigate the disappearance of his niece there. After a short introduction, the game quickly establishes its two main gameplay avenues: on the one side you have the ”board game” side. You collect wares from your citizens, you trade with ships in the harbor (adjusting for current market trends when haggling), you upgrade buildings in your city and you send out expeditions mapping the island.

But then in parallel you have the main story and the investigation: you have limited hours each day, which you must spend by wisely talking to the correct people about the correct interrogation topics, pulling threads to figure out what happened to your niece and what is going on at the island and with the mysterious time loop only you seem to remember.

The game’s hand-drawn art is wonderful, the soundtrack is good and the writing is solid and functional and flows nicely, with some colourful characters to get to know. A fully voiced cast definitely helps set the tone and adds to the general feeling of high production values.

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Rain of Lead

A revolution is brewing, people are rising up against a deeply unpopular, tyrannical queen in a Victorian-esque Dieselpunk state. Unfortunately for them, her consort is able to dodge bullets, deflect tank shells with a sword and cut swathes of soldiers in half with a single swipe.

Rain of Lead is a Katana ZERO-inspired 2D slasher/shooter where everything dies in one hit: both the enemies and you. The gameplay is pretty much what you’d expect from that. You slice, dash, jump, shoot and explode everything that moves, clearing out each room in seconds (or dying even faster). Controls are crisp and razor sharp, the animations and physical feedback are satisfying and the thrumming soundtrack keeps your heartrate going.

I also enjoyed what little writing we got in the demo. There is a pleasant self-awareness in the tone, without becoming too unserious or obnoxious. There are some nice individual moments, too: soldiers discussing post-revolution plans of teaching literacy to underprivileged children seconds before their profusely bleeding hips are wondering where their torso went.

The Queen is most certainly evil and manipulating the protagonist, and whether to naively lean into the romance or push back against it seems to be left to the player. There’ll probably be at least two different endings. Combined with the very pretty pixel art this seems like a hit in the making.

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Funeral for the Sun

An Obra Dinn-like set in latin america with nice quirky art and nice music - and some magical realism to boot – is enough to draw me in. The setting drips with love, betrayal, revolution and A Hundred Years of Solitude as you investigate 400 years of intrigue alongside a deeper and more supernatural mystery.

The game takes the entire core mechanic from Obra Dinn, expanding and iterating on it a bit (even down to a magical excuse to peer into the past). Instead of just faces and fates, you can lock in connections and relationships with people; family lineages and whether two faces are the same person at different times. It still uses the 3-at-a-time confirmation system from Obra that discourages brute forcing, and it also adds a slew of nice QoL features like bookmarking individual memories to your in-game notebook for easy quick access (something that was sorely missing from Obra Dinn).

I’m not one hundred percent convinced by the writing, and the deductions available in the demo felt a tad simpler than Obra Dinn, but there is enough promise here to keep an eye on. Good Obra Dinn-likes are few and far between.

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Ablahshikar

The cursed ship Ablahshikar calls. For some godforsaken reason you answered, another other salt-drunk dilettante in a line of dimwit dreamers spilling their ink on the vellum. A tar-drenched tale of treasure, of portholes leaking like open sores and Kavvers plucking at the rigging. Bellows pump bile-black steam as the screaming boiler strains against the tide. This salvage is forfeit, cap’n, cut the line! In the distance a Raider emerges from the reefs and oilfires.

Seldom has a game left me so perplexed yet intrigued as this. Ablashikar is a turn-based salvage game, using ASCII as its main graphical presentation (a leftover from the early stages of development, which was originally intended to be a Minesweeper-like). A solo dev effort by a deranged madperson, the idea (as far as I’ve been able to decipher it) is slowly sailing the grid-based sea, recovering salvage, avoiding trouble and slowly building your ship and crew. Until you die, that is. Then you start over, because this is also a roguelike. Kind of. And you will die. Or run out of fuel. Probably both at once, wondering what on earth you were supposed to be doing differently. Sometimes you start a run spawned in surrounded by Kavvers and just have to accept that it’s instantly over.

The gameplay itself, in addition to being brutally difficult, is also completely impenetrable, nigh incomprehensible even. Just look at that interface, with it’s overload of (albeit beautiful) barely decipherable text. There is no tutorialization at all. Every term, phrase and name is arcane, archaic and cryptic. Nothing is explained to you, in any way. The dials and gauges don’t always work right (for flavour reasons). There are missing items from the Map Legend list of things you can encounter at sea, because (according to the dev’s own words): ”nobody said the map was complete”. The crew members have stats that aren’t explained anywhere. You can weld things to your “frame table”, which I guess are ship improvements but who even knows. The list goes on. With the limited time I’ve had to devote to it, I barely scratched even the crust on top of the surface. ”Trade heretical folios” the Steam page says. I never encountered one.

But there is something here. Just look at the art, watch the trailers. Listen to that soundtrack. Play through the intro, with it’s densely poetic, borderline lunatic prose. Maybe, at some point, some maniac has put thousands of hours into this game and made extensive video guides for it, and I will be able to understand what I’m actually supposed to do. I feel like there is potential in this game for a sort of experience adjacent to a Noita or a Caves of Qud or some game like that.

Whether it’s actually a good game or not is a separate question, but it is most certainly a singular creation.

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Games I also liked

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Derelikt

Derelikt is the best game of 1999. Do you wish we were still in 1999? Then play this game. Out of the new wave of PS1-era nostalgia that’s been flowing in like a tidal wave, this is the best of the bunch I’ve tried. I don’t have much to say about it beyond that. It’s a quality retro-shooter with some light horror elements. If it had modern resolution, modern poly-count assets and a modern photorealistic look it would not garner much attention (although it would still be a fine game). So I suppose the gimmick is working. The story seems fine enough, the writing has some charm to it. The gunplay is what you would expect: peak 1999 ”what the hell is an ADS?”.

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Hillthorn

A card-based detective game entirely without dialogue. Attempting to leave as much to the player’s imagination as possible, this is an interesting experiment in minimalism. And it does work - you piece together an impressive amount out of just cards with single word descriptors as context clues.

I am intrigued by the concept, although mechanically the demo left a bit to be desired (too much just trying out every card combination, too little actual deduction or puzzling). Still worth keeping an eye on.

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Elta: Defy All Gods

There is something about the overall visual style that puts me off a bit (although the emulated brushstrokes in the cel shading are neat), but as a relaxed action-first Beat-Em-Up/3D Metroidvania it has some potential. I worry that the combat might get slightly monotone if the game is too long, especially since it is completely focused around hand-to-hand fighting and boxing/martial arts and consequently has no weapon variety. And it’s also very easy and simplistic compared to your Ninja Gaidens or DMCs or what have you. There are some combos and cancels and launches and juggles, but overall it’s quite superficial and very low stakes. That’s fine though, it’s clearly intended to be a more casual game. And combat does feel nice, snappy and crunchy.

There is a bit of customization with stances and a gem-slotting system that can alter certain abilites, which perhaps will be enough to provide the variety in combat. Otherwise you build meter by attacking and spend it on super moves, as you would expect from a game taking inspiration from fighting games. There are some small skill trees, a grappling hook, detective vision… all the things you would expect these days.

Big question marks are performance issues (UE5) and fluidity in traversal, both of which I had issues with. The platforming didn’t really feel that great. With a February launch though there is time to address the issues, and I think it could be worth keeping eye on as a nice casual action oriented 3D Metroidvania. I’d probably wait for a sale personally, though.

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The Road of Dust and Sorrow

The beautiful pixel art, animations and nice atmosphere and environments carries this otherwise not-so-special survival horror. While I like the concept of a jaded middle-aged mother protagonist and her wide-eyed innocent daughter well enough, the writing didn’t feel strong enough to really make it feel impactful. The world building is also your standard-fare zombie apocalypse, this time with some mutated miracle crop being the culprit. The gameplay suffered from being too easy, both mechanically and because of the overabundance of resources, meaning any tension you could have felt never materialized.

Both combat and puzzles felt quite basic, with a lack of enemy variety and behaviour (at least in the demo), but the animations are nice, and especially the protagonist has some nice heft to her movement, particularly changing directions feels nice and heavy with momentum. I liked the gun and reload animations, too. The lack of a ladder climbing animation however - it just fades to black - feels very cheap and unimmersive, and I hope that gets addressed for release (there are a lot of ladders). You also really should be able to stomp on fallen enemies to finish them off. Though I guess currently it doesn’t matter as you get so much ammo there is no reason to conserve.

Still worth keeping an eye on, if nothing else than for the pixel art. Seems like a decent experience for a few dollars on sale.

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A Line Held High

Dystopian retrofuturistic mining colony visual novel about unions, strikes, worker’s rights and corporate violence and overreach. I loved the greyscale art, both the drawings of the mining vehicles and the interesting environmental pictures that are drawn like photographs with doodled silhouettes in white pen on them. The character portraits are okay, but not as much of a standout. The writing was decent, and I have to commend their skill at coming up with evocative names for the various mining vehicles. That singular aspect reminded me of Disco Elysium, as Robert Kurvitz was also a genius at naming things. Unfortunately the rest of the writing was not nearly as good as Disco… but what is?

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Walk-Off 199X

In a sea of soulless slop, I love seeing a low-budget dev cobbling together (while fully crediting) free Creative Commons and Public Domain assets instead of resorting to genAI. And that’s exactly what this game is built out of, including wonderful 100+ year old baseball pictures. I can also happily report that you don’t need to know or care about baseball to enjoy this game, as I do neither.

The general framework is very familiar: roguelike deckbuilding, permanent unit upgrades between rounds, optional events with bonuses and drawbacks, boss fights at regular intervals, random unlocks that create run-to-run diversity etc, etc… The formula works for a reason. The 90s VHS aesthetic is great, the card names and art are nice and flavourful, the UI is well designed and the game just feels good to play. It’s probably quite a bit too easy, though. You also do feel the ultra-low budget, especially in the 3D office you spend time in between rounds. During the actual baseball games I think it looks great, but the office really does feel like the hodgepodge of free assets it is.

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The Citadel Project

Thief meets Dark Souls. Savescumming is a common bane of stealth games, and here the attempted solution is implementing Soulslike-style ”bonfire” checkpoints. I’m not sure how that solution sits with me. I also am not a huge fan of the mutated zombie enemies and the headcrabs stuck to their backs, which you remove to kill them. I’m honestly getting bored of the zombie/mutated enemy design tropes. I would have preferred true human enemies and a bit more gore and violence and physical feedback in a game like this. This game would feel twice as good with Dishonored-style kills. Combat in general wasn’t that satisfying (besides shoving enemies off ledges), weapons felt like they had no real physical impact. The animations also felt a little lacking, especially the visual feedback and implementations of climbing and ledge grabbing and general platforming could use more first-person arm animations.

That being said, the Thief-inspired trick arrows you have at your disposal are great. Using Moss Arrows to silence your footsteps is fun, and in particular the Rope Arrow is great for vertical play.

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Mind Vessel

Mind Vessel is about building small Rube Goldberg machines. The game is a creature collector/autobattler where you have two creatures fighting for you: the left one and the right one. The left one acts first, the right one acts second. Within each creature, you also have a slew of effects, and they too activate from left-to-right within each creature. Once both your creatures have acted and activated all their effects, their scores are multiplied with each other, and this is your damage value. You have up to three sets of pairs like this at your disposal - if the enemy is still alive after the third pair, you lose a heart. Lose all your hearts, and the run is over.

With all the various effects you can unlock, and with the surprisingly flexible and customizable ”body part” system for the creatures, the main gameplay loop consists of finding and refining chain reactions of effects that run up the score. And because the scores of each side are multiplied with each other, you are heavily rewarded for making sure both creatures are growing their score at a somewhat equal rate.

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Below Lethe

As souls stand trial after their death, your job is to assist the gods making their judgement by plucking memories from the river Lethe and presenting them to the judges, adding nuance and detail to the soul’s own testimony.

The impeccable style, nice music and greek mythology inspirations drew me in. There is a light deduction/observation mechanic as well, adding some minor gameplay to what is otherwise mostly a visual novel (you have to watch short video sequences and construct a correct summary of events to present to the judges). I think there is also potential for some nice musings on morality, and there are promises of a deeper mystery (although that was not really part of the demo).

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THERMOCLINE

Charming enough pixel art survival-horror with both a stamina and a heat gimmick. Combat is turn-based and has D20 rolls as well as nonviolent actions such as ”Observe” to gather information, or touch or even lick something to figure out what it is. The freezing cold and having the tension of getting between heat source to heat source works well and the pixel art is quite nice, as is the music. The whole abandoned space station setting is a little played-out, but I guess it’s a trope for a reason. It does work to set a lonely, desolate atmosphere. It seems decent although it didn’t quite hook me. That being said, the full game will be 100% free, so if it sounds remotely appealing it’s definitely worth at least trying.

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Mixed Feelings

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Guns of Eschaton

I want to love this game so bad. I do love a lot about it. Weird West is a setting I am very fond of, and I really enjoy the way it’s presented here. I think the idea of a true slow and methodical FPS Soulslike has potential. I love the attempt at a realistic portrayal of revolver-slinging, including cocking the hammer before every shot, slow reloads and the ability to keep specific specialty ammunition in specific chambers. I know some people hated that in the demo, but I’ve played some remarkably slow modded STALKER; I’m into that shit.

Unfortunately the gunplay realism, weakspot-shooting and limited resources combine into a gameplay flow that is both extremely difficult, glacially slow, memorization-intensive and focusing on resource management a lot. You have limited ammo between campfires (using a “mana” type resource), and in typical Soulslike fashion resting respawns all enemies. So really, getting from campfire to campfire involves trying to maximize the damage of each bullet, or you will run out (which I did a lot). That means you can’t just shoot randomly: you have to shoot weak spots, and weak spots must be shot in a specific order, varying from enemy to enemy. Since you can’t afford to bring the book out mid-combat as a refresher every fight, that means you better start memorizing the weak spots (and orders) for each enemy.

Some enemy designs also work poorly with the slow combat design, often being way too fast and hectic for the slow weakspot-shooting and time consuming reloads. The Duel system (although thematic) feels weird in fights with more than one enemy involved. In general the game doesn’t feel great in fights against multiple enemies. The lack of the ability to lean out from behind cover also really hurts both the combat feel and the cowboy fantasy. It also seems locked at 75 FOV which is… not great.

The game has so much potential, but being this close to launch… I worry it won’t realize it.

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Dictatorship Simulator

Armed with a smartphone and a pack of cigarettes you set out to undermine democracy, one heckling, bullying and Blackmail Dossier at a time.

At the moment the game is a little bare-bones, but there is a promising proof-of-concept here, using the usual rogulike deckbuilder framework while putting a bit of a unique spin on how combat works. With more cards, tweaks and polish this could be a quite fun game. There is also a big ”No GenAI” sticker on the store page, and that definitely sways me a bit. As does the promise of 5% of the profits being donated to the Godot and Blender foundations.

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Prison of Husks

What if Dark Souls was a fraction as good and made on the PS1? While its vibes are dead-on (in its derivative copying of DS1) it’s unfortunately marred by clunky combat, both in terms of execution and design. Although I suppose DS1 isn’t the smoothest either in that regard, so maybe it’s by choice. The stamina system here is even more punishing than usual, with an extended ”exhausted” state crippling you for several seconds if you ever completely drain your stamina, making your character slow and unresponsive and unable to do almost anything but slowly shuffle across the floor. Doubling down on stamina management is probably not at the top of most Souls players’ wishlists (although I can only speak for myself).

I also personally really don’t care for these ”early stages of 3D” PS1-style graphics. I didn’t like it in Psudoregalia and I don’t like it here. Pixel art works great for me and can be beautiful and evocative, while these just look low-poly, low-resolution, smeared and blurry and headache-inducing. This game even goes one step further, enforcing a 4:3 resolution (with black bars on the sides of your widescreen monitor).

If you’re nostalgic for PS1 games and are fiending for yet another Soulslike in the endless sea of them, this might be for you.

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Hemlon the Grey

It opens with a very perplexing sexual content warning, which as far as I can tell is only there because of some voluptuous statues in the background in a couple of places? I guess the main character takes a bath at one point but, like… it’s pixel art. You can’t see anything. After that the opening epic backstory and world building is established, whose “dark fantasy” angle I have to admit doesn’t hit home quite as much when delivered through pencil-and-crayon drawings.

The main character being a red-eyed busty female inquisitor who is a half demon (including having a single demon horn on one side of her head) is also absolute peak “OC, don’t steal!” hours. That being said, in the age of AI vomit I can’t hate something that is so patently human made. Albeit perhaps a human who has read a few too many fanfiction mangas of dubious quality.

The gameplay is just yet another parry-based Soulsvania, so it has a very oversaturated genre to compete in and Nine Sols this ain’t. The bones of a serviceable game are here, but honestly the biggest problem is how predictable and undynamic the enemy AI is, which does drag the combat experience down a lot.

I mostly wanted to talk about this game because I found it unintentionally hilarious, to the point where it’s actually almost kind of charming even.

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And there you have it. After a week’s slop sifting those are most of the games I found interesting for one reason or another. Some didn’t make the cut because this is already long enough, and I tried to root out any AI content (Hemlon the Grey had temporary placeholder AI translation, which I think is acceptable for a demo). Let me know if any games above are found to have GenAI and I’ll ammend the post.

Now excuse me while undo my moorings and drift out upon the Candle Sea in another vain attempt at figuring out what the hell is going on in Ablahshikar.