2025 is already odd to a heck of a start. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a hit, we’re loving Civilization 7, and Avowed is just around the corner. Those aren’t the games I’m most excited about, though. My favorites games of the past month and change are all independent releases that I didn’t see coming. Rift of the Necrodancer, Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, and While Waiting are all sitting at the top of my list currently. While big budget games are exciting, you should never sleep on the indies — especially because there are so many great ones coming soon.
Last week, I demoed four upcoming games from Raw Fury, most of which will launch soon. The publisher may not be a household name like Devolver, but it’s quietly given us plenty of fantastic indies over the past decade, from Sable to American Arcadia. This year, Raw Fury has a few games in the works that are worth keeping your eye on. That includes a creepy ode to Silent Hill, a medieval tactics game, and a serious game of the year contender. Don’t take your eyes off these four games.
I first encountered Blue Prince last year at GDC, where I was (evidently) the first person to ever demo it. I instantly knew it would be special, something that was confirmed when it was selected for last year’s Tribeca Fest and nominated for Excellence in Design at this year’s Independent Games Festival awards. Now that I’ve tried it a second time — and realized that there’s much more to it than I initially thought — I’m confident that it’s going to be one of 2025’s most talked about indies.
Blue Prince is hard to explain. It’s sort of a roguelike, sort of a board game, sort of a puzzler. The idea is that players need to find the secret 46th room in an enormous manor, the layout of which changes every time one enters it. When I open a door, I draw three room tiles and have to choose one, shaping what the house looks like as I explore. There are secrets, items, and puzzles strewn throughout the halls that’ll help me track down the secret room. The catch is that I only have a set amount of stamina and spend some every time I walk in a new room. I knew about all that from my last demo, but this time I picked up on more details that widened its scope. From hints that different events can happen on specific days to a massive secret hiding in plain sight, Blue Prince is shaping up to be this year’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: a puzzle game for the sickos who pray at Myst’s altar.
Last year was a fantastic one for games inspired by Silent Hill (and Silent Hill itself), and that’ll continue this year with Post Trauma. Developed by Red Soul Games, it’s an atmospheric horror game with its roots firmly in the genre’s past. When my demo begins, I’m walking through eerily silent train cars as fixed camera angles trigger. It’s classic Silent Hill right out the gate, and the comparison only gets more pronounced when I come face to face with fleshy monsters and catch glimpses of mannequins in my flashlight’s glow.
Taking notes from the series that inspired it, Post Trauma goes heavier on puzzles than combat – and those puzzles are already brain busters. The first one I found required me to carefully decode information on scattered train route maps to reverse engineer a padlock code. The second, unlocked after finding some fuses, had me rebooting a train station’s power by translating environmental clues to correct switch flips. In between those moments, I was bashing creepy monstrosities with my crowbar and walking through surreal hallways that wouldn’t look out of place in Silent Hill 2’s Otherside. That’s only a small slice of what’s to come, too. The full game sounds more ambitious, with a three character structure that switches up its gameplay. I’m excited, and a little scared, to see more.
In 2021, developer Ground Shatter released a hidden gem in the form of Fights in Tight Spaces. The clever tactics game turned fight fighting into a deckbuilder, a formula that earned it some praise. The studio will return with a follow-up this year, Knights in Tight Spaces, which builds on that foundation. The basic premise is the same. It’s a roguelike where players build a deck of attacks, movement options, and defensive capabilities. The goal is to knock out a small diorama filled with enemies, carefully playing as many cards as possible on a turn while managing resources like momentum.
The difference this time is right in its title: knights. The sequel has a medieval theme, as players control a full party of heroes rather than one action star. That opens the door for a new strategic layer, as party members can combo with one another depending on their position. If I smack an enemy into my archer’s line of sight, they’ll get hit with an arrow. Smart positioning is more important than ever as a result, as a perfectly executed turn can result in a lot of damage. With an illustrative new art style in its inventory, Knights in Tight Spaces should be a worthy successor to a cult hit.
As I kid, I played a lot of Lemmings at school. I was obsessed with it, delighted as I watched my virtual critter army mill around the screen. To this day, I’ve still never played something that captures its spirit. Craftlings may be the game to do it. The resource management strategy game has players overseeing a handful of creatures who aimlessly wander back and forth across a pixelated, 2D landscape. It’s my job to give them tasks. I start by commanding them to build a town hall, giving a few axes that they can use to chop down trees. That first step balloons into a large ecosystem of materials and buildings as my Craftlings autonomously build, fight enemies, and complete missions.
The slice I played is promising, though I’ll need to spend much more time with it to fully master it. There are tons of tools to work with, from lifts that can carry items to stoppers that keep my pals from wandering off cliffs. I’ve only scratched the surface of what looks like a dense, systems heavy game for the underserved Lemmings fans still out there. While Craftlings isn’t confirmed for a 2025 release, I’m sure that this retro strategy game will trigger a lot of memories when it launches.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.