Winter Burrow Nintendo Switch 2 Review 8/10 *Cute Creature Crafting Comforts* 🐁🌳@pinecreekgames #IndieGame #GameDev

I had my eye on Winter Burrow for a while, and whilst I’m not naturally drawn to crafting games, the art style and draw of being a little mouse in a snowy forest rebuilding his family home whilst fending off insects and rediscovering his childhood was almost too cute to ignore. The final straw was when I showed my partner and our 4-year old son the trailer to Winter Burrow, and when I looked at them as the snippet ended, they had turned into anime characters with wide, trembling eyes, emitting a collective “aaaaawwww”.

The Precinct Vinyl Soundtrack Review By Britt 💿 #Vinyl #VideoGameVinyl #VGM

I was lucky enough to be in a position to cover The Precinct last year, as I was a huge fan of American Fugitive, the first game from developers Fallen Tree Games. I loved the vibe that it laid out, and that classic top-down, open-world vehicular gameplay brought back to a life a genre that I really didn’t feel had played itself out through its initial run. 

The Precinct is a celebration of ‘80s cop films, placing you in the shoes of a rookie in the police force as opposed to the titular fugitive protagonist of the first game, and as you’d expect from such a setting, the music is a huge part of the experience, setting the scene for the player as it does as you make your way around the rain-slicked streets of Averno City. 

This eleven-track soundtrack release comes from Lost In Cult, a company that know their onions, we here at GF have been fans of them since their inception, with their various books and board games all being of incredible quality thus far, and I believe this is the first record from them that we’ve had the pleasure to cover.

That said – let’s dive into the soundtrack that echoes off the graffiti-covered walls of Averno City!

Video Game LoFi: Final Fantasy Vinyl Review ⚔️💿 🎶 @MateriaStore #VideoGameVinyl #Vinyl

Curaga Records are back once more! With this, a double LP collection of twenty tracks from the Final Fantasy series of games re-imagined as lo-fi chill-hop songs, all presented in chronological order, taking us on an aural journey spanning Prelude from Final Fantasy II through to Lunar Serenade from the recent Final Fantasy XVI, that’s 1988 to 2023, which is a pretty incredible stretch of time!

As always with Curaga records, the packaging prioritises sleek style over garishness, with simple and bold being the keywords, all the while having imagery that evokes the game series at hand, in this case, the blacks, pinks, purples, and blues matching the mellow dreaminess and focus on hopeful melody that permeates the soundscapes of the Final Fantasy games.

Monster Train 2 DLC - Destiny of the Railforged Xbox Series X Review 8/10 "Keeping it Rail" 🚂 @TheMonsterTrain #IndieGame #GameDev

The first paid DLC for Monster Train 2 has arrived at the station. The lauded sequel itself only came out in May of last year, and in late 2025 we were blessed with a host of new additions through the ‘Echoes From the Void’ update. Now, only a few months later, we have another, more substantial offering to expand the network in a way that shows HS2 how it’s done (Google it, non-UK people).

Monster Train, for the uninitiated, is a roguelike deck-building game. I won’t go into the mechanics too much as I cover a lot of it HERE. And I didn’t review the Void update, but essentially it offered a bit more of everything. We were furnished with new foes, new weapons and new variants of the Pyre (source of the player’s life and what your monsters protect) to up the ante and keep the train rolling.

Mindseye PS5 Review 4/10 [POST 2026 UPDATE 7] "Not quite as catastrophic as you might have heard" 👁️

Here are the first ten minutes of Mindseye.

After a slick cinematic establishing our hero, Jacob Diaz, you begin a new job at a sprawling military-tech corporation. Your superior takes you on a guided tour of the pristine facility in a small buggy, explaining the company’s grand ambitions.

You can absolutely floor this buggy and plough into every NPC in sight.

It’s like the parking garage in Dead Rising, bodies ragdolling across the place, your buggy skidding over their motionless corpses. No one meaningfully reacts to this. They don’t move out of the way, and aside from a few yelps they don't say anything.

At one point I flipped the vehicle completely. My boss, still seated beside me, calmly continued her monologue while Jacob nodded along, upside down, as if this were standard onboarding procedure.

This was the most fun I had playing Mindseye.

The Cabin Factory PS5 Review 9.5/10 "A beautifully designed bite-sized horror that’s a must play for fans of the genre" 🛖 @ICS_indie #IndieGame #GameDev

As long time readers will know, I’m a (blood) sucker for short horror games. I love settling down and knowing I’ll be watching the credits roll in an hour or two and will get a short blast of unsettling thrills. Combine that with the fact that The Cabin Factory costs less than half a pint of lager, and we are very much onto a winner.

I’m purposely not going into the game that much here as discovering it is where a lot of the fun lies, all you need to know is that this is a first-person 3D horror game in which you play an older lady that begins The Cabin Factory in a lift en route to the huge aeroplane hangar-like room in which she will be performing her job…checking if cabins that roll up on a conveyor belt are haunted or not. There are two buttons marked ‘danger’ and ‘clear’, and if you get eight cabins correct on the trot – you finish the game, it really is that simple.

Roadwarden Nintendo Switch 2 Review 5.5/10 "A beautiful tale crushed by performance issues" 🗺️ @MoralAnxiety #IndieGame #GameDev

I actually received Roadwarden for review last year, but had an issue when playing on my Switch, whereby the game would judder along as if it was constantly buffering – I made contact with the relevant party to inquire if this was a known issue that would be patched shortly etc. – as it made the game unplayable - and received no response, so it fell off my radar. 

It was only upon installing games on our new Switch 2 that I spotted Roadwarden and wondered if it would run more smoothly on this new console, it is after all, a text-based adventure – hardly a genre that needs a technical powerhouse! And yet…problems remain, which is a real shame as the game has so much potential.

Disco Simulator PS5 Review 7.5/10 "Can people please stop spewing on the dance floor?" 🕺🪩💃 @GamesIncubator #IndieGame #GameDev

As someone who has a partner that grew up on The Sims games, I quite fancied the idea of settling down of an evening and spending a few sessions with Disco Simulator, a game in which you run your own nightclub (I do really feel that this should have been called Nightclub Simulator, by the way, but it looks like that name was already taken). 

The game begins with a brisk tutorial that lays out the setting, you begin each scenario with certain goals in mind – reaching a certain amount of cash, hitting certain metrics etc. – and from there, you pretty much get free reign of how to run your club, from naming it through to shaking cocktails, unclogging toilets, checking tickets for entry, and ensuring that the power stays on – or will you delegate all this nonsense to your ever-growing team of staff?

Crisol: Theatre of Idols PS5 Review 8.5/10 “A Bloody Good Start for Vermila Studio” 🪆🩸 @CrisolGame @VermilaStudios #IndieGame #GameDev

When viewing the trailer for Crisol: Theatre of Idols it was immediately obvious where a lot of inspiration had come from it. looked like a mix of Bioshock and Resident Evil, which are two of my favourite game series, so I was very excited to see whether it could live up to its lofty inspirations, or would it be a pale imitation? 

Especially as this is the first game by the studio. I think they hit it out of the park, a slam dunk, a hole in one.. and that's all the sports metaphors I know. For a first outing I think it’s fantastic. Crisol knows what it wants to achieve, it is a love letter to the horror games that inspired it, and whilst it may not reinvent the horror game wheel, it has wonderful art design and a cool new mechanic that makes the game a delight to play.

Britt’s iOS Adventures #1 Dawncaster & Caves of Lore on iOS 📱⚔️ @WanderlostGames #IndieGame #GameDev

Considering how many games I play across the various console platforms (and PC, back in the day), one aspect of gaming that I have been disappointed with over the last ten years or so has been mobile gaming. As much as I like the classics being ported to mobile, I’ve always wanted to discover new single-player games, and to this end – it’s always been difficult to come across handcrafted, enjoyable experiences, having been stung in the past with games that look great, but are hampered by either micro-transactions, endless grinding, multiplayer-focused shash, or have a spark – but are unfinished, abandoned projects.

A few weeks ago, I came across a list of a few games that stood out to me and I thought I’d – again – try to get hips deep into the world of mobile gaming, initially through the medium of two games. Dawncaster, a deck-building ‘cardventure’ developed by the Netherlands-based studio Wanderlost Interactive, and Caves of Lore, an RPG in a more classic vein from solo developer Mike Robins. I have to say, these titles have both been incredible discoveries, and have reinvigorated gaming on a mobile device for me, with Dawncaster taking the place of a game that is fun to both dip in and out of as well as have lengthier session on (my four year old is also a fan, loving the character and card designs), whilst Caves of Lore really connected with me with its pixel visuals, dynamic lighting and classic, open-world sensibilities that fill the game with quests and quirks, very clearly the vision of a single individual, which makes the scope of the game all the more impressive, and the vibe very personal.

Death & Lead SEGA Mega Drive Review 7/10 "The West rises again on Sega’s best machine from the East" 🤠🏇 @Kai_MSX #IndieGame #GameDev #RetroGaming

We here at GF have been big fans of Kai Magazine Software, a Spanish development company that has brought us The Secret of the Four Winds, Life On Mars, and Metal Dragon – amongst others over the years. 

Whilst their games have had some pros and cons, the one thing that stands out about this development house for me, and keeps me extremely interested in their upcoming releases, is that they have an uncanny ability to hone in on game genres that felt under-realised on Sega’s best* home console system, as well as having the ability to make the audio shine. 

There are a handful of developer/publishers that release titles for the Mega Drive – and I genuinely adore them all – but Kai Magazine Software seems to have a little niche in that the games they create aren’t the typical sort that you’d find on the MD, and in doing so, have that frisson that brings the system alive.

G’AIM’E Plug & Play Time Crisis Light Gun System Review By Britt "A new light gun bundle for Modern TVs!" 🔫 @MyGAIME

It’s always a pleasure when tech that has fallen by the wayside gets a new lease of life, and light gun games certainly fall into that category.

A couple of years ago, I covered the fantastic Sinden light Gun, but it did require some setup and also relied on the owner’s library of games, as opposed to coming pre-packaged with anything.

The G’AIM’E light gun ‘aims’ to remedy this, and after a successful Kickstarter raised over 800k, they now have various packages available, timed in with celebrating thirty years of that classic arcade light gun shooter, Time Crisis.

Trust GXT 498P Forta Gaming Headset For PS5 ¬ Review By Britt 🎧 @TrustGaming #GXTrust

Trust have released a line of headsets licensed for PS5 in a range of colours (Nova Pink, Midnight Black, white, and Starlight Blue) that are available now!

We were sent the Nova Pink edition, which is a bright and vibrant colour that is definitely more a hot pink than baby pink. Well packaged and easy to set up, the Forta headset has a detachable mic arm and a universal 3.5mm cable that is soft, braided (thank the lord, much more practical than some stiff, plasticky cables I’ve encountered in the past), and also detachable - much preferred to hard-wired cables that can get yanked and require full unit replacements in such situations. I always find it comforting to know that cables can be replaced with my accessories, should the worst happen.

Romeo is a Dead Man PS5 Review 7/10 "As far as I’m concerned, playing Romeo is a Dead Man makes you cool" ⚔️🩸 @romeoisadeadman @Grasshopper_EN @suda_51 #IndieGame #GameDev

It’s really very straightforward.

You play as Romeo, a young sheriff’s deputy who discovers a body lying in the middle of a deserted road. He investigates and is attacked by a monster that horrifically disfigures him. On the verge of death, his grandfather appears in a time machine and saves his life with the Dead Gear, trapping him between life and death and shattering the space-time continuum.

Now Romeo is a cyborg agent of the FBI's Space-Time Police, living in a spaceship, assisted by his katsu curry loving mother, zombie-farming little sister, a human with a cat head (or possibly a cat with a human body), his time-travelling grandfather (now a talking patch on the back of his sweet jacket), and a mission to journey across interdimensional parallel universe taking out evil version of his one true love, Juliet.

Y’know, one of those stories.

Gear Club Unlimited 3 Nintendo Switch 2 Review 6.5/10 "a fun, if slightly bland racing game"🛻🔥🔥 @Nacon @EdenGames #IndieGame #GameDev

I’m not familiar with the Gear Club Unlimited series, but after playing a few duff Switch racers recently (I look at YOU Fast & Furious) I had a hankering for a solid arcade racer, and so Eden Games’ Gear Club Unlimited 3 very much appealed, and whilst the fundamentals and moment-to-moment driving are fun with a few positive quirks, the package as a whole feels like a missed opportunity, although huge kudos up front for not trying make this a ‘hip’ game with needless bad language and cringe-inducing dialogue, ensuring that this can be enjoyed by racing fans of all ages.

Beginning with your character winning a race against his mentor and bagging a spot in the France-based racing series that make up the rest of the game, you choose your initial car from a small selection (although you can unlock 40 cars in the game) and begin your winning streak. I went with an Abarth as my wife drives a Fiat 500, so I was flying the family flag – which turned out to be a good choice for the highway sections of the game which I’ll go into later.

Let’s Journey Nintendo Switch 2 Review 5/10 "Not as idle as you’d think" 🎒 @PotionPlayer #IndieGame #GameDev

A couple of weeks ago I fancied something a little straightforward and was offered the opportunity to cover Let’s Journey. Originally released on PC in 2020, it has now found its way to the console market. 

Whilst it has its moments, due to it not being a true idle experience – requiring player interaction to proceed – it ties you to the game, and unfortunately, whilst there is a lot of content here, the lack of variety creeps in pretty quickly, and it starts to feel more of a time sink than a fun time to be had.

Ancient Farm PC Review By Ayden 7.5/10 "This is a FUN Time Sink" 🐖🌱🥬 #IndieGame #GameDev

A lot of us still carry points of fascination we picked up as young children. There's no shortage of dinosaur obsessed young boys, or kids that dream of growing up and making a life among the stars. For me, ancient civilisations were that obsession. The idea of forgotten words and ways of living is something that encourages a particular curiosity. Unfortunately most of the games, movies and TV shows that are based in such worlds rarely focus on immersing the audience within the day-to-day life of these amazing environments.

Enter Ancient Farm. Long before sprinklers and robotic harvesters, early man farmed with rudimentary tools and very few shortcuts. In that respect, Ancient Farm is true to life. This is not a sim in which, after a couple hours of grind, you are able to fully automate your farm and watch your gold grow. But I think this is the strongest selling point on offer here. The continuous engagement required to grow your homestead keeps you actively invested, and truly does lead to a definitive sense of reward as you continue to progress.

Carmageddon Rogue Shift PS5 Review 7.5/10 *Almost thirty years on, the Eagle revs again!* 🛻☠️ @playcarmageddon #IndieGame #GameDev

I’m very familiar with the Carmageddon franchise, the original was something incredibly unique in both its gameplay and style back upon its initial release in 1997, and the follow ups (Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now (1998), Carmageddon TDR (2000), and Carmageddon: Reincarnation (2015) tried to modernise the experience visually whilst retaining the same mechanics as the original, which didn’t set the gaming world alight, although those early games still had their fans. 

This newest entry - developed by 34Big Things, the minds behind the Redout series – takes things in a different direction, and whilst I can imagine it will annoy purists, whilst there are still issues, this feels like the right approach for the series at the moment, making it a more focused, linear experience as opposed to the sprawling, slightly clunky vibes of the more recent entries.

Set in 2050, the world is... well, it’s completely buggered, quite frankly. Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland – natch – your character enters the ‘Carmageddon’ in a bid to win their freedom. The narrative is handled by graphic novel-esque cutscenes and adds to the larger-than-life feel of the whole setup and are brisk in their approach to allow players to get a quick understanding of the basic premise before getting into the meat of the game proper, the violent racing.

Taxi Chaos 2 Xbox Series X Review 7.5/10 *A sequel that steps up to the plate* 🚖🚕 @currentgamers #IndieGame #GameDev

I covered the original Taxi Chaos back in 2021, and whilst the fundamental mechanics and visuals were top-notch; the grating music, irritating voice acting, and repetition of the gameplay loop in such a flat, bland world was pretty wearing, and I awarded it 5/10 at the time. Whilst this sequel doesn’t solve all of those issues, in terms of enjoyment and polish, it’s a far better game, and a worthy sequel to the niche genre of arcade-led taxi driving action.

Beginning with much more of a story than the original – not that a story is particularly what you expect from this genre – you are Vinnie, an old school taxi driver plying his trade in a bit of a junkheap through a futuristic city wherein AI-driven ‘Taxibots’ are taking over from the classic cabbies. 

Determined to prove that humans can do a better job, Vinnie takes it upon himself to pick up the customers scattered throughout the city and surrounding areas, leaping over obstacles, swerving around hazards, taking myriad shortcuts, destroying – or avoiding! – said Taxibots and ensuring his passengers get safely to their destination.

Static Dread: The Lighthouse PS5 Review 9/10 “Shining a light on Lovecraftian Horror” 🗼🐙 @StaticDreadGame #IndieGame #GameDev

I don’t think a game has ever come along at the right time for me more than this one. Last year I got hips deep into Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which - like Static Dread - draws from the works of one Mr H. P. Lovecraft. I got really into both his works and the lore of the world he created which meant whilst playing this title I not only got the references, but that I had a better understanding of what Static Dread: The Lighthouse was going for, that fear and dread play a larger role than outright scares. Some scares do crop up in the game, but it is the complete, unsettling dread creeping over you that is the real horror.