Lego parties, hundreds of Xenomorphs and other new indie games worth checking out

Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. A bunch of new games arrived this week, alongside demo drops, reveals and details about upcoming titles. But if there are some you’ve had on your wishlist for a while and have been waiting for a solid discount, now might be the time to take the plunge.

That’s because Steam’s autumn sale is underway. It’s arguably not as massive as the summer or winter editions, but there are still lots of bargains on the storefront. During the platform’s big sales, I think it’s always worth taking a look at the list of deep discounts for some particularly good deals. I’ve been meaning to check out Haven from Cairn developer The Game Bakers for quite a while now, and at 90 percent off, that’s an easy pickup for me. 

There are lots of solid offers elsewhere in the sale, including half off Tunic, Cult of the Lamb and Nine Sols; 35 percent off Turbo Kid; 40 percent off Another Crab’s Treasure; and 25 percent off Animal Well and Blue Prince. Lots of blockbuster games are on sale too, of course, including the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 (75 percent off), Returnal (50 percent off), Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (50 percent off) and Assassin’s Creed Shadows (40 percent off).

Elsewhere, I thought this news nugget was pretty interesting. Evil Empire, the studio behind The Rogue Prince of Persia, has taken over development of Brotato. Original developer Blobfish Games is moving onto other projects.

Brotato never hooked me as much as the similar Vampire Survivors did, but the game has more than 10 million players. Evil Empire is releasing an update for Brotato this month that brings a new mob to the game, but the studio’s track record is what makes this change most intriguing. It handled several updates and expansions for Dead Cells, including the Return to Castlevania DLC. So, there could be some pretty neat stuff on the way to Brotato in the coming months and years, especially with Evil Empire teasing DLC.

New releases

Two Lego games arriving in the space of a couple of weeks might seem like a lot, but the latest one is a world away from Lego Voyagers. Lego Party — from SMG Studio and publisher Fictions — is a party game for up to four players and it has dozens of minigames. Think Mario Party, but blockier and with the smooth trademark humor of Lego games.

It supports local and online cross-platform multiplayer and there are tons of different ways to customize your minifigure. Let’s just hope no one gets too mad if you mess up their turn. Lego Party is out now on Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Alien: Rogue Incursion – Part One is now available for the first time outside of virtual reality platforms thanks to the new Evolved Edition. It hit PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Steam and Epic Games Store this week. 

This is a first-person shooter from Survios that’s set between Alien and Aliens. The game pits a marine colonel against hundreds of Xenomorphs and other nasty things. I can’t imagine I would have kept my cool if I were playing this in VR and a Facehugger jumped onto my head, but the flatscreen version might not be so scary. Maybe.

Puzzle adventure game Éalú sees you taking control of a wooden, clockwork mouse that’s attempting to escape from a labyrinth. Designer Ivan Owen of Beyond the Bark created all of the stop-motion animations by hand, including all possible outcomes for each scenario, and did so mostly in a garden shed.

It looks charming, though the mouse faces some rather grisly-sounding fates if you’re not careful. Éalú is out now on Steam.

Upcoming 

An edition of the PC Gaming Show took place during Tokyo Game Show last weekend, and it featured more than 30 games. One of them was Kaiju Cleanup. This is a cleaning sim in which you’ll clean up kaiju carcasses by slicing up the monsters into smaller pieces, disposing of “various jellies” and powerwashing the last little bits away. 

If your character dies due to acidic fluids or explosive organs, just send in a clone and clean up that mess too. It’s dangerous work, but someone’s gotta do it. 

This is a fun idea. There’s no release window for Kaiju Cleanup as yet, but Brightrock Games and publisher Mythwright say you can expect it to hit Steam at some point in the next 15 years. 

I kind of love the ethos of Wolf Haus Games. “We make the games we wanted to play when we were 13, because now we’re grown ups and nobody can tell us what to do,” the studio says on its website. After collectively accruing decades of experience in AAA games and movies, the team is working on its first game, Join Us.

In this co-op survival RPG, you’ll set up a chapter of a doomsday cult. You can choose the belief system and recruit members for your cause while amassing a stockpile of weapons. Naturally, you’ll need to build a compound for your collective and manage your resources. You can put your followers to work by assigning them roles like farmer, doctor and mission support, which will hopefully help you avoid permadeath.

Join Us is coming to Steam in 2026. I already feel like I might stick with this one for longer than I did Valheim, one of the more prominent co-op survival games of the last few years. That’s largely because this one has buses with machine gun turrets, along with pigs and bears you can ride into battle.

Earth Must Die is another game that was unveiled at the latest PC Gaming Show. This is a point-and-click adventure from Size Five Games and publisher No More Robots that has an appealing, cartoon-y art style, but it’s the cast that really catches the eye here. 

It features performances from the likes of Joel Fry (Game of Thrones, Our Flag Means Death), Ben Starr (Final Fantasy XVI, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hades 2) and a host of people who have appeared on the brilliant comedy panel show Taskmaster, including series creator Alex Horne. Earth Must Die is slated to hit Steam later this year.

Speaking of Taskmaster, a game called Task Time seems like it was inspired by the show. This is a competitive party title from ReadGraves and publisher Wired Productions in which you’ll compete with up to seven other players to complete random tasks. There are more than 500,000 variants of tasks that you might be asked to take on. 

It looks chaotic in a good way, and appear to tap into the DNA of the likes of Fall Guys (which shouldn’t be surprising given that some of the dev team has experience of working on that game). There’s local and online multiplayer support for this one. Task Time is coming to Steam and Epic Games Store “soon.” If you’re quick, you can join the Steam playtest, which ends on Sunday.

Rising Heat reminds me a little of Minishoot Adventures, a lovely Zelda-esque RPG from last year (40 percent off in the Steam sale, by the way). The only things they actually seem to have in common, though, is that you play as a little ship and they each have a top-down perspective.

That’s because Rising Heat is a twin-stick, bullet-hell survival roguelike. I dig the explosive, colorful visual effects (is that a black hole I see?) and the co-op mode sounds compelling. You can play with a friend locally or online, and your ships are tethered by a beam that can damage enemies and possibly pull your partner into danger if you’re not careful. 

Rising Heat was supposed to arrive on October 14, but Fuzzy Sock Studios and publisher Apogee Entertainment have delayed it until December 2. However, you can try out a demo on Steam now.

Here’s another demo, and I’m very excited about this one. Marvel Cosmic Invasion is the latest side-scrolling beat-’em-up from Tribute Games and publisher Dotemu, the teams behind the terrific Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.

Although this game is coming to Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as well later this year, the demo is currently only available on Steam. It features nine of the game’s 15 playable heroes: Spider-Man, Wolverine, She-Hulk, Storm, Venom, Nova, Phyla-Vell, Rocket Raccoon and Captain America. You can pick two and switch between them any time to deliver powerful team-up attacks. 

There’s couch and online co-op available, and the demo is fully playable on Steam Deck. I definitely need to carve out some time for this over the weekend. Ghost of Yōtei can wait a bit longer.

Dogpile is another in a long line of Suika Game clones (where you combine two objects to make a larger one without spilling over the top of a container). This is all about smushing together very good dogs, so it’s automatically one of the best ones. It has an utterly perfect title too.

Dogpile switches up the format a bit since it’s a deckbuilder and you can customize the puppers with their own traits. Dog tags alter how the pooches and their traits work, and using them smartly can help you discover synergies. 

Studio Folly and Toot Games are the developers behind Dogpile, and they have audio design assistance from A Shell in the Pit and help from the co-publishing team at Wings. There’s no release window as yet. But there’s a demo out on Steam right now and I don’t know why you’re still reading this instead of rushing off to play it immediately.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lego-parties-hundreds-of-xenomorphs-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-110000144.html?src=rss