April 2025 - Metal Gardens, Diabolic Dungeons and Mascots
Break out the amphetamines, line up the coke, brew a pot of coffee and cut it with Red Bull–it's time to play catch up.
Break out the amphetamines, line up the coke, brew a pot of coffee and cut it with Red Bull–it's time to play catch up. Join me as I embroil myself into a sick Tartarus of my own design, forcing myself to cover some of the truly excellent games I missed out on in my March roundup. On top of that, we've got the brand-spanking new April lineup to contend with.
Thus, I'm messing around with a new format for these articles: much shorter sections for each game, with a focus on separate reviews for games I have a lot to say about. But that's enough fucking around. Let's start with a banger.
Elroy and the Aliens
Release Date: 03.04.2025
I'm not the biggest fan of point-and-click adventure games, but Elroy and the Aliens was an exceptional experience. It is a beautifully hand-drawn adventure game set against a backdrop of an alternate 1993 with robots, ghosts, and aliens galore.
The writing is as funny as it is genuinely heartfelt–the characters and situations they find themselves in are over-the-top in the best kind of way. The puzzles are too easy, but I'd rather that than the obtuse puzzles that plagued 90s adventure games. Elroy and the Aliens is a true gem and well worth a looksie — find the full review here.
Metal Garden
Release Date: 21.03.2025
Despite the huge leaps the indie gaming scene continues to make every year, it still feels like shooter fans are left wanting. AAA studios are less and less inclined towards making single-player FPS games, especially more traditional and linear ones. Besides, DOOM: The Dark Ages, I can't think of another for 2025. Or 2024 for that matter (unless you count Black Ops, and I don't).
Luckily, the one-woman army behind Metal Garden gets it. Heavy on the vibes with an immaculate atmosphere reminiscent of S.T.A.L.K.E.R and a linear campaign that feels like a cross-section from Half-Life 2 or Halo. It is a very short game, and there's a limited selection of weapons and enemies to use said weapons on. But, in a game where a shotgun blast sends baddies hurtling out windows, I cannot complain. Check out the full review here.
Old Skies
Release Date: 23.04.2025
Adventure game fans are eating well this year. Old Skies comes from the storied team behind Unavowed and the Blackwell series. When it comes to adventure games, they know their stuff and Old Skies is no exception.
Old Skies has an inventive spin on the well-trodden time travel genre, with a novel interpretation of the butterfly effect. The world around our main character, Fia, is constantly shifting and changing. Time agents are constantly changing the past, altering the "present." You can even keep track of alternative versions of yourself across the span of timelines crossed.
Mother Hub
Release Date: 24.04.2025
This was an unexpected little gem for April. I've trained my Steam discovery queue to show me only the indie-est games and was very lucky to stumble across Mother Hub. Essentially, an FPS horror game very similar to Half-Life in design and Bioshock/System Shock in vibes.
For a solo developer, the game looks and sounds great — even if the physics frequently broke and spaghettified dead enemies. The gunplay is satisfying and there are some genuine scares in here too. For such a short game, there is a shocking variety of enemies; most are not smart enough to be a threat. Even with its flaws, it is an excellent little indie shooter and I want more of it!
PEPPERED: an existential platformer
Release Date: 08.04.2025
Existentialism is in. The language of my generation (gen-z, apparently) is questioning existence and deflecting through deadpan humour. Like when I told my partner that the Knuckles TV series was about to become my 13th reason why.
PEPPERED isn't the first game to grapple with an existential, tragical comedy, but it is the latest. While it is a fairly average platformer with some neat ideas, the juice is in the writing. It's a funny game and its laser focus on satire is well placed.
Tower of Kalemonvo
Release Date: 29.03.2025
A modern hack-and-slash role-playing game that harkens back to the first Diablo–nailing the sombre dark-fantasy vibes. Tower of Kalemonvo has been described as a Diablo 1.5 and that's an accurate assessment. The big difference is that Kalemonvo is light on story, while Diablo is drenched in it. No, this game is far more concerned with fine-tuning its distilled dungeon-crawling experience.
There are still some bugs and kinks to work out–particularly the game feels maybe too punishing at the beginning with a frustratingly low accuracy. This can all be fixed and adjusted and based on recent patch notes the developer is addressing all of these issues proactively.
Promise Mascot Agency
Release Date: 11.04.2025
I love the Yakuza games, but the shift over to turn-based RPG combat put me off the franchise for the time being. Where do I need to look for my fix of crazy Yakuza-like antics in the meantime? Well lucky for me, Kaizen Game Works just made something even crazier than any Yakuza game I've played and that's saying something.
Play as a former Yakuza-turned-mascot-agency-CEO in Promise Mascot Agency. Drive around town and recruit unsettlingly sentient mascots. Complete side quests and jobs, rebuild your agency and save the town itself from economic ruin. This is a lovely, laid-back game about driving an indestructible truck around a gorgeous open world. Great for fans of exploration games or management games or people who are just into weird and fucked up shit.
Space Sprouts
Release Date: 01.04.2025
Just when I thought time loops were out of style, Space Sprouts hit the digital shelves on Steam. Explore a huge ship packed with toys and gizmos to mess around with. It's an odd comparison but it feels like a 2D Goat Simulator. A time limit is initially imposed to create a structure for how the ship should be explored, which is hit-and-miss.
Each time you relive the journey, you have more memories to recall, secrets to uncover and goals you can set for yourself. Your time on the ship extends with each memory unlocked so finding everything becomes easier as time goes on. The art style is cute and everything pops; the loose laws of physics applied here create some really hectic scenes too.
REPOSE
Release Date: 15.04.2025
REPOSE doesn't make any fucking sense and that's the point. Rarely do games capture the complex, unknowable horrors of the cosmos without just throwing a big tentacle monster at the player. The monochromatic purgatory of REPOSE opts for subtler disconcertion—liminal spaces, looming and unknowable entities and a healthy dose of tentacles after all.
REPOSE is ostensibly a puzzle game with the veneer of a survival-horror dungeon crawler. You chart courses through levels with a limited supply of oxygen. It might not seem the most apt comparison, but if you've played Hitman Go... if you know, you know.
HASTE: Broken Worlds
Release Date: 02.04.2025
Why do I like HASTE? Well, it's simple really; it lets you run really, really fast and do sick jumps. Movement in this game feels incredible–every micro-adjustment feels satisfying to make. Soaring through the skies and making perfect landings is a flawless gameplay loop.
The procedural level generation can be frustrating, interrupting your flow with unavoidable, randomly placed obstacles. Besides a few slight hiccups, HASTE is an incredible ode to speed with amazing aesthetics and non-stop fun.
EarWorm
Release Date: 18.04.2025
I love short little horror games that hone in on a specific idea or feeling. EarWorm is basically the movie Inception but a lot more visceral. The visual aesthetic is purposefully disorienting — it can make it too difficult to see what's going on. If this game were any longer it might become grating but for the 45-60 minutes runtime, it serves its stylistic purpose.
In this world, you play as a thief. Bank accounts are secured by only a few flimsy secret questions and you go into your victims' memories to find the answers. The puzzles are interesting but not particularly fleshed out, as you'd expect from such a short game. It's still a really engaging experience and something with a bit more depth in the same universe could really shine.
What the fuck. This is late as fuck. It's May 23rd. Fuck. In all honesty, I lost motivation to finish this article for some reason. It's hard to divorce work from hobbies, and when this starts to feel like work, I don't want to do it.
I play games to forget about work and all that other shit I have to do like making sure I have a diverse stock portfolio and cleaning the fucked up part of the window that's always full of dust and dead flies and shit.
I spend a lot of time writing these articles and then editing them to make sure I get rid of all the parts where I say cunt or use an en dash (–) instead of an em dash (—) and that's all part of the fun. I love games, and I love writing.