Indie

The Curse of Nordic Cove is an unabashed indie game. The graphics are primitive, the controls are frustrating, it is filled with “What the hell am I supposed to do NOW?” moments, and much of the time the damned game engine just plain doesn't work. The list of things wrong with this game is nigh-endless, but it still deserves a closer look because the development team was clearly dedicated to creating something new and different.

Another day, another indie side-scrolling shooter. They seem to be a dime a dozen currently, but that's OK since they serve a purpose – fast entertainment on the cheap. Point 5 Projects' Bad Bots is another 2D shooter that recently hit the scene. Like many games of its ilk, it tries to recapture old-school aesthetics by providing gamers with challenging arcade action. Bad Bots accomplishes this, but in a way that feels incomplete.

Penguin Party is a new PlayStation Mobile title available on PlayStation certified devices and Vita, and although a lot of core gamers will dismiss it based on its design and content, the child-friendly visuals and anthropomorphic penguins hide what's actually quite a challenging puzzle game, and a title in the same vein as old favourites like Chu Chu Rocket.

When Sony opened their doors and welcomed indie games to be sold on their PSN Store, it was like a flash flood. Games like Braid, Limbo, Knytt and many more could now be enjoyed by a much wider audience. Console gamers got a break from their action-packed retail games and got to experience games they normally would never have had the pleasure to try, and developers were enjoying a bigger success riding on the back of the PSN. For the price of a sandwich and a cup of coffee you can now download these smaller games which in all honesty are often better and last ...

Nearly five years since the release of the smash-hit arcade game Castle Crashers, indie developer The Behemoth has finally released their long-awaited third title, BattleBlock Theather. The game, which has been perpetually delayed since its initial reveal in 2010, was launched on Xbox LIVE Arcade in April 2013.

Papo & Yo is a puzzler platformer, but only on the most superficial level. Players do push blocks around and jump over things, but Papo & Yo will also force players to wrestle with emotional issues like childhood abuse, alcoholism, and poverty in the Third World.

Sand Slides has a very simple premise. Coloured sand will fall from the top of the screen, and you must make sure that that sand falls into the right coloured funnel. You do this by creating slides, using the touch screen to direct the grains as they drop. This starts off fairly easy - some of the sand drops right down into the right funnel - but it's not long before you're having to crisscross slides and collect sand in "buckets." It's both ingeniously simple and utterly frustrating.

You've proably heard of Rogue-likes, but have you ever heard of a Snake-like? Unlikely. Obviously someone played a lot of Snake a child and thought 'You know what would make this better? If it had some light RPG elements!' And so it was that Nimble Quest was born.

If you had the opportunity to look one year into your future would you do it? Would you want to see if a new business venture paid off, or if a lost love might return to your life? Perhaps you'd see something terrible; would you be able to avert disaster?

Badland might be crammed into the category of an “Autorunner”, the genre of gaming where characters zoom along the screen and players just need to hit a jump button at the right moment. But the character in Badland doesn’t actually run; it’s a weird furball that flies, and players have to tap the screen of the iPhone to flap its wings and keep it afloat. It’s an “Autoflapper” if you will, but that doesn’t even begin to describe this unusual and engrossing game from the two-man team of Frogmind Games.