Indieventure

And so we're back from outer space (or wherever it is Indieventure hosts like to go on holiday). Yep, after our little recording hiatus – seamlessly covered for with pre-recorded Pokémon chat, bet you didn't even notice that was a weird one – your intrepid trio is back together for the first time in a month, and naturally we all have one question on our minds: what have we all been playing while we were apart?

Of course, two-thirds of the group were on dream holidays and thus didn't play a whole lot, but there's still plenty to talk about, between all the cool indies that launched in April/May and all the awesome games that have been sitting in our backlogs waiting for exactly this kind of downtime! So Rebecca (who is the only one who hadn't been on her holidays yet at the time of recording) dusted off some intriguing older one-shot indies in the form of 2:22AM and Babette, as well as falling down the Forbidden Solitaire rabbit hole. Rachel made the most of about one week with her PC, also playing Forbidden Solitaire as well as Wax Heads, Phonopolis, and a frankly unbelievable amount of other games given the short time she was home. Liam has only really played one indie game all month, but since it's Mina the Hollower he's certainly not short of opinions to share with the group.

We end as ever on our latest round of hyperfixations, and Rachel currently thinks there's nothing better in this world than a sweet little TikTok remix about a cat named Serafino (and she's probably right!). Liam proves that South Korea is still completely dominating the Netflix original programming market with Culinary Class Wars, a cooking competition made extra special by the contrasting personalities of the two hosts. And Rebecca is finally ready to talk about The Saint of Steel series by T Kingfisher, the series singlehandedly responsible for turning her opinion of romantasy on its head.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

So due to how everyone's holiday schedules have lined up this month, there was no way we were recording enough regular episodes to cover the gap. But this is Indieventure, where we love an excuse to go on a sidequest, and we hate leaving you without an episode if there's any way around it so…

Look, we wanted to talk about Pokémon, alright?

Yes, I know, I know, tiny indie franchise Pokémon, maybe you've heard of it? I mean, you listen to a podcast hosted by three queer millennial geeks, it's on you if you hadn't figured out by now that we were all obligate Pokémon fans in our spare time. What's more, the recent release of Pokémon Pokopia has finally provided us with a contemporary outlet that all three of us can rally around: Liam gets his serotonin hits from completing an escalating series of tasks, Rachel gets the cosy vibes of post-humanity settlement building and creature collecting, and Rebecca gets to make a nice home for all the cute villagers she's befriending. It's our shared dream!

But, plot twist, there's more to this episode than just complimenting Pokopia, partly because we'd all made vastly different headway into the game at the time of recording, and partly because Liam came up with a much more satisfyingly unhinged idea:

Ranking all of the original 150 Pokémon, based on a completely inconsistent and constantly moving scale of how good a hang we think they'd be.

So there you go: your bit-o-bullshit premise for this episode. I won't spoil anything for you other than to confirm that, yes, against all odds, three people did manage to each give individual opinions about 150 characters in a tight two hours – that's 450 total Poképinions, so talk about bang for your buck! — and that, of course, we end on a final ranking of the best and worst 10, as decided by an aggregate of the group's votes.

We hope you enjoy, and we promise we'll be back to talking about indie games in the next one!

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

Video game awards season 2025 is over, which means it's time once again for the annual Indieventure round-up of the year that was… surely, in 2026, this can only mean glad tidings and good vibes…?

Okay so it's not our most cheerful yearly debrief, but just because our podcast is 75% scatalogical humour and barely-concealed thirsting over fictional characters doesn't mean we can't get serious when we need to, and if now's not the time, then when will be? So expect some lively discussion about indie game trailers during award shows, the problem the academy has with indie sequels and multiplayer titles, the shrinking of nomination pools in an industry that sees thousands of new releases a year, and more hot analytical topics.

For supplementary reading, here's the article Chris Dring wrote over at The Game Business that Rachel recommends in this episode: Who really won The Game Awards?

We do also have some fun chats, of course, celebrating the great indie games recognised over this awards season, including 2025 Indiventure favourites Blue Prince, Citizen Sleeper 2, Wanderstop, Despelote, Hades II, Ball x Pit, PEAK, Lost Records, and a bunch more!

There's also our annual run-down of some cool games we forgot to cover last year, including Sektori, No I'm Not a Human, and Demonschool — the latter of which our more attentive listeners might recall we actually did cover already, but Rebecca's finally got around to playing it properly too and doesn't want to be left out after she spent literal years anticipating its release.

We end, as always, on our recent hyperfixations. Liam has been binging Dan Levy's latest Netflix outing, comedy crime caper Big Mistakes; Rachel has been playing Dosa Divas, although her feelings towards the game are not uncomplicated; and Rebecca has been having an extremely uncomplicated time switching off her brain with the help of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

Hey kids, remember me? I'm Clive, the ostrich Indieventure forces to write episode descriptions when Rebecca is otherwise indisposed. What's been going on with me, you ask? Not much. Liam recently transferred me from the large glass cube that served as my prison into his guest bedroom after the RSPCA kicked his door down and tasered him in the throat. Thanks to the threat of further legal action, I'm now free to roam his home, and every Tuesday he takes me to the Big Tesco so I can stick my grotesque neck through shelves to scare passing children (which is, of course, my favourite hobby). Life is good.

This week on the podcast, the trio are celebrating the wild amount of money you all donated by answering some of your questions! Which indie games should have developer commentaries? Which games from the vault would they sacrifice under spectral duress? Which critically acclaimed indies can they not get on with, no matter how hard they try? They answer these questions, and more! What a treat! For you. Not for me. I literally cannot stand these three.

Before you've even had time to roll your big ostrich eyes in your big ostrich head at whatever Liam constitutes as acceptable answers, it's time for hyperfixations. Rachel has been journeying through surreal roguelike Sol Cesto. Rebecca has been watching Carisa Hendrix (and, by extension, Lucy Darling) over on that there YouTube. Liam provides bite-sized verdicts for both Mouse: P.I. for Hire and Vampire Crawlers.

Well, I best be off. I'm going to stand in the kitchen and flap my enormous wings for an hour, shrieking like a broken kettle that simply cannot boil water any more than it already has. Until next time!

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord, too, and be sure to check out our Steam Curator page if you simply still can’t get enough of us!

Before we begin, let's take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate our new podcast art! This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, and we've had the great good fortune to be able to collaborate with the extremely talented friend of the podcast Simon (@simonwl.bsky.social) for our shiny new banner and logo! Let's just sit here and take it in for a few more moments because it's awesome!

Further to that – and I promise I'm going to start the proper show notes soon, but I don't know how far some of you get into these descriptions and I wouldn't want you to miss this – today marks the beginning of the first-ever Indieventure funding drive! If you're one of the lovely people who's been trying to give us money for years, now's your opportunity: we've started a Ko-Fi (ko-fi.com/indieventure), which will be open for two weeks after this episode goes live.

Any funds you generously donate will be spent on improving Rachel and Rebecca's recording set-ups and covering the podcast's annual operating costs, with any leftovers spent on snacks and supplies for our yearly in-person recording session this summer. As far as we're concerned this is a one-off for now, and we understand completely that not everybody will be in a situation where they can donate – just know that anything you can give is greatly appreciated, and regardless of any financial transaction, we're just so grateful that you've stuck with us this far. Thank you, and we love you!

And with that: onto the episode notes.

Since we took a little hiatus last month, we thought it was the right time to catch up on what everyone's been playing lately. Rachel shares her thoughts upon finishing Cairn, as well as Creature Kitchen and (not really indie but we have decided to allow this series on the podcast for… reasons) Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse. Liam's been catching up on Rise of the Golden Idol, checking out this year's first indie darling Mewgenics, and revisiting The Coin Game as it leaves early access. And Rebecca's mainly been playing demos – specifically for upcoming romantic horror titles Sucker for Love: Crush Landing and My Eerie Lair – but has also been spending some time in anime-esque Stardew-alike Starsand Island.

We end, as always, with our latest round of hyperfixations, and everyone's very on-brand this week. Liam wants to talk about Resident Evil Requiem; Rachel has discovered the delights of The Golden Girls; and Rebecca has finally read Battle Royale, the turn-of-the-millennium dystopian thriller novel by Koushun Takami that inspired so much of the media she's been enjoying ever since.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!