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Join three friends as they embark on an adventure to discover the best indie games! Hosted by Rebecca Jones, Liam Richardson and Rachel Watts. Episodes released fortnightly!
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It's that time of year again when your host trio take some time to get together in person and natter until we all lose our voices – luckily, a lot of the time we at least remember to be around our microphones while we do so! We recorded a couple of episodes (this one and a Side Quest you can look out for in a couple of weeks' time), so expect us to be extra crisp and way, way more unhinged than usual – because, despite now having a combined age upwards of 100, we're always just super excited to hang out with our besties. In true sleepover club fashion, we recorded this episode in our jammies, and what better way to pass an evening among friends pretending to still be teenagers than by playing a party game? And not just any party game: our very own Liam only went and designed a whole app to facilitate this idea! Inspired by the tabletop card game FunEmployed, Pitch Deck sees the three of us alternating in the role of indie developers pitching our game ideas to studio heads, using a series of wild card (emphasis on the wild) improv prompts that we need to adapt to as we go. It uh… goes some places, let's say. I don't want to spoil anything for you because this really is just one you need to listen to, but suffice to say there's lore here by the end. Oh and an actual real-life interruption by the UK Government's Emergency Alert system, so enjoy that if you missed it live. For once it feels like hyperfixations are actually here to mellow the energy out at the end of an episode rather than send us raring off in a different direction. Enjoy refined discussions of a couple of recent reads – "The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder" by David Grann (from Liam) and "King Sorrow" by Joe Hill (from Rebecca) – while Rachel gives us her initial thoughts on two of her most-anticipated multiplayer indies of the year: Big Walk and Peak: The Final Ascent. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
So far, 2026 has been a busy old year for some of our favourite genres here at Indieventure! You may remember Rebecca's deep dive into life sims a few weeks ago, and now Rachel's here with her own focussed topic: detective games. To celebrate the recent releases of The Mermaid Mask, The Incident at Galley House, and Desktop Explorer, your intrepid hosting trio are here to have a good old natter about detectives, mysteries, and investigations in indie games – and since it's probably the area of interest all three of us overlap on the most, we've got plenty to say! In addition to spoiler-free overviews of those latest releases, expect to hear about some classics of the genre, hidden gems we want to highlight, personal favourites, and loads more. We also don't necessarily contain ourselves just to video games on this occasion, since of course mysteries abound in books, films, and TV shows too, and this is one of those narrative genres where the conventions found in different media can really inform one another. As always, we end with our latest hyperfixations, and it's a three-for-two deal this week since Liam and Rachel are of course both all about the new Charli xcx album: Music, Fashion, Film. Meanwhile, in another unsurprising turn of events, Rebecca finally got around to watching I Saw the TV Glow and immediately became a Jane Schoenbrun evangelist. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
It's baaack. That's right – a mere 20 months later, we're revisiting one of our most chaotic episode ideas, and it's one where our listeners get to play along! If you weren't here yet in November 2024, you can go back and listen to Episode 27 to familiarise yourself with our totally-original-we-swear indie game draft picking process; or you can just take my word for it that it's basically fantasy football with indie games and that Liam as ever gives a good explanation of the rules in the episode and that's why I'm glossing over that bit… honest. It's not because I'm still a bit confused or anything. This time around we've done away with the framing concept of "we're building our own consoles and choosing the launch titles" in favour of… well, honestly, we just kind of each assemble a list of great indie games based on some loose themes while yelling at each other a lot in a very friendly way, and we felt like that was probably enough? Oh, but this time around everyone gets one betrayal card, and you can imagine how that goes… As a reminder, this is one where you can go to our lovely listener Discord and vote on who you think should win – and also, if you don't want spoilers, please go and listen first and then come back to this description once you're ready. I'll wait, don't worry. … Hi, nice to see you again! Okay so here are the three "teams" – remember to go and vote for your favourite! Liam's Team: Ballistic Zen, The Beginner's Guide, Blue Prince, Crow Country, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Night in the Woods, Orbitals, Promise Mascot Agency, Stardew Valley, Unpacking Rebecca's Team: Bad Magpie, Camp Palut, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Mouthwashing, Outer Wilds, A Short Hike, Slay the Princess, Strange Horticulture, Thank Goodness You're Here, Tiny Bookshop Rachel's Team: 1000xRESIST, Citizen Sleeper 2, Deltarune, Gorogoa, Jump the Track, Mediterranea Inferno, The Séance of Blake Manor, Signalis, Slay the Spire, Toem We'll leave the poll open for two weeks, so listen in for the results and our reactions during our next LIVE(ish) and in-person episode, coming in August! Even though the structure of this episode is just a little difference, hyperfixations remain as our constant final segment. Rachel has – of course – been playing The Mermaid Mask at long last, so look forward to her reactions in a future episode! Rebecca has finished reading underrated dark fairytale The Curator by Owen King, and also enjoyed a feminist horror double-bill of Evil Dead Burn and Obsession at a mercifully air conditioned cinema. And Liam has been happily binging another South Korean reality show, The Devil's Plan. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
The gang are all back together at last after our various summer hols, and we're happy to welcome the return of Liam after his absence from our last episode. Naturally, our first order of business is to get him all caught up on what he missed during the mid-year check-in, so we begin with a quick-fire chat that takes in Mina the Hollower, El Paso Elsewhere 2, Denshattack!, Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!, The Mermaid Mask, and – not indie, but unignorable given who we're talking about – Resident Evil Veronica. Then it's onto the main topic of this episode and, unbelievably, despite being co-created and co-hosted by a lifelong obsessive Simmer, it's taken Indieventure almost three years to put together an episode dedicated to the life sim genre. However, the early access launch of Paralives a few weeks back has given Rebecca the excuse she's always needed to go off at length about her excruciatingly detailed knowledge of life sims, how they work, how they're made, and how the genre has developed and adapted to the changing gaming landscape over the past quarter-century. Many thanks to Liam, Rachel, and you, our lovely listeners for indulging this semi-interactive TED talk, and be sure to check out the Sims Community interview quoted in this episode! Naturally you can expect some illegal AAA chat here too as it's more or less impossible to discuss Paralives in context without regularly referring back to The Sims franchise as well as InZoi; but don't worry, we also circle back to perennial Indieventure favourite and underappreciated indie life sim Tiny Life while we're at it. There might even be a Stardew Valley cameo in there somewhere, too. And like a cooling dip in the pool during Britain's third consecutive heatwave, we round off with our latest hyperfixations. One of Rachel's favourite manga series – The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All – is getting an anime adaptation early next year soundtracked by Nirvana, so there's plenty to get excited about there already even if we're six months away from seeing the thing itself. Liam has broken a bit of a dry spell in his gaming enthusiasm by getting very, very invested in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. And Rebecca has achieved her pledge to "sit by a pool and do nothing but read a stack of books for two weeks", having read nine novels on her recent break with a reading list comprised of authors Mie Takase, T Kingfisher, KJ Charles, Becky Chambers, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, Owen King, and Chuck Tingle. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Ahhh, how is it June already?? In this episode, it’s just the gals having a chat as Liam is feeling under the weather and is resting, but fear not, our sweet Geordie boy will be back next episode. Rachel and Rebecca get gabbing about their favourite indie games of 2026 so far, a general vibe-check of gaming this year, and what games they're looking forward to in the second half of the year. The two also pick a handful of game highlights from The Power of Pride Bundle over on itch.io, which you should definitely check out, as it’s pride month, HAPPY PRIDE!! Whoooo! Plus, there’s some ‘not-E3’ aka Summer Games Fest talk, with some minor AAA tangents even though this is a podcast about indie games (shhh). The two mention SO MANY games this episode, but some notable mentions from the first half of this year include: Cairn, Phonopolis, Titanium Court, Wax Heads, Forbidden Solitaire, Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse, and Fears to Fathom: Scratch Creek. And our most anticipated games for the rest of this year include: Moonlight Peaks, The Mermaid Mask, Aquapark Tycoon, Truck-kun is supporting me from another world, Servant of the Lake, I Am Your Host, Toem 2, Penguin Colony, Virtue and a Sledgehammer AND MANY MORE. For hyperfixations, Rachel thoroughly enjoyed watching Backrooms in the cinema and Rebecca has been blushing and kicking her feet over the book Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
And so we're back from outer space (or wherever it is Indieventure hosts like to go on holiday). Yep, after our little recording hiatus – seamlessly covered for with pre-recorded Pokémon chat, bet you didn't even notice that was a weird one – your intrepid trio is back together for the first time in a month, and naturally we all have one question on our minds: what have we all been playing while we were apart? Of course, two-thirds of the group were on dream holidays and thus didn't play a whole lot, but there's still plenty to talk about, between all the cool indies that launched in April/May and all the awesome games that have been sitting in our backlogs waiting for exactly this kind of downtime! So Rebecca (who is the only one who hadn't been on her holidays yet at the time of recording) dusted off some intriguing older one-shot indies in the form of 2:22AM and Babette, as well as falling down the Forbidden Solitaire rabbit hole. Rachel made the most of about one week with her PC, also playing Forbidden Solitaire as well as Wax Heads, Phonopolis, and a frankly unbelievable amount of other games given the short time she was home. Liam has only really played one indie game all month, but since it's Mina the Hollower he's certainly not short of opinions to share with the group. We end as ever on our latest round of hyperfixations, and Rachel currently thinks there's nothing better in this world than a sweet little TikTok remix about a cat named Serafino (and she's probably right!). Liam proves that South Korea is still completely dominating the Netflix original programming market with Culinary Class Wars, a cooking competition made extra special by the contrasting personalities of the two hosts. And Rebecca is finally ready to talk about The Saint of Steel series by T Kingfisher, the series singlehandedly responsible for turning her opinion of romantasy on its head. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
So due to how everyone's holiday schedules have lined up this month, there was no way we were recording enough regular episodes to cover the gap. But this is Indieventure, where we love an excuse to go on a sidequest, and we hate leaving you without an episode if there's any way around it so… Look, we wanted to talk about Pokémon, alright? Yes, I know, I know, tiny indie franchise Pokémon, maybe you've heard of it? I mean, you listen to a podcast hosted by three queer millennial geeks, it's on you if you hadn't figured out by now that we were all obligate Pokémon fans in our spare time. What's more, the recent release of Pokémon Pokopia has finally provided us with a contemporary outlet that all three of us can rally around: Liam gets his serotonin hits from completing an escalating series of tasks, Rachel gets the cosy vibes of post-humanity settlement building and creature collecting, and Rebecca gets to make a nice home for all the cute villagers she's befriending. It's our shared dream! But, plot twist, there's more to this episode than just complimenting Pokopia, partly because we'd all made vastly different headway into the game at the time of recording, and partly because Liam came up with a much more satisfyingly unhinged idea: Ranking all of the original 150 Pokémon, based on a completely inconsistent and constantly moving scale of how good a hang we think they'd be. So there you go: your bit-o-bullshit premise for this episode. I won't spoil anything for you other than to confirm that, yes, against all odds, three people did manage to each give individual opinions about 150 characters in a tight two hours – that's 450 total Poképinions, so talk about bang for your buck! — and that, of course, we end on a final ranking of the best and worst 10, as decided by an aggregate of the group's votes. We hope you enjoy, and we promise we'll be back to talking about indie games in the next one! Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Video game awards season 2025 is over, which means it's time once again for the annual Indieventure round-up of the year that was… surely, in 2026, this can only mean glad tidings and good vibes…? Okay so it's not our most cheerful yearly debrief, but just because our podcast is 75% scatalogical humour and barely-concealed thirsting over fictional characters doesn't mean we can't get serious when we need to, and if now's not the time, then when will be? So expect some lively discussion about indie game trailers during award shows, the problem the academy has with indie sequels and multiplayer titles, the shrinking of nomination pools in an industry that sees thousands of new releases a year, and more hot analytical topics. For supplementary reading, here's the article Chris Dring wrote over at The Game Business that Rachel recommends in this episode: Who really won The Game Awards? We do also have some fun chats, of course, celebrating the great indie games recognised over this awards season, including 2025 Indiventure favourites Blue Prince, Citizen Sleeper 2, Wanderstop, Despelote, Hades II, Ball x Pit, PEAK, Lost Records, and a bunch more! There's also our annual run-down of some cool games we forgot to cover last year, including Sektori, No I'm Not a Human, and Demonschool — the latter of which our more attentive listeners might recall we actually did cover already, but Rebecca's finally got around to playing it properly too and doesn't want to be left out after she spent literal years anticipating its release. We end, as always, on our recent hyperfixations. Liam has been binging Dan Levy's latest Netflix outing, comedy crime caper Big Mistakes; Rachel has been playing Dosa Divas, although her feelings towards the game are not uncomplicated; and Rebecca has been having an extremely uncomplicated time switching off her brain with the help of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Hey kids, remember me? I'm Clive, the ostrich Indieventure forces to write episode descriptions when Rebecca is otherwise indisposed. What's been going on with me, you ask? Not much. Liam recently transferred me from the large glass cube that served as my prison into his guest bedroom after the RSPCA kicked his door down and tasered him in the throat. Thanks to the threat of further legal action, I'm now free to roam his home, and every Tuesday he takes me to the Big Tesco so I can stick my grotesque neck through shelves to scare passing children (which is, of course, my favourite hobby). Life is good. This week on the podcast, the trio are celebrating the wild amount of money you all donated by answering some of your questions! Which indie games should have developer commentaries? Which games from the vault would they sacrifice under spectral duress? Which critically acclaimed indies can they not get on with, no matter how hard they try? They answer these questions, and more! What a treat! For you. Not for me. I literally cannot stand these three. Before you've even had time to roll your big ostrich eyes in your big ostrich head at whatever Liam constitutes as acceptable answers, it's time for hyperfixations. Rachel has been journeying through surreal roguelike Sol Cesto. Rebecca has been watching Carisa Hendrix (and, by extension, Lucy Darling) over on that there YouTube. Liam provides bite-sized verdicts for both Mouse: P.I. for Hire and Vampire Crawlers. Well, I best be off. I'm going to stand in the kitchen and flap my enormous wings for an hour, shrieking like a broken kettle that simply cannot boil water any more than it already has. Until next time! Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord , too, and be sure to check out our Steam Curator page if you simply still can’t get enough of us!
Before we begin, let's take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate our new podcast art! This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, and we've had the great good fortune to be able to collaborate with the extremely talented friend of the podcast Simon (@simonwl.bsky.social) for our shiny new banner and logo! Let's just sit here and take it in for a few more moments because it's awesome! Further to that – and I promise I'm going to start the proper show notes soon, but I don't know how far some of you get into these descriptions and I wouldn't want you to miss this – today marks the beginning of the first-ever Indieventure funding drive! If you're one of the lovely people who's been trying to give us money for years, now's your opportunity: we've started a Ko-Fi ( ko-fi.com/indieventure ), which will be open for two weeks after this episode goes live. Any funds you generously donate will be spent on improving Rachel and Rebecca's recording set-ups and covering the podcast's annual operating costs, with any leftovers spent on snacks and supplies for our yearly in-person recording session this summer. As far as we're concerned this is a one-off for now, and we understand completely that not everybody will be in a situation where they can donate – just know that anything you can give is greatly appreciated, and regardless of any financial transaction, we're just so grateful that you've stuck with us this far. Thank you, and we love you! And with that: onto the episode notes. Since we took a little hiatus last month, we thought it was the right time to catch up on what everyone's been playing lately. Rachel shares her thoughts upon finishing Cairn, as well as Creature Kitchen and (not really indie but we have decided to allow this series on the podcast for… reasons) Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse. Liam's been catching up on Rise of the Golden Idol, checking out this year's first indie darling Mewgenics, and revisiting The Coin Game as it leaves early access. And Rebecca's mainly been playing demos – specifically for upcoming romantic horror titles Sucker for Love: Crush Landing and My Eerie Lair – but has also been spending some time in anime-esque Stardew-alike Starsand Island. We end, as always, with our latest round of hyperfixations, and everyone's very on-brand this week. Liam wants to talk about Resident Evil Requiem; Rachel has discovered the delights of The Golden Girls; and Rebecca has finally read Battle Royale, the turn-of-the-millennium dystopian thriller novel by Koushun Takami that inspired so much of the media she's been enjoying ever since. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Thanks for bearing with us listeners! After various real life events necessitated we take a month-long hiatus, we're happy to be back with a new episode, and what better way to kick off season whatever-we're-on-now than with a visit to the prestigious Indieventure Vault? The theme this time around is extremely simple: all three of us got a free pick of whatever favourite indie game we felt was the Vault's biggest outstanding omission to date. For Rebecca, that was archaeological adventure/hieroglyphic decryption puzzle game Heaven's Vault; for Liam, it was that surprisingly upbeat soulslike about reapers, aptly named Death's Door; and for Rachel, it was of course Cocoon — I mean, she literally wrote the book on it. (Pssst, go pre-order Rachel's upcoming book about Cocoon if you haven't already!) We end, as always, with our latest hyperfixations, and since we've been away for a month, it's a… diverse bunch for sure. Rachel has spent her recent holiday wisely by getting very into WWE (scandal noted), and in particular has identified her favourite wrestler as everyman Mick Foley (no scandals to note, turns out he's just lovely??). Liam has been playing a lot of AAAs recently, but neither Overwatch nor Pokémon Pokopia nor even Resident Evil Requiem have been enough to overshadow his newfound love for 2017 Canadian mockumentary sitcom Nirvanna The Band The Show. And Rebecca has belatedly been captivated by the strangely bland allure of Love & Deepspace's player housing update. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
It’s time for another episode of Indieventure EXTRA, our bonus series where we interview key members of the games industry. In this episode, Rachel chats with fellow podcast pal Robin Bea about some very good Steam Next Fest demos! The duo discuss three of their favourites, then end with two honourable mentions. Rachel also forgot to ask Robin her hyperfixation, so Robin will have to come back as a guest in the future! If you'd like to follow Robin's work, you can find links to all her socials and projects here, PLUS her podcasts Girl Mode and dotzip ! You can find the Steam Next Fest demo episode of dotzip HERE . Demos mentioned in this episode: Helix: Descent N Ascent , Phonopolis , Unhomely , Mermaid Mask , Bobo Bay , Dosa Divas , Walk The Frog , and Raccoin Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Being firmly children of the '90s, all three hosts of Indieventure are at least passingly familiar with Blind Date, the British dating game show that ran from 1985 to 2003 which was iconically hosted by Cilla Black and Paul O'Grady. Look, I promise this is relevant. When we realised we couldn't do our originally planned topic for this episode and needed to come up with something else at short-notice, and also that the release date fell right around Valentine's Day, we threw around some ideas and eventually realised we'd just re-invented Blind Date with extra steps. Such is the millennial curse, I suppose (one of many). So yes, this is one for the bit-o'-bullshit fans, as we trot out indie gaming's most eligible batches (I'm told that this is the gender-neutral term for bachelors and bachelorettes – I'm personally a proponent of bachelandorette but fine, it's fine) for a dating game panel show type arrangement. We each attempt to embody our chosen singletons (and a few that we thought just ought to dump their canonical partners); ask some off-the-wall questions of one another; get briefly weirded out because as long-time friends playing a dating game together is a surprisingly odd experience; and generally attempt to do improv despite none of us being trained in the art. It goes surprisingly well! We had a lot of fun, hopefully you will too. I won't spoil the surprise by revealing the dates right here, but suffice to say if you've ever wondered which character from another game should be the next addition to Melinoë's polycule, or whether Chef Fujimoto from Octodad has healed enough to move on with his life and find love… well, the answers are all in this episode. Allegedly. I cannot stress enough that none of this is canon, and for legal reasons we don't claim that it is. We finish, as ever, on our hyperfixations, and it says a lot about the vibes of this episode that they're comparatively quite hinged this week. In preparation for the imminent release of Resi 9, Liam has been addressing the sole gap in his Resident Evil franchise knowledge by finally playing RE6 to see if it's as bad as he remembers from when he played half an hour at launch and then dropped off it. Rachel continues her commitment to playing fewer games slower with shout-outs to upcoming Paranormasight sequel The Mermaid's Curse, Cairn, and hidden gem of the farming/social sim genre Before The Green Moon. Rebecca, meanwhile, has been tempted back into the MCU by the word-of-mouth reputation of Wonder Man – an honestly brilliant buddy dramedy about the vicious world of Hollywood that just happens to feature some superheroes occasionally – and can't believe that Disney isn't doing more to promote their best Marvel offering in years that just happens to feature two men of colour as the leads, hmmm how strange, GO WATCH WONDER MAN while you ponder that one everybody. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
There's still officially six weeks of winter left – seriously, look it up, the groundhog saw his shadow this year and everything – but here at Indieventure we've been bundled up cosy playing so many lovely games that we figured we'd just talk about them right now! In keeping with our general commitment not to force ourselves to always play brand-new stuff, this episode's line-up is a respectable mix of games that were released in 2026 and games that are just… new-ish. Okay, in all honesty, none of our picks have gone back more than a year – the oldest one is only from February 2025 – but hey, baby steps. So, what have we been playing? Well, our digital climbing expert Rachel has unsurprisingly already been caught up enjoying Cairn, while Liam once again throws himself at the electric fence labelled "what you can get away with calling a Double-A" to talk about Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar. Rebecca has been excavating under last September's Silksong rubble and surfaced clutching the slightly neglected but still well-worth-playing Strange Antiquities. On a break from the mountain, Rachel turned her talents to playing ghost detective in Utter a Name. Meanwhile, Liam has been playing one of those Steam games, you know the ones… this one's called Wicked Seed, and it's not actually what it sounds like, but your first thought was probably not entirely wide of the mark either. More importantly, though, it's actually a pretty decent solo-dev effort at a Resi-like, so to try to focus on that. And finally, it turns out we've all played TR-49, the latest short outing from inkle that sees you sifting through an archive of digitised books to understand an alternate history of 20th century Britain. So we whipped up a quick group review, starting with a safe, spoiler-free chat before turning to all the spoilers at 1:38:16, because this game is really too short and involved to dance around the main themes. It's a game that's best enjoyed fresh though, so skip to 1:54:03 if you'd prefer to play it for yourself first. We end, as always, on our latest hyperfixations. Rachel sneaks in one more indie game rec (technically legal, but irregular) in Type Help , an in-browser itch.io text adventure from last year that's anticipating a shiny expanded re-release in 2026 as adventure game The Incident at Galley House. Liam has been reading The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow – yes, it's a sad book, but it's also kind of romantasy, so he knows the other two will be extra on-board with this particular recommendation. And Rebecca has been feeling a little bit too seen as a queer millennial gamer thanks to the YouTube comedy oeuvre of Blake Jennings . Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Happy New Year, Indieventurers, welcome to 2026! What's new, what's good? Well that's what we're here to tell you of course! Last year may have been a bit of a washout for AAAs, but the indie game scene is still going strong, despite the many obstacles presented by the modern games industry and… our contemporary world in general. Happily, this year looks set to continue the indie gem trend; even though the calendar is so far looking pretty empty of firm release dates as every game developer and their mum attempts to edge away from the all-consuming spectre of GTA6, there's already plenty on the horizon for us to get excited about all the same. Join us as we evangelise on our upcoming highlights (plus way more bonus honourable mentions than we'd planned) including, in no particular order (just kidding I'm alphabetising them like always): Beware of the Cartographer, Cairn, Denshattack!, Dosa Divas, Find Your Words, Hellmart, inKONBINI, Mandrake, Masters of Albion, The Mermaid Mask, Mixtape, Moonlight Peaks, Orbitals, Paralives, Peace Island, Penguin Colony, A Planet Full of Cats, Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike, ReAnimal, Roman Sands RE:Build, Servant of the Lake, Starsand Island, and – maybe the best-named game ever – Virtue and a Sledgehammer. Our first hyperfixations of the year are here too, and you may not be surprised to learn that over the Christmas break Rachel has been enjoying the latest series of The Traitors, while Liam has been equally diverted by the surprisingly excellent Scooby-Doo licensed DLC for House Flipper 2. Rebecca, meanwhile, thinks that 2026 may have peaked already as far as AAA gaming goes with the release of Heartopia – an Animal Crossing inspired "slow life sim" that somehow also encompasses all of the other trends she's associated with (a mobile live-service game possessed of the world's most useless and forgettable gacha). Also, if you ever read a novel called The Mouse Butcher, can you please let Rebecca know? It'd be a great opportunity to head on over to our Discord if you haven't already, just saying. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Ring out those solstice bells, the longest night of the year is now behind us! But we've still got weeks and weeks of winter left to go, so if you're looking for some indie games to help pass those cold and dark nights, you're in the right place: it's the third (or maybe fourth, depending on how you count) annual Indieventure GOTY episode! This is our smallest GOTY cohort ever, with just 12 games – not because this wasn't a great year for indies, but because your trio of hosts are in greater agreement than ever before as we slowly but surely merge into a single terrifying gestalt consciousness. As a fun challenge, why not pick one game from this list to play every day during the 12 days of Christmas? Sure, that'd be prohibitively expensive and impossibly time-consuming, but if you already have some to hand, consider this the sign you were waiting for to tackle some of that backlog – truly a festive tradition for many of us gamers at this point. As ever we won't spoil our Christmas selection box here in the show notes, but you can always check the Indiventure website for a full list of games mentioned in the episode. Furthermore, maybe keep an eye on that blog over the festive period if you're interested in some additional stocking stuffers in written form from your Indieventure hosts and some friends of the podcast… Our final round of hyperfixations for 2025 progresses at lightning speed because we're all very tired and want to start our Christmas break, please. Stranger Things 5 has Rebecca's seal of approval, while Super Mario Galaxy on Switch 2 is similarly acclaimed by Liam, and Rachel recommends The Chair Company season finale. Thank you all and good night: merry Christmas, happy holidays, a peaceful midwinter to you all, and we'll see you in 2026! Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
The festive season is well and truly upon us, which can only mean one thing! …Actually that's not true, it means loads of things to all sorts of different people. But to an Indieventure listener, it means our increasingly established tradition of putting together a two-part end-of-year round-up! Tune back in for our Game of the Year list discussion on December 22nd, but first, it's time for a more free-form look at the year that was. If you've listened to one of these before you'll know that this episode can end up being quite… cathartic for your trio of hosts, who've once again witnessed a year in the games industry that can generously be characterised as full of highs and lows. But aside from… all that, what were this year's big trends in indie games specifically? We delve into the unusual prominence given this year to longer indie games, indie game sequels, and indie games as digital third spaces (because we know "friendslop" is mostly meant as an affectionate joke but haven't we landed on a much better name there?). Also, expect some spicy takes on whether Steam's monopoly in the PC gaming market is causing them to increasingly become more of a problem than a champion for indie publishing. We end as ever with our hyperfixations, and Rachel is keen to bring your attention to Thinky Dailies , a new daily series of in-browser brainteasers from our good pals over at Thinky Games – guaranteed to make you feel smarter than Wordle as well as being much, much less cursed. Liam is eager to highlight the excellent and highly timely video essay Greed is Destroying the World by Drew Gooden. And finally it's a rare musical recommendation from Rebecca, who's been listening to the Mountain Goats and their amazing new concept album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan . Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
It’s time for another episode of Indieventure EXTRA, our bonus series where we interview key members of the games industry. In this episode, Rachel chats with award-winning indie developer Lucy Blundell! Lucy is someone the Indieventure gang have wanted on the podcast for SO LONG, so we are very honoured to have her insights on what it’s like creating semi-autobiographical stories, the challenges of putting your personal life into your work as an artist, and the ways players can connect to the games they play on an emotional level. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s work , you should play her games! You can play both One Night Stand and VIDEOVERSE on just about every gaming platform you can think of. Lucy’s Hyperfixation is The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy ! Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The title says it all really: the Indieventure podcast is celebrating a couple of milestones, and you're all invited! Hope you like parties where three people indulge in absolute bullshit banter at length because that's what we've got for you today as we mark both our 50th episode and our podcast's only ever-so-slightly belated second birthday. You really do deserve to hear some of this without being spoiled by any pesky context beforehand, so suffice to say that Rebecca has put together a quiz with a heavy visual component ( check out our blog for the companion piece to that! ) and Liam has written A Thing. Don't ask. Just listen. Trust me, it's better that way. After completely wearing ourselves out with that nonsense, we mellow out a bit with a slightly more sensible second half in which we discuss a few games we've been playing recently – including The Séance of Blake Manor, Hades II, PEAK, and Demonschool – before making a very optimistic wishlist of all the amazing 2025 indies we'd love to play before recording our GOTY episode but, like, we're starting to get a bit nervous about the timeframe on that, not gonna lie. Finally onto hyperfixations, this week with some completely improvised bonus bullshit about which Pokémon starter type each of us would be! Liam (grass type) has been finishing his 2025 Goodreads challenge by reading some of the most acclaimed short novels he could find, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, Foster by Claire Keegan, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Rachel (fire type) is once again bingeing The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which has become surprisingly meta in its new season. And Rebecca (water type) somehow hadn't heard of The Amazing Digital Circus until very recently, but now she's been completely drawn in by the hype. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
Now that the nights are well and truly closing in (for us here in the UK at least) and Halloween is behind us, there's just enough time for the Indieventure trio to take one last look at the latest batch of new(ish) indie games we've been enjoying before turning our attention to the serious business of end-of-year celebrations. We say new-ish because, while Rachel and Liam are as on it and up-to-the-minute as ever, Rebecca has wandered off on a bit of a side-quest. Basically, it's still Halloween in her heart, and if that means shining a spotlight on some spooky (and/or romantically spooky-adjacent) games from six months or two years or heck, even nearly a decade ago, then it's more than worth it to create what we hope you'll all agree is a suitably autumnal vibe. To that end, our round robin discussion in this episode encompasses games including Absolum, Ball x Pit, Easy Delivery Co., Herdling, Layers of Fear (both the 2016 and 2023 versions), Monster Prom 4, Monstrous Love, and of course, PowerWash Simulator 2. Regular listeners might already have noticed that we've had a longer break between episodes than usual, and so naturally we've found plenty to be hyperfixated on in that time. Rachel has discovered the SCP Foundation collaborative fiction project, and while it's given her a bit of a crisis over her love for a certain suspiciously similar Remedy game, she nevertheless thinks you all should go and read about an eldritch basketball game in SCP-1733 if you haven't encountered it yet. Meanwhile, Liam's been enjoying some movies courtesy of Eatflix in Newcastle, and also thanks to everyone's favourite breathtaking meme machine Keanu Reeves' latest starring role in Good Fortune. And Rebecca has finally got her hands on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, her feelings on which are far too complex to condense down into this brief text summary, but on which she is at least qualified to speak with some authority as an OG mega-fan of the 21-year-old original cult classic. Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic . Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!
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