In A Gentlemen’s Dispute, you fight to be the last gentleman standing in a wild brawl. Fun is key here, and the game lets you toss your floppy characters as weapons to hit others. Everything around you can break, and you can grab anything, from sticks to bear traps, to secure victory. Between fights, you can pick upgrades that stack, like dropping bombs when hit or gaining an extra jump. Up to four players can join on one screen, or eight can play online.

What makes A Gentlemen’s Dispute so appealing is its focus on wackiness over intense competition. Unlike many party games, it prioritizes fun and randomness above all. The demo, available on Steam, lets you try various moves, so gather your crew for a wild multiplayer experience.

The post A Gentlemen’s Dispute, slapstick kaotična multiplayer igra, predstavila je novi trailer tijekom The MIX Summer Showcasea first appeared on IndieGames.

Grandma, No! is a physics-based, laugh-out-loud adventure where you step into the worn-out slippers of a grandma in way over her head. Forget ordinary chores, these “simple” tasks go off the rails fast. Taking out the trash may lead you somewhere unexpected, and cooking dinner could end up with more fire than flavour. Just when things start to calm down, BOOM — something weirder crashes the party.

Try to survive the day without burning the house down, or maybe you’ll prefer to let it all hang out and embrace the mayhem. Get ready to enter hyper interactive playground where your actions may have permanent consequences. From freaky twists to guest appearances, there’s always something bizarre waiting to derail your plans.

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The Easter playtest introduces a brand-new Easter-themed shell for players to customize their fragile egg protagonist, along with several other unlockable skins to discover. As you roll, jump, and climb through treacherous environments like the Hen House and beyond, you can hunt for these shells to add flair to your journey. The game’s punishing mechanics challenge you to master its physics, syncing jumps with rolls to reach new heights while avoiding cracks and falls.

All you have to do is “Request Access” on Steam and you’re good to go. Additionally, you can read our interview with the team behind the game here.

The post Egging On Cracks Open a Limited-Time Easter Playtest first appeared on IndieGames.

Which Way Up: Galaxy Games is a family-friendly party game built around a unique gravity-defying mechanic. Up to four players can compete locally (or online via Steam Remote Play Together) in 12 distinct mini-games, each leveraging physics-based challenges where you run on walls, orbit planets, and navigate shifting gravity fields. Controls are simple, move with the analog stick, jump with a button, and use a “Comet Push” to interact with opponents or propel yourself, making it accessible for all ages.

While the gameplay is simple and engaging, it’s clearly not designed for keyboard, a controller is highly recommended. Another key detail is that the current version of the game is split into singleplayer and multiplayer modes. The singleplayer experience features three distinct game modes. Nebula Nab tasks you with running across planets to collect and match shapes to their correct slots. Hole in One offers a space-themed twist on golf, complete with celestial obstacles. Finally, Comet Collect reinvents football in a cosmic setting, challenging you to score goals within designated zones.

Frustrating Fun in Space

But here’s my biggest gripe: it’s much harder than it looks. Some levels are significantly more difficult than they should be, making them frustrating – even for kids. Each mode includes six levels and 24 medals to collect. Progression requires a certain number of medals to unlock levels, but the game never explicitly tells you how many are needed. While you do get time to practice the mechanics and controls, the game never truly prepares you for the different modes. The tutorial simply explains movement and controls but doesn’t offer hands-on practice for actual gameplay challenges.

Timing is crucial, as your speed in solving levels determines the medals you earn. Unfortunately, medals don’t serve much purpose beyond unlocking levels, which feels like a missed opportunity. A customization system, allowing you to personalize characters with unique outfits and accessories, would have made the experience feel more personal and rewarding.

The gravity mechanic offers a fresh twist on platforming, imagine Mario Galaxy meets Mario Party, and stands out as one of the game’s most innovative features. That said, the gameplay occasionally lacks depth: mini-games are bite-sized and chaotic, but rarely evolve beyond their initial premise. Some modes, like the golf-inspired challenges, rely more on luck and unpredictable ball physics than actual skill. Another minor frustration is the slightly prolonged loading times between levels, an unnecessary pacing disruption for such quick-fire gameplay.

Stunning Art, Stumbling Depth

While the narrative serves as a functional backdrop, it’s ultimately forgettable. The wall-of-text delivery feels ill, and multiplayer bypasses the story entirely. That said, the lore itself has charm: before the universe existed, Celestial Space Sprites, cosmic embodiments of concepts like nature (Sprout), light (Prism), and the moon (Luna), created the Galaxy Games as a diversion while shaping life. Don’t expect branching narratives or deep plotlines here, though.

Where the game truly shines is its presentation. The vibrant 2D art style bursts with cosmic personality, featuring colorful planetoids, star-dusted arenas, and obstacles like jelly berries or baby dragon fireballs. The seven Space Sprites are visually distinct, with playful animations that pop against the dynamic backdrops. It’s a shame the gameplay doesn’t always match this level of creativity.

The absence of AI opponents in multiplayer limits the experience, solo or duo play feels incomplete, and online play requires workarounds like Steam Remote Play, which can come with lag. As mentioned, some mini-games also suffer from balance issues, and the game struggles to find its ideal audience, caught between being overly casual and lacking depth. That said, it’s worth considering if you have kids to play with or friends willing to try an unfinished game. More levels are planned for future updates, which could help flesh out the experience.

Review copy provided by the publisher

3.3

The post Which Way Up: Galaxy Games – Gravity-Bending Party Game first appeared on IndieGames.

As an interstellar cargo smuggler, or “Space Slug,” you see opportunity where others see a desolate graveyard. Complete increasingly difficult contracts, and sell everything you can get your hands on. Master the tools of the trade and use the physics of space to your advantage. Cooperate with up to three friends to become cosmic legends, or strike out on your own as a Solo Slug.

Airlock Arena utilizes Steam’s RemotePlay feature for its online multiplayer, meaning that only one copy of the game is needed to play with up to four people, allowing a gameplay experience reminiscent of classic couch co-op fun, but with the freedom to play across the galaxy from anywhere. Gather your crew, jump into the action, and see if you can survive the chaos together, no matter the distance.

The post Interstellar multiplayer roguelike Airlock Arena: Profit or Perish launched on Steam first appeared on IndieGames.

Bionic Bay is a unique platformer that immerses you in a mysterious biomechanical world. You play as a scientist stranded in this strange, futuristic environment, where realism meets stunning pixel art. The game is packed with clever, physics-based gameplay and meticulously hand-crafted levels, challenging you to use their your and creativity to overcome obstacles.

The game introduces core mechanics like The Swap, Time Freeze, and Power Fist, which allow you to manipulate the environment in innovative ways. From bouncy force rays and super magnets to temporal anomalies and anti-gravity liquids, the world of Bionic Bay is filled with ancient yet advanced technology. Classic platforming elements, such as swinging ropes, detonating explosives, and navigating rusty pipes, add to the nostalgic charm.

The post Bionic Bay is releasing a bit later for PC, and a new demo will be available in the coming weeks first appeared on IndieGames.

Cloudheim is a action RPG where players team up to explore a colorful, destructible world filled with enemies, puzzles, and secrets. The game emphasizes physics-based combat, allowing you to use the environment to your advantage, whether it’s collapsing pillars onto enemies, launching explosive barrels, or creating chaotic combos with friends.

In the game, you can team up with up to three friends online, meaning sharing weapons, abilities, and resources will be essential as you grow stronger together and unlock new playable characters. With visual crafting, you can create a massive array of weapons, gear, and abilities on the fly. Additionally, experiment with crafting to discover powerful new tools or sell your creations to fund your adventures.

The post Cloudheim is a co-op action RPG with physics-based combat, launches in 2025 for PC and consoles first appeared on IndieGames.

“Mom, do we have Shadow of the Colossus at home?” “Yes, we do. It’s called Eternal Strands.”

Jokes aside, playing Eternal Strands reminded me how fun games can be, even when they draw clear inspiration from other titles. Despite its influences, this game delivers a unique and enjoyable experience. It’s an ambitious action RPG that combines creative, physics-based gameplay with towering, epic battles against colossal foes. The game’s strengths lie in its improvisational combat, environmental interaction, and open-ended exploration. However, these highs are offset by a slow-paced narrative and repetitive smaller battles. While Eternal Strands shines during its most creative moments, it struggles with monotony and occasional frustration.

The story is somewhat sluggish, but it’s actually not too bad

The story centers on Brynn, a Weaver exiled by society following a magical catastrophe known as the Surge. Alongside her allies, Brynn explores the mysterious Enclave, uncovering its secrets and investigating the origins of the Surge. While the premise is intriguing, the narrative pacing is slow, with major developments only emerging midway through the game. The early stages often feel repetitive and lack the momentum needed to fully engage players.

Brynn is a likable protagonist, but the game struggles to provide compelling reasons to engage in its lengthy conversations with various characters. While the voice acting is impressive and the world is rich with lore, the delivery often feels lackluster. Side quests do help flesh out the history and relationships between characters, but they lack urgency and depth, further slowing the narrative pace.

Although the characters each have their own unique charm, I found it difficult to connect with them. Many of their conversations felt meaningless, and I often ended up skipping through dialogue that failed to hold my interest. I’m not sure why such a strong emphasis was placed on the story in Eternal Strands. It’s not terrible by any means, but it lacks the depth and intrigue needed to truly captivate players. That said, where the game truly excels is in its action-packed gameplay.

Thankfully, the combat is excelent

One of Eternal Strands’ standout features is how it encourages experimentation with a variety of tactical approaches to combat and exploration. Thankfully, the combat system is straightforward and easy to grasp. You can wield multiple weapons, such as a sword and shield or a bow and arrow, and the game includes an excellent parry system alongside the ability to dodge enemy attacks. However, the real highlight is its elemental powers, which add a unique layer of strategy and excitement to the gameplay.

For instance, the ice power is far more versatile than just freezing enemies. You can use it to create bridges, extinguish fires, or even pin down a titan’s limb during an intense boss fight. Telekinesis adds another layer of strategy, allowing you to manipulate objects to disable enemy shields or trigger environmental hazards. Fire powers let you melt ice and unlock new areas. The sheer variety of uses for these abilities adds a dynamic element to exploration and combat.

Since battles are heavily physics-based, there’s a sense of unpredictability that keeps things exciting. You can be thrown around by massive creatures, take fall damage, or even get flung into hazards like a ragdoll. This creates plenty of opportunities for creative problem-solving and keeps the gameplay engaging and fresh.

Battles against Great Foes are as much about solving puzzles as they are about combat, demanding careful planning and creative use of your powers to exploit their weaknesses. Whether you’re scaling a dragon’s wings or pinning a giant’s arm to the ground, these encounters feel epic, varied, and deeply satisfying. They also present meaningful choices: defeating a Great Foe in a specific way rewards you with power upgrades, while taking them down through more traditional methods grants rare crafting materials. This innovative system adds an extra layer of depth and makes the gameplay even more rewarding.

Smaller-scale combat falls short

The game introduces a dynamic weather system that impacts both exploration and combat, but rather than enhancing the experience, it often feels like an unnecessary obstacle. My biggest gripe is the miasma weather effect, which engulfs the world in a magical purple fog. Stepping into it is practically a death sentence, and the dense cloud severely limits visibility, making it hard to navigate or see what’s happening on the map. Similarly, flash freezes and droughts force you to manage temperature through potions or gear, but the game offers little feedback on how effective your preparations are. A system to show how well your gear counters specific weather effects would have been a welcome addition. Instead, these events frequently disrupt gameplay, making navigation and combat feel unnecessarily frustrating.

While the Great Foe battles are genuinely engaging, the smaller-scale combat falls short in comparison. It quickly becomes repetitive due to a lack of variety in enemy types and limited melee weapon options, which are restricted to just two archetypes. Additionally, the core combat mechanics remain mostly static throughout the game, offering little in terms of progression. The versatility of your powers does help to break the monotony, but it’s not enough to completely mask the repetition. It can become especially frustrating when dealing with groups of enemies, like three archers attacking from all directions. In such cases, the best option often feels like running away rather than engaging with them.

Exploration in Eternal Strands is open-ended, allowing you to climb nearly any surface and break down environmental objects for crafting materials. However, the incentive to explore feels minimal, as the most valuable rewards, such as gear blueprints and crafting materials, are tied to story progression rather than discovery. Additionally, the climbing mechanics leave much to be desired. Climbing consumes a lot of stamina, feels sluggish, and can be frustrating to use, particularly when you’re trying to escape from enemies.

Weather conditions are more irritating than fun

The game introduces a dynamic weather system that impacts both exploration and combat, but instead of enhancing the experience, it often feels like an unnecessary obstacle. My biggest complaint is the miasma weather effect, where the world is engulfed in a magical purple fog. Stepping into it is practically a death sentence, and the dense cloud makes it incredibly hard to see what’s happening on the map. Similarly, flash freezes and droughts force you to manage temperature through potions or gear, but the game provides little feedback on how effective your preparations are. A system to show how well your gear counters specific weather effects would have been a welcome addition. Instead, these events frequently disrupt gameplay, making navigation and combat feel unnecessarily frustrating.

Eternal Strands ties all progression to its gear system, which allows for upgrading and reforging using crafting materials. While this ensures that even starting equipment can remain useful, the system feels overly convoluted and tedious. Swapping armor for specific situations, like boosting stamina during a Great Foe battle, equires manually equipping each piece of gear, as there’s no option to save loadouts. This makes frequent gear changes a chore. The lack of meaningful upgrades to health or stamina outside of gear progression further limits the sense of growth. While managing equipment starts off as an enjoyable mechanic, it eventually becomes repetitive and time-consuming.

Another issue is the limited inventory space for carrying resources during exploration. To craft legendary or epic gear, you’ll need to grind materials constantly. While resources are relatively easy to gather, the combination of environmental hazards and relentless enemies makes the process more tedious than rewarding. Larger creatures will attack on sight, and for some reason, enemies seem to have an uncanny ability to detect you from great distances, often chasing you endlessly. This relentless pursuit, coupled with the environmental challenges, can make gameplay feel like more of a slog than a proper adventure.

Ending thoughts

Visually, Eternal Strands is vibrant and colorful, with striking character designs and seamless performance, even during intense battles. The anime-style cutscenes punctuate key story moments, adding flair and drama to the narrative. The soundtrack, composed by Austin Wintory, is absolutely stunning. Its sweeping orchestral tracks amplify the scale and tension of the Great Foe battles, making these already epic encounters feel even more grandiose. The sound design is polished overall, with effects and music that perfectly complement the gameplay’s intensity.

Eternal Strands is a game of contrasts. While it boasts many strong elements, certain flaws hold it back from reaching its full potential. For fans of action RPGs and Shadow of the Colossus-inspired games, Eternal Strands is worth exploring, but its inconsistencies may test your patience.

The inventive power elements and epic Great Foe battles are highlights, delivering some of the most creative combat in recent memory. However, the repetitive smaller encounters, slow pacing, and overly complicated systems occasionally detract from the experience. I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game and can confidently recommend it. Just give it some time to grow on you, you might find yourself enjoying it far more than you initially expected.

Review copy provided by the publisher

3.8

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White chocolate is your source of energy. Consume it in order to become faster, stronger, more powerful. You can also share it with that vile creature that survived alongside you. There is no light left in here – the only way to see more is using echolocation. But don’t be too loud: you’re not the only one in here. Even if you think you are.

The game allows you immerse yourself in a peculiar pitch dark world of WHITE CHOCOLATE. You will have to try and survive in an online co-op up to 100 players in a lobby. Additionally, there are platforming puzzles with different approaches, either help each other or go by yourself. And above all: find more chocolate.

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What does every protagonist in any game ever do when they find a suspicious video tape that explicitly says ”DO NOT PLAY”? Of course they play it right away, despite the warnings. Usually it results in unexpected and dreadful horror experience, however Beta MAX decided to take more pleasant route and turn it into an atmospheric adventure in the 80’s inspired realm.

Laser beams, time chambers and Tetris

Posters referencing such iconic titles like Jaws, Star Wars, The Thing and Back to the Future are the last things Max saw before being pulled into TV. Finding himself in the neon and geometric world influenced by his favourite decade, he has to complete numerous puzzles in order to discover a way back home. Although those are no regular riddles: they require bending the laws of physics and time manipulation.

From my point of view, Beta MAX is a perfect game for speedrunners and players willing to search for the secrets. Each level is equipped with a timer, which is an useful feature in the sections where speed and precision are essential to get under par-time. Moreover, on each stage there are hidden collectibles waiting for those ready to experiment with finding new paths and ways to take on gradually more complex challenges.

Another factor that is included in the final score is amount of errors made during the run, such as falling in the water or getting hit by the lasers. Although, it’s worth pointing out that technically you cannot ”die” in this game, since any wrong move can simply be reversed thanks to abilities of extraordinary remote control.

The remote mechanic is in my opinion the most interesting aspect of Beta MAX – it turns a simple concept of jumping, climbing and moving objects into a gameplay based on rewinding and stoping time in right moments and places. Elements such as floor switches, time chambers, velocity accelerators, moving platforms, fragmenting bridges and crushing blocks make the levels even more challenging and surprising.

While I enjoyed the creativity and difficulty from levels dedicated to logical puzzles, during the segments that utilized platforming skills I often found myself in quite troublesome scenarios: the movements of protagonist were clumsy at times, the objects got destroyed by crushers due to strange hitboxes or during rewinding parts which, in my opinion, weren’t always necessary. To me, solving riddles while keeping four dimensions in mind was much more fun than dodging obstacles.

Very retro retrospect

There’s one thing you cannot deny when it comes to this game: it has truly mesmerizing atmosphere. The neon lighting combined with catchy synthwave melodies manages to capture the feeling of retro-futuristic ideas from the 80’s to a T. Even though the graphics could have been more polished – for example there were many blank walls that were left in the game without serving any particular purpose, so they could have been better incorporated in the gameplay or the overall setting – the presentation is pretty satisfying and I definitely couldn’t help but pause and listen to some of the musical pieces.

Ending thoughts

Beta MAX discovered a way to embrace video cassette characteristics both as plot device and gameplay mechanic. While there’s still room for improvement, the game as it is now offers a solid platforming and puzzle experience in an unique, retro inspired world that many could find nostalgic.

Review copy provided by the publisher

3.8

The post Beta MAX – A four-dimensional blast from the past first appeared on IndieGames.