Well, IGF judging has wrapped for the year and that means it’s time for my perennial activity: Talking about some stuff I played! For those who haven’t seen these posts before: Welcome to my yearly tradition, where I bring up a selection of games I played as an Independent Games Festival judge that I thought were interesting and deserved further highlighting. You can find last year’s post here: https://auratriolo.com/blog/2025/11/05/igf-games-i-want-to-talk-about-2026/ The industry continues limping along through a storm of poor financial conditions and AI trash, but nonetheless there was a TON to like this year and I’m revitalized by seeing all the incredible work people around me are doing. IGF required an AI disclosure this year and it was especially heartening every time I saw someone shout “FUCK AI” into the notes box in a submission. Love you all. You’re truly out there doing the Good Work. And I can guarantee: Every game in my list this year declared themselves AI-less. Now, before we get into the list, I’m going to super-emphasize my usual reminder: _Inclusion on this list has no relation whatsoever to how I vote in the awards_. IGF awards tend to categorize games into little boxes – “exceptional art, exceptonal design”, etc. My personal “liking-a-game-ness” often does not map to those categories in clean ways. And thus, what I aim to do in these blogposts is highlight stuff I think is interesting regardless of its Awards Capacity. Things that are overlooked by the public, unusual, or that bring me personal joy. Now let’s talk about some games!!!! ### Isekizima: Ruins and Tails I recognize this is a sort of subculture-y opinion even within indie circles, but: GOD do I love messy doujin games. The enthusiasm and lack of embarrassment to make something at the very edge of your reach and use any possible tool to get there, from telling lengthy and complex stories though text-boxes alone, to making a complex combat system with only a bare few frames of animation or photobashing background art out of stock photos. Izekizima is just that sort of ambitious and messy, and I adore it. Oh, how awkward its platforming, how janky its combat! And yet it is FUN. And _thus_ it is fun! This game defies absolutely everything one could read about “good game feel” and manages to pull out of that philosophy something that feels rough-edged and joyful, sincere in its desire to evoke little wonders and surprises in the same way as the platformers I played in the 90s. It brings me back to the excitement of my childhood in a way a thousand remakes never have and never will. I love it. It’s coming sometime this year: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2686820/isekizima_Ruins_and_Tails_Journey/ ### Echo Weaver I have highly specific tastes in metroidvanias. I’m generally pretty vocal about this; what I loved about Super Metroid as a child was not its combat. It was the exploration, the wonder, the confusion, the doubling-back, the surprise of finding a new relationship with a room you’ve passed through a thousand times. Echo Weaver is exactly my kind of metroidvania. The premise is simple: You are caught in a several-minute time loop. What can you get done in that time? Can you… find a way to get through a door that locks 15 seconds into the loop? A door that is quite a few rooms away? Explore. Learn. See what advantages you can find. Many times, those advantages will not be in the form of permanent upgrades – when you loop, so goes everything you’ve accomplished. Instead, what you gain is knowledge. Knowledge of the space around you. Shortcuts, tricks. Knowledge of YOURSELF and your own capabilities. Right now, I could start a fresh save file of Echo Weaver and instantly travel somewhere you’d normally only find hours into the game. I simply know how – and that’s all you need. That’s the kind of game this is. I can’t wait to play more, and you can do so yourself – it came out only a few days ago! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2184080/Echo_Weaver/ ### Inkblood Mystery game fans are, I think, eating pretty damn well lately. This year’s IGF was packed with interesting entries in the genre, and I was particularly caught by this one. Inkblood takes Curse of the Golden Idol as a starting point and brings in a sense of place and physicality – you are a person in the world, riding your carriage about as you investigate, hanging your notes and evidence on its walls, using a lens to look into the near-past. But it’s not THAT long ago. Those who committed the murders may still be lurking in the vicinity… This physical aspect lends Inkblood’s cultish murders a threat and immediacy that I found as compelling as its WILDLY cool art style. Just traversing the world and looking around is an interesting use of your time, and the developers seed all sorts of little incidental characters here and there to flesh out the world. I always really appreciate a sense of _place-ness_ to a game, and it’s especially fun to see in a genre that tends to be very sparing with its detail. Excited for the full release this year! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4114100/Inkblood/ ### Truth Scrapper Anyone who knows or played In Stars and Time is not going to be even slightly surprised by this inclusion, but: Truth Scrapper really has it. I had gone in expecting a sense of creeping paranoia – after all, basing a game around a protagonist who suffers amnesia anew each morning is inevitably going to cause _trust issues_ – but I’m so amazed at Truth Scrapper’s balance between the creeping certainty that everyone around you is lying, and the sheer, impossible-to-resist charm of its cast. I can’t help but come to love these stupid jerks, even as I grow ever more suspicious of them. The core mechanic – that you can only keep a few memories for your amnesiac protagonist from one day to the next – becomes harder and harder to decide as the game progresses, loading you down with thoughts that seem like they could be the keys to vital clues. What will you keep? What’s _important_ to you? Relationships? Your job? …Your selfhood? This one’s release is TBD, and I’m def keeping a close eye out. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3239830/Truth_Scrapper/ ### Curse of Resthaven Curse of Resthaven combines a bunch of my favourite genres. You’re the newly appointed governor of an island colony; Your cousin is missing, the old governor is dead in mysterious circumstances, and commerce is failing. The game is, then, about a sort of plate-spinning prioritization: How will you balance building relationships, the colony’s economy, and searching out its mysteries? Every action ticks the clock, and there’s never enough time in a day to find out everything you need. What really compels me in a game like this is the slow-drip mystery. Everyone is suspicious as hell, and they’re keeping their secrets close to their chest. The time limits keep the pace constrained – you can only ask people three questions per “session”, so there’s no gorging yourself on dialogue, and you’ll always wish you could find out just a bit more. Some won’t even talk to you until you’ve helped pull their shops out of poverty. And as members of the colony start to disappear, the urgency of your task rises, until… You wake up at the docks, having just arrived at the colony. Thus the time loop begins. What will you focus on this loop? What will you learn? And who will live and die because of your actions? This one comes out in just over a week! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3796150/Curse_of_Resthaven/ ### Stip What if you combined sudoku with, like… inscryption? basically? Creepy horror meets weird puzzles meets a lot of slapping numbers into circles. Solve math. Speak to the eyeball that exists behind the world. Find items and use them to ??????. Figure out why the cursor _vibrates_ sometimes. I probably shouldn’t say much more. I strongly suspect this game is going to go really big when it releases sometime later this year. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3227960/Stip/ ### Windswept Isle Sometimes I feature a game on here because it just fills me with a deep, personal joy. Windswept Isle is one of those. The premise is dead-simple – your farm animals have escaped! Go find them and bring them back! This is basically an excuse plot for you to explore the developer’s bafflingly fleshed-out island setting, chock full of NPCs using stock RPG maker art that somehow seem to have full, rich lives and history, expressed entirely through incidental dialogue and examining random objects in houses. It’s so minimalist, and yet it is _so_ charming that what I expected to be a slight 15 minutes turned into hours. I adore it. It’s out now and free! https://farawaytimes.itch.io/windswept-isle ### Torment Hexus I’m not sure I would have beleived you if you’d told me that “Cyberpunk match-3 Wizard of Legend” was going to be a premise of game but fuck if this doesn’t pull it off. A smart and genuinely challenging tactics game about charging up spells via matches and then deploying them in grid-based battles to murder the giant hordes of corpo goons chasing you down, with all the roguelitey buildcrafting you’d want out of a thing like this. This one came out a few months ago! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3238420/Torment_Hexus/ ### Patience is a Virtue Patience is a Virtue is a game about talking to people. Faced with the terror of a boss, or a doctor, or even an awkward acquaintance, how do we cope with the difficulties of socialization? Here, you use people’s words against them, assembling new sentences out of their own until you wriggle your way out of trouble. Or…. until you don’t. If it was JUST that, I’d think this was a game with a cool premise and maybe not be writing about it. But here’s the thing: Writing a game about chronic pain, disability, neurodivergence is hard. I think a lot of games trying to handle Serious Topics end up falling into one of two categories: Either unbearably dour or accidentally dismissive, miserable to play or so afraid of reality that they escape into magical solutions for their protagonists. I am STUNNED at how well this game pulls off its trick of tackling not just real topics but ALSO transforming into a genuinely interesting supernatural thriller _without taking away_ from those previous elements, like doing some sort of pirouette onto two knives and not getting punctured. I smiled, I cringed, I felt hideously seen, I got a bit emotional, even. What a trick. There’s no release date listed on this, but the version I played seemed pretty complete, so i’m guessing… not too long? https://store.steampowered.com/app/4656880/PATIENCE_IS_A_VIRTUE/ ### Trifolium: The Adventures of Gary Pretzelneck Do you like brain-bending box pushers and navigation puzzle games in the vein of A Monster’s Expedition and other Draknek-y stuff? What if one of those but you’re a giraffe with an impossibly long neck and can’t intersect your own previous path? What really impressed me with this one was the horrifying depths to which it went. I think a lot of puzzle games get difficult by simply increasing the possibility space until it becomes exhausting, but Trifolium’s strength is that it instead, over and over, simply presents you with tasks that seem utterly impossible, and demands you contort your brain into a new shape that understands possibilities you would never have previously considered. The rabbit hole goes deeper than I ever imagined when I first started. The game has one more secret to it, though: The entire thing takes place on one gigantic level, and you can, at any point, zoom the camera over to a previous segment of your neck and press a single button to undo to that time, rework a segment of your neck, and then press another button to redo all your work in every single level in a few seconds. This ability to alter temporal causality enables all sorts of terrifying puzzles and implications – things you’ve done in the past might have all sorts of implications for the present. I’ll leave it to you to imagine just how deep they go. Releases in november! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3350860/Trifolium_The_Adventures_of_Gary_Pretzelneck/ ## Extra bits I try to keep my main list to 10 every year, but there’s always a few more games that creep through I had a little extra to say about. Here’s those! **Danchi Days:** Melos Han-Tani’s new hamtaro-like is absurdly charming in every way, and I only wish I could have found more time to put into it! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3107530/Danchi_Days/ **Burn-9:** This “Metal Gear but you’re playing as Col. Campbell” game has a killer premise, but they only submitted a short demo. I’m keeping an eye on this one for sure!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4377480/Burn9/ **Cairn:** I put genuinely like 30 hours into this amazing and terrifying mountain-climbing game, holy shit it’s good!!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1588550/Cairn/ **Threadbound****:** A puzzle platformer about linking various objects on the screen so that they move together. Seems really promising, and has some cool narrative stuff going on! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2218130/Threadbound/ **Draco and the Seven Scales:** What if, like, Link’s Awakening but you were also a pirate with a pirate ship? Works for me, really! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2559690/Draco_and_the_Seven_Scales/ ## The Student Zone! This year I played an uncommonly large number of great student games and I wanted to take the time to feature them separately! ### Doo-Daa There were a lot of highly-ambitious student games this year, but I especially have to respect this one, made by a fine-art student FULLY equipped to both lampoon and engage in video-game-based Dadaism. You’re a cat who works for Earth’s space colonization bureau. Go convince those aliens they want to be colonized! Unfortunately, your universal translator barely works and also all of the aliens claim to be the president. Featuring something like 50 different endings depending on your actions! https://bobby4apples.itch.io/doo-daa ### Horse Magnifier So you have to take a horse and then use magnifying glasses on it until it matches another horse that looks extremely wacky. This is genuinely one of the funniest games I’ve played, with a pitch-perfect sense of escalation. You will not BELIEVE what the “Final boss” looks like. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4585340/Horse_Magnifier_The_Full_Horse/ ### Basilisk’s Isles Ambitious and self-contained student project wherein you need to solve a mystery on a tiny island with the use of your personal superpower: A unity-like interface for manipulating the world. Place objects, change the time of day, or do other, less-obvious things to solve various puzzles and begin to understand the true nature of the Basilisk in question. A really charming little thing. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4216270/Basilisks_Isles/ Whew! That’s a lot of games, even for one of these. And they’re all interesting as fuck! I hope you check a few of them out, they’re all deserving of your time! Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

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