The Indie Informer

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Is your indie slate wiped clean for the new year and just begging for some new titles to fill it up again? Get ready for a trio of games that will take you through clear blue skies, unknown worlds, and behind a bustling food truck counter.

Locator

I went into Locator thinking it would be a breezy way to spend some time. This was a mistake. The public demo now up on Steam, kicks of with a mystery. What happened to archeologist Abigail Lidari? Others before me have tried and failed to uncover a trace of her and all I have is a series of photos, journal entries, and a map.

I’ll have to take these and, somewhat like Return of the Obra Dinn, piece together the information I can glean from these sources to track the missing subject by marking her known locations on my map. It’s not a task for the casual geo-guesser.

Airborne Empire

Only recently released in Steam Early Access, Airborne Empire had my head in the clouds. Of course, the first thing I did — after learning of our lofty ambitions to rebuild the floating metropolises of an empire gone by and take on the dreaded air pirates — was to repaint, for which I actually got an achievement.

My singular city center, complete with a lone, horizontal propeller keeping me afloat, required a new hangar. Fans of the city building genre will recognize immediately the flow of things, including building a pathway to enable construction. Unlike other games in the genre, players will need to keep a close eye on gravity, as my newly built hangar caused the whole city to lean precariously.

Monster Meals

This last entry is on the precipice of its January 17 launch date. So, here’s what you can look forward to this Friday: pixelated pressure. Much like other cooking-inspired games, the object of the gameplay is to make as many meals for as many customers as possible from your food truck. The clock is ticking. And that’s not too helpful when you have to kill and cook your own gourmet offerings.

If you feed enough of your bizarre clientele with delicacies that include scorpions and lizards, you’ll pass the level. Money in hand, you can than head back to your hub to spend coin on upgrading your enterprise, customizing your look, or redoing your truck’s paint job before driving out to the next wave of intergalactic restaurant-goers.