Indie Monthly: January 2025
January is conventionally a bit of a slow month. With shopping season and the rush of GOTY lists vanishing in the rearview, it can be on the quieter side. That's not to say that there's nothing of interest, of course. Today's slate of games includes several with an odd common thread: Unorthodox detectives. Whether hunting mystical beings, investigating occult rituals, or untangling quantum paradoxes, we're flush with spec-flavored mysteries.
Interested in seeing the games in action? Check out the video versions here.
The End of the Sun
The End of the Sun is a story-driven adventure game centered around Kupala, the Slavic festival of the Summer Solstice. It puts the player in the role of a sorceress investigator tasked with unearthing the secrets of an abandoned settlement.
You are an ashter, a mystic gifted with the ability to view distant events and travel through time. You are attempting to capture a magical creature that has been causing trouble throughout the countryside. It's a job you've done many times, but this one is particularly crafty. Its trail ends in a village that shows no signs of life, save a large number of smoldering hearths. These half-kindled fires will serve as portals allowing you to reconstruct the final year of this village and, hopefully, learn how your quarry is connected to the whole thing.
The story of The End of the Sun is split into many vignettes, each linked to one of the fires and presenting a small part of the greater story. After connecting with a fire, the player can view unstable fates - events from the past that went awry in some way. By solving various puzzles, the player can eventually stabilize these events and get the whole picture. These vignettes range from mundane slice-of-life tales of a Slavic village to stranger events of a more arcane nature, but they are all linked and gradually fill in the backstory.
The game's narrative is largely nonlinear. After a brief introductory sequence, the player gains the ability to travel across the four seasons, encountering different vignettes and events in each. Completing certain vignettes can change what happens in the other seasons - for example, helping a worker complete the construction of a bridge will offer access to a new area in another time period. There isn't any specific sequence one has to follow, and there are enough events available from the start that the player can tackle the story in any number of ways. The signposting is also good enough that there's little risk of getting lost, and the puzzles that will take time to solve are usually obvious.
Realism was a major focus for the developers of The End of the Sun. The events, traditions, and myths depicted in the story are all based on actual Slavic culture, while the buildings and artifacts were derived from actual physical objects recreated in the game world. The result is a game that can have a real spirit-haunted beauty to it. If you know anything about traditional Slavic culture or have ever been curious about it, then this game offers a little something extra.
The End of the Sun is available for PC via GOG, Epic and Steam. A copy was provided for this review.
Cat Detective Albert Wilde
Cat Detective Albert Wilde is a surrealistic adventure game that satirizes the film noir genre with its visuals and writing. It's very much in the walking simulator camp, with a greater focus on story and dialogue than puzzles.
Albert Wilde is quite possibly the worst investigator who's ever lived. Between his losing gambling habit, a torrent of lawsuits from former clients, and the Chief of Police refusing his calls, it's no wonder that he's neck deep in bills. Out of a desperate need to pay off his bookie, he takes on a case that even the police can't solve - a mysterious murder with no obvious cause of death. It's a weird case that only gets weirder as the clues lead Wilde to a world of mad science and a space-warping device that is somehow tied to the crime.
The game plays out in first person, with Wilde traveling between locations, searching for clues, and interrogating witnesses and suspects. There are some simple puzzles and even the occasional action sequence, but the mechanics are overall streamlined to put most of the focus on the narrative and visual design.
The aesthetics are easily the strongest element in Cat Detective Albert Wilde. The game does a fantastic job capturing the gritty, grainy, rain-soaked look of vintage film noir cinema, with lots of little details to pick out as Wilde explores the seedier (and, occasionally, prettier) parts of the city. This aspect mixes surprisingly well with the surreal, distorted character design, which has realistic animal heads mounted on disproportionately small bodies. "Weird" is the watchword, and the weirdness never lets up.
That also extends to the writing; most of the dialogue is a parody of classic hardboiled detective writing, intercut with sci-fi-flavored surrealism. The humor is a bit of a strange blend, combining deadpan jokes about old-school detective stories and broad cracks about feline hygiene habits. This admixture doesn't always work as planned, but comedy is down to personal taste and you may have more affection for jokes about litter boxes and personal grooming.
Ultimately, whether or not you like the game is going to come down to whether you appreciate surrealism and especially surreal humor. If the willfully bizarre is up your alley, then this just might be for you.
Cat Detective Albert Wilde is available for PC via Steam. A copy was provided for this review.
Warden's Will
Warden's Will is a third-person, co-op extraction shooter pitting the player against waves of enemies on a series of alien planets. Each level tasks the player with tracking down three transmitters hidden somewhere in the landscape. Once activated, these transmitters must be loaded with data gained by defeating enemies. Activating and loading all three opens a rift somewhere high in the map which leads off the planet. Scattered between the transmitters are upgrade terminals, enemy spawners, resource-restoring crystals, and a fistful of other traps and obstacles.
There's some degree of character customization, beginning with the player's choice of Warden. Each comes with a skill kit that includes two special attacks and a movement ability. Those movement abilities - including power jumps, omnidirectional dashing, and a few versions of flight - all offer some means of vertical travel, which compliments the verticality in the level design.
Wardens do not come with their own weapons but rather pick one from a selection of armaments. These range from TPS staples like submachine guns and rail guns to more exotic weapons that fire bouncing plasma orbs, electric pylons, or miniature black holes. All weapons work on a novel heat system in which the primary fire increases heat while the secondary fire consumes heat. This means a player with good game sense and timing can maintain continuous firing by switching between the two.
The developers of Warden's Will claim a lineage to bullet hell games, which is most evident in the difficulty curve. The beginning of each level is a surprisingly placid experience, sparsely populated with weak, passive enemies. As the player spends more time in the level and activates more transmitters, the gloves come off, with the game spawning larger waves of higher-level enemies that aggressively seek out the player. Expect every level to end with all participants limping away from a flood of mobs constantly spawning all around.
Defeating enemies provides the player with currency which can be used to purchase upgrades. These upgrades are randomly selected and are mainly offense-oriented, focused on tuning how the player's weapon handles, upgrading special attacks or even adding additional projectiles under select circumstances. Since Warden's Will plays out in real-time even when played offline, don't expect to have much time to pick out your build - usually, you'll be making a decision while taking fire.
Warden's Will supports up to four-player co-op and it is clearly meant to be played that way. It is possible to play the game single-player, as I did for this review, however, the scope of the levels and the frequent attacks from all directions definitely lend themselves more to group play. Do yourself a favor and find a friend or two to watch your back if you give this one a shot.
Warden's Will is available for PC via Steam. A copy was provided for this review.
Dead of Darkness
Dead of Darkness is a throwback survival horror game combining circa-1997 design sensibilities with circa-1992 graphics design. It pays homage to many well-known horror games of the era with Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and Eternal Darkness being the most obvious inspirations.
Miles Windham is a down-on-his-luck PI who's been adrift through life ever since he lost his family in a mysterious fire. One day, he receives a message urging him to travel to the remote Velvet Island, home to a psychiatric hospital run by a family with a long and storied history. In exchange for Miles' help, someone is prepared to offer him information on the fire. But Velvet Island isn't what Miles was expecting. The night he arrives, he watches as several of the denizens are ripped apart by walking corpses. Now, if he wants to escape, he'll need to unravel a greater mystery, one involving occult rites and strange experiments.
Anyone experienced with early survival horror will feel right at home with Dead of Darkness, as it plays like a 16-bit demake of one of those games. The player must explore a series of monster-infested buildings, keeping a careful eye on life and ammo. Combat is very simple, with the challenge coming more from managing limited resources. There are also puzzles, most of which are just a matter of finding keys and combining items, though there are some more complex puzzles that are, for the most part, intuitive enough to solve them unassisted.
The overall design is extremely old-school for better or worse. That means getting used to some concepts we've left behind, such as manual-only saving restricted to save rooms and a limited inventory that will require some key item juggling. On the plus side, Dead of Darkness also features some quality-of-life improvements over its precursors, including a scan feature that shows every interactable object onscreen and a color-coded map that shows which rooms still contain items and which keys are needed to unlock doors.
One other addition to the game is the sanity system. In addition to physical harm, monster attacks also erode Miles' sense of self. This results in increased vulnerability to damage and status effects as well as the occasional screen-warping hallucination. Sanity-restoring items are abundant enough that this seldom becomes significant, but it is something to note when your screen abruptly flips upside down.
Aesthetics aside, Dead of Darkness is a flashback to the late 90s. Give it a shot if you have any nostalgia for that era.
Dead of Darkness is available for PC via Steam. A copy was provided for this review.
That wraps up our look at all the indie games that caught our attention in January, be sure to come back each month for more of those sweet, sweet indie games you need to know about!