Indieventure

As 2024 draws to an end, the Indieventure trio return to discuss their favourite indie games of the last 12 months. That's right, folks, it's time for our annual Game Of The Year episode! We won't spoil which games we chat about here in the description (you can find that over on our website if you're the type of person who hunts around the house looking for their Christmas presents in mid-November like a wrong 'un) but what we can say is that although we each brought along a personal list of our five favourites, we only ended up discussing 13 due to a couple of overlaps. As always we end with our hyperfixations. Liam's been playing the MySims-inspired city builder Go-Go Town! Rebecca has been rethinking her relationship with attention, and is doing something every day that makes her happy (we have no choice but to stan). Meanwhile, Rachel was put on the spot and decided to dream about the upcoming (when we recorded, anyway) open-world fashion adventure Infinity Nikki. A reminder! After this episode, we're taking a short break to drink a few buckets of gravy and have a nice long nap, but we'll be back on the 23rd of January 2025 with our usual nonsense. Thanks once again for all your support this year, we hope you have a lovely Christmas, happy holidays, or a peaceful winter break! 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, and don’t forget that you can join our dedicated Discord too!  

Christmas is almost upon us, and before we ring in the New Year with our GOTY picks, it's time for us here at the Indieventure podcast to pour ourselves a generous glug of mulled wine and reflect on the year as a whole as it pertains to indie games. Has it been a good year for indies? How did it stack up against previous years – especially the wall-to-wall hit machine that was 2023? And, putting personal preferences aside (because we'll be digging into that in-depth in our next episode, don't worry) what have been the biggest indie games of the year? Naturally expect Balatro, 1000xRESIST, Hades 2, and Pacific Drive to get a lot of airtime in this one, as well as Silksong (still conspicuous in its absence as we head into 2025). We also look back over our most-anticipated games from the start of the year, checking in with what came out, what got delayed, and what landed unexpectedly (or not) from a list that included Anger Foot, Creepshow, Crow Country, Demonschool, Europa, Loco Motive, Lost Records, The Mermaid Mask (née The Mermaid's Tongue), Rise of the Golden Idol, Sucker for Love 2, Synergy, Thank Goodness You're Here!, and Tiny Bookshop. And then – just in case you thought we were going to be if anything a bit too sensible in this one – an old friend returns to deliver a self-indulgent quiz! There's really no point in outlining the premise here, just trust us when we say that it has to be heard to be believed. We end, as always, with our current hyperfixations! Rebecca has been defying gravity thanks to the Wicked movie, Rachel has been reading a stack of queer fiction (specifically Julia Armfield's Salt Slow, Eliza Clark's She's Always Hungry and Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch), while Liam has turned his attention to the skies - and the places it leads - with Mark Vanhoenacker's Imagine A City. 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, and don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too!

It’s time for another Indieventure EXTRA, our bonus series where we interview key members of the games industry. We’re pretty PC-focused on Indieventure so in this episode, Rachel has a chat with Oscar Taylor-Kent about PlayStation indies. Oscar is the Games Editor at GamesRadar+ and previous editor of PLAY Magazine and Official PlayStation Magazine so he’s the perfect person to discuss this topic with. Have a listen if you’d like to hear us both take a trip down memory lane and have a gab about Sony’s history with indie games. You can find Oscar and his work on Twitter, BlueSky, and his GamesRadar+ profile.  Enjoy~ 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.

Like it or not, 2024 is almost over, and Indieventure is closing out the year with a trilogy of episodes looking back on our recent experiences of the games industry. We're saving the more targeted analysis of the year in games and of course our big GOTY reveal for the two episodes due out in December, but today we're starting out with a more general question: how has working in games media impacted our experiences of gaming as a hobby? What starts out as a light-hearted "day in the life of a games journalist" chat quickly turns into a group therapy session where we go into a fairly serious examination of the realities of working in games media in the 2020s, both good and bad. This is less a chat about specific games and more an overview of games media trends both visible and invisible to the audience, so if you've ever wanted to hear some inside baseball delivered from the Indieventure trio's perspective, here's your chance. We promise the mood gets lighter over the rest of the holiday season episodes, but we're glad we got all this off our chests! This episode also includes our final pre-GOTY "what we've been playing" round-up, in which Rachel gives a spoiler-free overview of Rise of the Golden Idol; Rebecca catches up on the long-awaited full release of Phoenix Springs; and despite spending much of the past month on another continent, Liam has somehow put another 10 hours into Factorio following the launch of the Space Age expansion. Last but not least, our hyperfixations for this episode see Liam geeking out over the Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary, Rebecca enjoying "Somewhere Beyond the Sea" by TJ Klune (the sequel to a Season Zero hyperfixation, "The House in the Cerulean Sea"), and Rachel discovering an amazing TV channel called Mech+ which appears to only show reruns of Robot Wars and it turns out we're all very here for that. 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, and don't forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too!