Indieventure

Happy New Year, Indieventurers, welcome to 2026! What's new, what's good? Well that's what we're here to tell you of course!

Last year may have been a bit of a washout for AAAs, but the indie game scene is still going strong, despite the many obstacles presented by the modern games industry and… our contemporary world in general. Happily, this year looks set to continue the indie gem trend; even though the calendar is so far looking pretty empty of firm release dates as every game developer and their mum attempts to edge away from the all-consuming spectre of GTA6, there's already plenty on the horizon for us to get excited about all the same.

Join us as we evangelise on our upcoming highlights (plus way more bonus honourable mentions than we'd planned) including, in no particular order (just kidding I'm alphabetising them like always): Beware of the Cartographer, Cairn, Denshattack!, Dosa Divas, Find Your Words, Hellmart, inKONBINI, Mandrake, Masters of Albion, The Mermaid Mask, Mixtape, Moonlight Peaks, Orbitals, Paralives, Peace Island, Penguin Colony, A Planet Full of Cats, Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike, ReAnimal, Roman Sands RE:Build, Servant of the Lake, Starsand Island, and – maybe the best-named game ever – Virtue and a Sledgehammer.

Our first hyperfixations of the year are here too, and you may not be surprised to learn that over the Christmas break Rachel has been enjoying the latest series of The Traitors, while Liam has been equally diverted by the surprisingly excellent Scooby-Doo licensed DLC for House Flipper 2. Rebecca, meanwhile, thinks that 2026 may have peaked already as far as AAA gaming goes with the release of Heartopia – an Animal Crossing inspired "slow life sim" that somehow also encompasses all of the other trends she's associated with (a mobile live-service game possessed of the world's most useless and forgettable gacha).

Also, if you ever read a novel called The Mouse Butcher, can you please let Rebecca know? It'd be a great opportunity to head on over to our Discord if you haven't already, just saying.

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!

Ring out those solstice bells, the longest night of the year is now behind us! But we've still got weeks and weeks of winter left to go, so if you're looking for some indie games to help pass those cold and dark nights, you're in the right place: it's the third (or maybe fourth, depending on how you count) annual Indieventure GOTY episode!

This is our smallest GOTY cohort ever, with just 12 games – not because this wasn't a great year for indies, but because your trio of hosts are in greater agreement than ever before as we slowly but surely merge into a single terrifying gestalt consciousness. As a fun challenge, why not pick one game from this list to play every day during the 12 days of Christmas? Sure, that'd be prohibitively expensive and impossibly time-consuming, but if you already have some to hand, consider this the sign you were waiting for to tackle some of that backlog – truly a festive tradition for many of us gamers at this point.

As ever we won't spoil our Christmas selection box here in the show notes, but you can always check the Indiventure website for a full list of games mentioned in the episode. Furthermore, maybe keep an eye on that blog over the festive period if you're interested in some additional stocking stuffers in written form from your Indieventure hosts and some friends of the podcast…

Our final round of hyperfixations for 2025 progresses at lightning speed because we're all very tired and want to start our Christmas break, please. Stranger Things 5 has Rebecca's seal of approval, while Super Mario Galaxy on Switch 2 is similarly acclaimed by Liam, and Rachel recommends The Chair Company season finale. Thank you all and good night: merry Christmas, happy holidays, a peaceful midwinter to you all, and we'll see you in 2026!

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 festive season is well and truly upon us, which can only mean one thing! …Actually that's not true, it means loads of things to all sorts of different people. But to an Indieventure listener, it means our increasingly established tradition of putting together a two-part end-of-year round-up! Tune back in for our Game of the Year list discussion on December 22nd, but first, it's time for a more free-form look at the year that was.

If you've listened to one of these before you'll know that this episode can end up being quite… cathartic for your trio of hosts, who've once again witnessed a year in the games industry that can generously be characterised as full of highs and lows. But aside from… all that, what were this year's big trends in indie games specifically? We delve into the unusual prominence given this year to longer indie games, indie game sequels, and indie games as digital third spaces (because we know "friendslop" is mostly meant as an affectionate joke but haven't we landed on a much better name there?). Also, expect some spicy takes on whether Steam's monopoly in the PC gaming market is causing them to increasingly become more of a problem than a champion for indie publishing.

We end as ever with our hyperfixations, and Rachel is keen to bring your attention to Thinky Dailies, a new daily series of in-browser brainteasers from our good pals over at Thinky Games – guaranteed to make you feel smarter than Wordle as well as being much, much less cursed. Liam is eager to highlight the excellent and highly timely video essay Greed is Destroying the World by Drew Gooden. And finally it's a rare musical recommendation from Rebecca, who's been listening to the Mountain Goats and their amazing new concept album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan.

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 time for another episode of Indieventure EXTRA, our bonus series where we interview key members of the games industry.

In this episode, Rachel chats with award-winning indie developer Lucy Blundell! Lucy is someone the Indieventure gang have wanted on the podcast for SO LONG, so we are very honoured to have her insights on what it’s like creating semi-autobiographical stories, the challenges of putting your personal life into your work as an artist, and the ways players can connect to the games they play on an emotional level.

If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s work, you should play her games! You can play both One Night Stand and VIDEOVERSE on just about every gaming platform you can think of.

Lucy’s Hyperfixation is The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy!

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.

The title says it all really: the Indieventure podcast is celebrating a couple of milestones, and you're all invited! Hope you like parties where three people indulge in absolute bullshit banter at length because that's what we've got for you today as we mark both our 50th episode and our podcast's only ever-so-slightly belated second birthday.

You really do deserve to hear some of this without being spoiled by any pesky context beforehand, so suffice to say that Rebecca has put together a quiz with a heavy visual component (check out our blog for the companion piece to that!) and Liam has written A Thing. Don't ask. Just listen. Trust me, it's better that way.

After completely wearing ourselves out with that nonsense, we mellow out a bit with a slightly more sensible second half in which we discuss a few games we've been playing recently – including The Séance of Blake Manor, Hades II, PEAK, and Demonschool – before making a very optimistic wishlist of all the amazing 2025 indies we'd love to play before recording our GOTY episode but, like, we're starting to get a bit nervous about the timeframe on that, not gonna lie.

Finally onto hyperfixations, this week with some completely improvised bonus bullshit about which Pokémon starter type each of us would be! Liam (grass type) has been finishing his 2025 Goodreads challenge by reading some of the most acclaimed short novels he could find, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, Foster by Claire Keegan, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Rachel (fire type) is once again bingeing The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which has become surprisingly meta in its new season. And Rebecca (water type) somehow hadn't heard of The Amazing Digital Circus until very recently, but now she's been completely drawn in by the hype.

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!