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Servant of the Lake is a strange little puzzle game that sits somewhere between dark, cosy, and quietly unsettling. You play as a newly hired housekeeper at the Vanderboom estate, spending a weekend completing tasks for the man who lives there and his visiting family members. At first, it all sounds rather ordinary. Then the house reveals things a normal housekeeper probably wouldn't expect. Servant of the Lake is weird, creepy, and occasionally downright disgusting, but it has a wonderfully distinctive identity. Its puzzles can be genuinely difficult to crack, and the game loves hiding its clues in places you might never think to look. I found myself frustrated more than once, but I enjoyed the challenge even when I was smacking my head off my keyboard. It's a particularly good fit for players who enjoy dark, atmospheric puzzle games and don't mind getting a little gross along the way. I wouldn't call it my perfect puzzle game, but there's something really compelling about how confidently Servant of the Lake commits to its strange little world.
At first glance, Capy Castaway feels like a gentle exploration game. Its bright colours, cute animals and soft presentation reminded me a lot of Little Kitty, Big City. However, the further I played, the more I realised that Capy Castaway was trying to tackle some surprisingly serious subjects. Grief, anxiety, strained relationships, death and identity all feature in the story, and that contrast became one of my biggest points of uncertainty with the game. Not because I think these themes have no place in a cosy-looking adventure, but because I wasn’t always sure that the game knew how to bring its softer presentation and heavier ideas together. It looks like the perfect cosy adventure about a cute capybara, and there are plenty of lovely ideas here. Some of the heavier moments simply don’t always sit comfortably alongside the game’s bright, child-friendly presentation, while the writing sometimes struggles to connect everything together. I wanted to love this little adventure, but I often found myself wondering who Capy Castaway was really made for.
There are very few games that leave me sitting at my keyboard at 4am, trying to convince my co-op partner that we really should go to bed while secretly hoping they’ll say, “one more puzzle”. Big Walk did exactly that. Four days and around 20 hours later, my friend and I were still finding new places to explore, new items to play with, and new reasons to laugh at each other as we accidentally threw ourselves off mountains or picked each other up instead of interacting with an object. Going into my Big Walk review, I expected something that sat somewhere alongside PEAK. That’s an easy comparison to make given they’re both cooperative exploration games, but after spending so much time with both, I don’t think they’re trying to achieve the same thing at all. PEAK leans heavily into survival exploration. One bad climb can end your run, and every mountain feels like something you have to conquer. That’s not something you have to worry about in Big Walk. There are chairlifts, trains, winding hiking trails, forests, coastlines, and countless places where you can simply stop and appreciate the view. Even within the first couple of hours, I was already thinking this was a solid 9/10. Every session introduced another mechanic, another secret, another item, or another reason to keep wandering. By the time I sat down to write my review, I realised I’d spent four consecutive late nights and early mornings exploring the island...
There is something incredibly satisfying about watching a plant slowly emerge and grow, and then seeing a customer walk in and decide it is exactly what they have been looking for. Leafy Corner takes the simple idea of a plant shop and turns it into a cosy business management sim that is easy to lose hours to. Instead of chasing profits through stress and time limits, it lets you learn about real plants, decorate a beautiful little shop, and enjoy the quiet rhythm of running your own business. Few cosy management games make learning feel this natural. Leafy Corner quietly teaches you about real plants while giving you meaningful choices about what to grow, what to sell, and how to build your shop. It is charming, thoughtful, and surprisingly relaxing, even when a few of the ruder customers decide your recommendation was apparently the worst thing they have ever heard...
When I first sat down to write my High Times review, I wasn’t sure what I’d make of the game. It’s a dating sim, a cooking sim, a visual novel, and a surprisingly thoughtful queer game wrapped up in a neon, psychedelic café where you make mood-altering doughnuts for a living. It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, but somehow it mostly works. High Times is one of the most ambitious indie dating sims around. Beneath its colourful chaos is a genuinely fun cooking system, excellent voice acting, and refreshingly gender-neutral character design. The writing does not reach the emotional highs it could have aimed for, but it’s an enjoyable casual dating sim that took me back to the yaoi/yuri visual novels of the 2010s.
One of my favourite elements in Helix: Descent N Ascent is the arcade machines. You find them dotted around the world, and completing their levels rewards you with access to new areas within your environment. Every level has the same premise: make your way to the other character on the opposite point of the screen. Each machine offers its own twist, based on the abilities you have been learning within that section. It mirrors the base game in a compact, stylised form. I like how this not only changes up the style of gameplay, but offers inadvertent insight into the character you’re seeking. In the world you’re in, the other character crops up on occasion, withholding the way forward. Catching up to them only causes them to push you away. In the arcade games, they make a consistent appearance, and reaching them spooks them into high-tailing it outta there.
Cat Mail Co. delivers a charming and relaxing management experience filled with adorable cats, satisfying organisation, and plenty of cosy moments. While some areas could use a little more polish, especially when it comes to Steam Deck optimisation and certain controls, the overall experience is still enjoyable. The simple gameplay loop of sorting packages, restoring the post office, and discovering pieces of its history is surprisingly satisfying. The lack of time pressure makes it easy to settle into your own routine, and the small details, like the funny customer names and decorative stamps, add a lot of personality.
Kioku: Last Summer is a fairly simple game. You spend your days exploring Kioku Island, completing activities, collecting items, and building friendships with the other characters. The mechanics are easy to understand, and the overall gameplay loop fits well with the game’s relaxed summer setting. Unfortunately, my biggest issues with the game came from the technical side of the experience, which significantly impacted my enjoyment.
DAVE THE DIVER In the Jungle doesn't feel like a DLC; it feels like the kind of expansion games used to get. It slips naturally onto the end of the base game, respects the time players have already invested, and expands the world without changing what made it special in the first place. Instead of feeling like a separate product, it feels like coming home after a long trip and discovering there are new rooms in a house you already love. I spent days playing, writing guides, cataloguing fish, and exploring every corner of Utara Lake. By the time the credits rolled, I realised something unusual had happened: At no point did I feel like I was rushing through content. Instead, the DLC kept introducing new activities, new characters, and new surprises at a pace that made me want to keep playing just one more in-game day.
Swan Song is a cosy puzzle game that feels like an adult version of a child’s shape sorter puzzle. It’s nostalgic in that way; it feels familiar even if you’ve never seen a set of puzzles quite like these. The game takes place almost entirely inside a magical music box, where your job is to guide a small swan to safety by placing musical notes in the right sequence and manipulating the tiles to create a functioning path. Beyond the box, Swan Song tells a story about grief that feels painfully real, even when one of its characters makes choices that are particularly hard to forgive. The puzzles become more complex with each chapter, but the emotional weight behind them never disappears. Although the writing sometimes falls short of its potential, Swan Song‘s journey undoubtedly offers a worthwhile experience.
There was a point during my Coffee Talk Tokyo review where I realised I had stopped thinking about the game as fiction. I was playing at around two or three in the morning (as is usual), making drinks for tired strangers, listening to people talk about grief, chronic pain, loneliness, love, anxiety, and all the tiny ways people try to survive the world, and I realised that I had seen all of this, so much of this, in the people around me. Coffee Talk Tokyo feels soft, but it's so incredibly real. While uncomfortably close to mirroring our reality, the quiet support its cast of characters offers each other is where the game makes its biggest impact. Coffee Talk Tokyo understands that connection matters, even more so now, when people feel more isolated than ever.
There’s a quiet confidence to Aphelion that I didn’t expect, paired with a stubborn refusal to make things easy for the player. It takes story, platforming, and familiar sci-fi ideas and creates something that feels thoughtful, yet oddly punishing. It pulled me in, pushed me away, and then pulled me back again just when I thought I was done with it.
Sintopia looks playful, but nothing feels simple. You juggle systems that don’t always want to cooperate, and trying to reduce the Sins of your Humus when they enter Hell quickly spirals out of control. It’s like having a queue of people who want to get on a ride that never ends and never gets shorter. All the while, everything else in the Overworld, above Hell, continues to spiral out of control as monsters attack and set things on fire. It’s funny, overwhelming, and it definitely left me feeling like Hell was managing me instead.
Dosa Divas ended up being one of those games that just… clicked for me. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you right away or throw everything at you all at once. Instead, it builds, layer by layer, until you realise you’re fully invested. In the story, in the characters, and in the gameplay loop that somehow keeps pulling you back in every time you think you’re done for the night. What really stands out is how well everything works together. The cooking, the combat, the exploration with Goddess, it all feels connected in a way that makes sense…even when it probably shouldn’t on paper. Nothing feels like it was added, “just because”. It all has a place, and it all works.
What makes the game a challenge, and this is where the core gameplay comes in, is the enemies throughout the dungeons. Hordes of various nasty hellspawn gravitate towards you, the skull, and your band of merry murderers. In Skull Horde, it’s a matter of getting from point A to point B without being overwhelmed and collecting enough resources to reinforce for the next area. Akin to Risk of Rain 2, Skull Horde uses a timer mechanic to gradually ramp up the difficulty of each run. So, the weigh up is: grind out enemies for more resources, but end up with significantly harder enemies in the next area, or rush through and end up underpowered. The final boss of each level is much more of a struggle when its minions are beefed up from a slow run-through.
At first glance, it might seem like just another game in a well-loved genre, but KuloNiku: Bowl Up! adds its own flavour with playful mechanics and a dash of personality that keeps things feeling fresh. It balances its narrative beats with hands-on cooking in a way that never overstays its welcome, creating a loop that’s as easy to sink into as your favourite comfort meal.
Fishbowl is not an easy game to pick up, and it’s not always one you want to play. The discomfort of the game is seemingly intentional, asking you to sit with Aloo’s grief as she lives through this part of her life. You can’t run, or hide, or distract yourself. As the days pass, Aloo confronts more of the memories she thought she’d forgotten, and, in doing so, she starts to heal.
Life is Strange has always been about consequence, and Reunion leans into that more than anything else. The game opens by grounding you in Max’s history: her childhood with Chloe, the storm, the impossible choice, and the grief that follows, no matter what you originally chose. By the time you reach Reunion, Max is still carrying all of it. Whether you saved Chloe or the town, that decision has shaped her adulthood in a way that never really settled. I do not believe that there could be a game anymore deserving of Chloe and Max's ending than this one. Life is Strange: Reunion builds on every major choice from Max's games, and it doesn’t ignore the major decisions that players made. Your past actions shape how this story plays out, from who Max has loved to who or what she’s lost. It's a story that we've been watching for over 11 years.
Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection brings back the games we grew up with, and for a moment, that’s enough. You feel it straight away — the charm, the challenge, the familiarity of it all. But the longer you sit with it, the more the cracks start to show. What should have been a full return to Neopia ends up feeling like a smaller, quieter version of it, missing some of the heart that made it special.
At first glance, the game looks like a peaceful experience focused on tending and restoring a garden. Something slow, relaxing and easy to settle into. However, as I spent more time in the game, I realised there was a little more happening beneath the surface.