The Indie Informer

It’s that time of year again! The Game awards are right around the corner, but before we watch Geoff Keighley hand out trophies to the biggest games of this year, Day of the Devs gave us a look at some of the most promising indies of the coming year. Here’s every game from today’s showcase, in order of appearance.

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Faraway

This chill constellation construction game was a great place to kick off this year’s showcase. You play as a comet, swinging from one star to another to create the constellation that will score you the most points. It’s described by its creator Steph Thirion as a game designed to scratch the same itch as Tetris – random and replayable with a minimal aesthetic and deep gameplay. Faraway comes to PC next year.

Ultimate Sheep Raccoon

A spiritual successor to Ultimate Chicken Horse, this game tweaks the competitive platforming from the original with a tire-based twist. In Ultimate Sheep Raccoon, your animals are all riding bikes, Trials style, and in addition to avoiding obstacles and racing to the finish line, you’ve also got to land all your jumps right-side-up, or you’ll fall off your vehicle and lose the game. There’s no release window yet, but I can’t wait for this game to launch and tear my family apart.

Sleight of Hand

If Metal Gear Solid was a noir deckbuilder about urban witches, it would look a lot like Sleight of Hand. As Lady Luck sneaks around the rain-slicked locale of Steeple City, you use cards to cast spells and cause distractions to infiltrate top-secret locations in this third-person stealth game. It will eventually be released on Game Pass and Steam.

Demon Tides

Formerly known as Project Tides, Demon Tides is the next game from the developer of Demon Turf. Its playstyle follows in the footsteps of other speed-based 3D platformers, but this game brings it’s own cel-shaded aesthetic and hyper-customizable mobility options, with five different talisman slots you can use to adjust your moveset and play at a pace that’s right for you. Complete with leaderboards and an open-world design, Demon Tides sets sail next year.

Kingmakers

This game, which had one of the funniest reveal trailers of all time, has a silly premise that its developers are taking very seriously. In Kingmakers, you head back in time to medieval England with an arsenal of modern weapons to overthrow the current monarch, but historical accuracy is key. The battlefields have fully destructible buildings and thousands of soldiers on-screen at a time. Meanwhile, you’ll also be able to build a town and an army of your own. The game is multiplayer-friendly as well, so if you’ve got 1-3 friends with you, you can band your armies together to conquer the lands. You’ll be able to head to the past in the near future; Kingmakers comes out next year.

Recur

Mail carriers have a straightforward job, but it’s a task Recur has decided to complicate immensely by setting its game in the midst of the explosive collapse of a city. In this game, you play as a mailman whose day is clearly disrupted by a massive explosion. Luckily, the player has the ability to rewind time, so crumbling structures become elevators and exploding trains become platforming challenges. I just hope my holiday packages will still get here on time.

Blue Prince

This first-person puzzle game, set in a mansion with 45 rooms, gives the player one goal: find room 46. As you try to solve the mystery of this “atmospheric architectural adventure,” you’ll build the mansion in real time to discover its secrets. Get a pencil and a notebook ready for when the Blue Prince launches next spring.

Incolatus: Don’t Stop Girly Pop

When presenter Jon Gibson introduced this game as a “Lisa Frank and Barbie fever dream,” it was 100% accurate. Incolatus is a first person shooter designed to overwhelm your senses with its vivid pink visuals, its synth-heavy pop soundtrack, and its speed-based combat, which rewards the player for momentum and quick traversal. You can also customize your arms with different colors and textures, including denim. That’s right – this game has jarms.

Lok Digital

Movie and TV adaptations of video games are commonplace, but it’s not often you see a video game adaptation of a book. Lok Digital is a collaboration between game developer Ferran Ruiz Sala and puzzle designer Blaz Urban Gracar, the latter of which made a physical book of word puzzles so engaging that Sala reached out to turn it into a game. The catch? The puzzles are based on a made-up language that you learn as you play. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can do so right now – Lok Digital launches today.

Neon Abyss 2

Neon Abyss is back and as flashy as ever. This sequel to the 2020 roguelite adds a new weapons system that allows the player to customize their playstyle, and when you combine that with the ability to mix and match powerful items, the chaotic future of Neon Abyss is looking bright. Or maybe that’s just the neon signs. We’ll find out when it hits Steam next year.

Crescent County

This racing game from Electric Saint brings players into a witchy, solar punk open world. It’s based around brooms that go vroom (or Motorbrooms, as the game calls them) that you can customize and race around the county, deliver packages, herd sheep, and more. There’s also a healthy helping of coven lovin’, which is to say that you can romance your fellow witches. The “driving test” is live today, so you can check it out yourself and let the developers know how you feel about the base mechanics.

PBJ – The Musical

Games like these are why we love to write about indies. PBJ – The Musical is a playable romance about the invention of the PBJ sandwich, told through song and paper-based stop-motion animation, which the player can push and pull to traverse the main characters throughout the environment. The music was written by Britain’s Got Talent Golden Buzzer winner Lorraine Bowen and covers a range of genres, all of them jam-packed (see what I did there?) with whimsy.

Curiosmos

From stardust to solar system, Curiosmos is a game about cosmic construction. Grow planets from space debris and customize them by shaping their surfaces, introducing weather, and sustaining life. With the help from your partner satellite Curio, you’ll also try to find a way to avoid impending doom from a nearby black hole. Also, all the celestial bodies, asteroids, and satellites have cute little smiley faces. I should have led with that one.

Bionic Bay

This mostly monochromatic 2D platformer evokes the art style of Playdead’s Limbo, but with parkour moves, object-swapping powers, and the ability to slow time. An example in the trailer shows a player punching an object into the air, slowing the clock, and swapping places with it to cross gaps. Its dark, abstract, industrial setting raises lots of questions that will luckily be answered soon – this world premiere game launches on March 13, 2025.

Inkonbini

In this cozy management game, you play as Makoto, a young woman who helps her aunt run the local convenience store by taking the night shift. You can stock the shelves to your liking, learn more about your regular customers, and kick back and relax to the game’s chill soundtrack, based on 90s-era Japanese pop music

Feltopia

Wooly Games’ “cute-em-up” Feltopia is a game based entirely on its hand-felted stop-motion aesthetic. Every sprite in the game is needle-felted by hand, which is a wild concept that I’m sure is only wilder in practice. As you embark on a quest to save your lost flock of sheep, you blast little magic bolts into corrupted enemies to return them to their natural, colorful forms. Feltopia has a launch window of 2026.

Blippo+

From the publisher of Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here comes the most cryptic trailer of the showcase. As far as I can tell, it’s a game based on a fictional television service called Blippo+ which uses FMV footage passed through a filter that makes it look like it belongs on a Game Boy or a Playdate. Check it out for yourself at blippo.plus.

Hyper Light Breaker

We’ve been learning more details about Hyper Light Breakers for years now, including our hands-on preview from earlier this summer, but this is the first we’ve heard of a release date. Hyper Light Breaker hits Early Access in just over a month, on January 14.

Tankhead

The Day of the Devs showcase this year really ended with a bang, in more ways than one. The first bang is the game itself; Tankhead is a roguelike in which the player pilots a tank around a robot world, fighting off other tanks and tank-adjacent monstrosities. The developers clearly put a lot of work into the vehicle itself, with classic tank controls and reactive enemies that need to be hit at certain parts to do more damage. The second bang is its release date: Tankhead is available on the Epic Games Store right now.