Latest posts
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ROB RUN: The Free Crime Sandbox That Passed 151,000 Players While Everyone Waits for GTA 6
ROB RUN is a free Early Access crime sandbox where every cop and every robber is a real person. It launched on Steam on November 4 and peaked at 151,032 concurrent players on November 9, with reviews stuck at Mixed. Here is why the crowd showed up anyway.
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Probably Stolen: The Sketchy Shop Sim That Sold Half a Million Copies in Two Days
The biggest Steam story of the last two weeks is a game about checking whether the merchandise fell off a truck. I respect it completely. Everybody knew what the top of the Steam chart would look like last week. Phantom Blade Zero first, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 second, thank you, good night. Then…
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Two People Made Queen’s Domain. It Sold 100,000 Copies in Five Days and Already Paid for Itself.
Two developers, one flying sword, zero marketing budget to speak of. That was enough. I love a sales number that makes the big publishers look silly, and this one is perfect. Queen’s Domain is a retro fantasy action RPG made by Freshly Baked Games, a team of exactly two people, and published by Future Friends…
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Hades II: The Witch Rebuilt the Roguelike
Supergiant had never made a sequel. For Hades II, the studio’s first, it kept the structure that won a Hugo Award and replaced the person at the center of it: out goes the warrior prince built on dash aggression, in comes a witch whose entire kit runs on a resource that has to be charged,…
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Silksong: The Sequel That Had to Rebuild Its Hero
Sequels usually inherit the hero and change the world. Silksong did the harder thing: it kept the studio, kept the genre, and rebuilt the character so completely that the old game’s muscle memory becomes a liability. Team Cherry’s follow-up to Hollow Knight is the fourth entry in my indie analysis series, and it is a…
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Steam’s Review Line Got So Long, Indie Games Are Missing Their Own Launch Days
Valve says Steam build reviews now take up to 12 business days instead of the usual three to five, and indie launch dates are already slipping because of it. Food Devils missed its day entirely. Wheel Make It lost almost two weeks.
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Hollow Knight: The Metroidvania That Trusts You to Get Lost
Some games hand you a map, a marker and a polite arrow. Hollow Knight hands you a blank page, a dead kingdom and one instruction it never says out loud: figure it out. Nearly a decade after launch, that refusal to help is still the most interesting design decision in the genre, and it is…
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17 MUGEN Games Where Naruto Can Punch Goku in the Face
Image: Team Z2 / MUGEN Database Open Google Images and search for MUGEN and this is what you get: a character select screen with so many tiny portraits it looks like a stadium crowd. Naruto in one corner, Goku in the other, and a few hundred of their closest friends in between. I know that…
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Stardew Valley: One Man Built the Coziest Empire in Games
Every farming game promises a slower life. Stardew Valley is the one that delivered it so completely that it became a problem for the entire genre: after 2016, every cozy game gets measured against a $14.99 pixel farm that one man built alone in about five years, coding, drawing, composing and sound-designing the whole thing…
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Hades: The Roguelike Where Dying Is the Story
Every roguelike asks you to accept death as tuition. Hades did something ruder and smarter: it made death the delivery truck for the plot. Supergiant’s 2020 action RPG is the third entry in my indie analysis series, and it is the game that proved a genre built on repetition could carry one of the best-written…