Indieventure

So far, 2026 has been a busy old year for some of our favourite genres here at Indieventure! You may remember Rebecca's deep dive into life sims a few weeks ago, and now Rachel's here with her own focussed topic: detective games.

To celebrate the recent releases of The Mermaid Mask, The Incident at Galley House, and Desktop Explorer, your intrepid hosting trio are here to have a good old natter about detectives, mysteries, and investigations in indie games – and since it's probably the area of interest all three of us overlap on the most, we've got plenty to say! In addition to spoiler-free overviews of those latest releases, expect to hear about some classics of the genre, hidden gems we want to highlight, personal favourites, and loads more. We also don't necessarily contain ourselves just to video games on this occasion, since of course mysteries abound in books, films, and TV shows too, and this is one of those narrative genres where the conventions found in different media can really inform one another.

As always, we end with our latest hyperfixations, and it's a three-for-two deal this week since Liam and Rachel are of course both all about the new Charli xcx album: Music, Fashion, Film. Meanwhile, in another unsurprising turn of events, Rebecca finally got around to watching I Saw the TV Glow and immediately became a Jane Schoenbrun evangelist.

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!

It's baaack.

That's right – a mere 20 months later, we're revisiting one of our most chaotic episode ideas, and it's one where our listeners get to play along!

If you weren't here yet in November 2024, you can go back and listen to Episode 27 to familiarise yourself with our totally-original-we-swear indie game draft picking process; or you can just take my word for it that it's basically fantasy football with indie games and that Liam as ever gives a good explanation of the rules in the episode and that's why I'm glossing over that bit… honest. It's not because I'm still a bit confused or anything.

This time around we've done away with the framing concept of "we're building our own consoles and choosing the launch titles" in favour of… well, honestly, we just kind of each assemble a list of great indie games based on some loose themes while yelling at each other a lot in a very friendly way, and we felt like that was probably enough? Oh, but this time around everyone gets one betrayal card, and you can imagine how that goes…

As a reminder, this is one where you can go to our lovely listener Discord and vote on who you think should win – and also, if you don't want spoilers, please go and listen first and then come back to this description once you're ready.

I'll wait, don't worry.

…

Hi, nice to see you again!

Okay so here are the three "teams" – remember to go and vote for your favourite!

Liam's Team: Ballistic Zen, The Beginner's Guide, Blue Prince, Crow Country, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Night in the Woods, Orbitals, Promise Mascot Agency, Stardew Valley, Unpacking

Rebecca's Team: Bad Magpie, Camp Palut, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Mouthwashing, Outer Wilds, A Short Hike, Slay the Princess, Strange Horticulture, Thank Goodness You're Here, Tiny Bookshop

Rachel's Team: 1000xRESIST, Citizen Sleeper 2, Deltarune, Gorogoa, Jump the Track, Mediterranea Inferno, The Séance of Blake Manor, Signalis, Slay the Spire, Toem

We'll leave the poll open for two weeks, so listen in for the results and our reactions during our next LIVE(ish) and in-person episode, coming in August!

Even though the structure of this episode is just a little difference, hyperfixations remain as our constant final segment. Rachel has – of course – been playing The Mermaid Mask at long last, so look forward to her reactions in a future episode! Rebecca has finished reading underrated dark fairytale The Curator by Owen King, and also enjoyed a feminist horror double-bill of Evil Dead Burn and Obsession at a mercifully air conditioned cinema. And Liam has been happily binging another South Korean reality show, The Devil's Plan.

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!

The gang are all back together at last after our various summer hols, and we're happy to welcome the return of Liam after his absence from our last episode. Naturally, our first order of business is to get him all caught up on what he missed during the mid-year check-in, so we begin with a quick-fire chat that takes in Mina the Hollower, El Paso Elsewhere 2, Denshattack!, Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!, The Mermaid Mask, and – not indie, but unignorable given who we're talking about – Resident Evil Veronica.

Then it's onto the main topic of this episode and, unbelievably, despite being co-created and co-hosted by a lifelong obsessive Simmer, it's taken Indieventure almost three years to put together an episode dedicated to the life sim genre. However, the early access launch of Paralives a few weeks back has given Rebecca the excuse she's always needed to go off at length about her excruciatingly detailed knowledge of life sims, how they work, how they're made, and how the genre has developed and adapted to the changing gaming landscape over the past quarter-century. Many thanks to Liam, Rachel, and you, our lovely listeners for indulging this semi-interactive TED talk, and be sure to check out the Sims Community interview quoted in this episode! Naturally you can expect some illegal AAA chat here too as it's more or less impossible to discuss Paralives in context without regularly referring back to The Sims franchise as well as InZoi; but don't worry, we also circle back to perennial Indieventure favourite and underappreciated indie life sim Tiny Life while we're at it. There might even be a Stardew Valley cameo in there somewhere, too.

And like a cooling dip in the pool during Britain's third consecutive heatwave, we round off with our latest hyperfixations. One of Rachel's favourite manga series – The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All – is getting an anime adaptation early next year soundtracked by Nirvana, so there's plenty to get excited about there already even if we're six months away from seeing the thing itself. Liam has broken a bit of a dry spell in his gaming enthusiasm by getting very, very invested in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. And Rebecca has achieved her pledge to "sit by a pool and do nothing but read a stack of books for two weeks", having read nine novels on her recent break with a reading list comprised of authors Mie Takase, T Kingfisher, KJ Charles, Becky Chambers, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, Owen King, and Chuck Tingle.

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!

Ahhh, how is it June already?? In this episode, it’s just the gals having a chat as Liam is feeling under the weather and is resting, but fear not, our sweet Geordie boy will be back next episode. Rachel and Rebecca get gabbing about their favourite indie games of 2026 so far, a general vibe-check of gaming this year, and what games they're looking forward to in the second half of the year. 

The two also pick a handful of game highlights from The Power of Pride Bundle over on itch.io, which you should definitely check out, as it’s pride month, HAPPY PRIDE!! Whoooo! Plus, there’s some ‘not-E3’ aka Summer Games Fest talk, with some minor AAA tangents even though this is a podcast about indie games (shhh).

The two mention SO MANY games this episode, but some notable mentions from the first half of this year include: Cairn, Phonopolis, Titanium Court, Wax Heads, Forbidden Solitaire, Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse, and Fears to Fathom: Scratch Creek. And our most anticipated games for the rest of this year include: Moonlight Peaks, The Mermaid Mask, Aquapark Tycoon, Truck-kun is supporting me from another world, Servant of the Lake, I Am Your Host, Toem 2, Penguin Colony, Virtue and a Sledgehammer AND MANY MORE.

For hyperfixations, Rachel thoroughly enjoyed watching Backrooms in the cinema and Rebecca has been blushing and kicking her feet over the book Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian.

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!

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!