Finnish road trip and cyber-chats

Plus horror shooters, fishing RPGs, and a very strategic auto-battler

Happy 2025 everyone! I hope that you are all entering the new year well rested, and ready to tackle another year. 2025 is going to be a pretty big one! We already saw NVIDIA dropping the release date for the 50 series GPUs, Genki leaked a whole bunch of info about the Nintendo Switch 2, with a potential release of April this year, and of course more games are on the way. I'm sure we will also see another slew of layoffs and corporate buffoonery, but I'm choosing to remain willfully ignorant until proven otherwise. NOTHING CAN GO WRONG THIS YEAR, RIGHT FOLKS?

My holiday period was focused on my family, but I did manage to get some big ticket items out of the way. I finally finished Persona 5 and I can confidently say that yeah, I get why people like this games now. Sure, I didn't love it as much as many other folks do, but I sure did like it enough that I am going to get around to P3 Reloaded later this year. I also started off my new year playing 1000X RESIST, and just like... wow... what a piece of narrative art. I will refrain from any in-depth chatter about it considering my former ties to the publisher, but I will say that if you have ANY interest in narrative games, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I will be honest, I liked it but was not in love with it after a few hours. Then Chapter 6 onwards hit me like a tonne of bricks and I walked away with my undisputed favorite game of 2024.

But enough about old games, let's take a look a batch of new ones to kick off the Indie Release Dispatch for 2025!

And what games came out this week?

My Summer Car

Developer: Amistech Games
Steam rating: Overwhelmingly Positive
Store page

My Summer Car is a wild mish-mash of genres that puts you in the 1990's Finnish countryside as you scavenge your way to building, tuning, and maintaining your dream summer ride. You also have to work, and look after yourself too, managing your hunger with sausages, and thirst with many frothy beers.

This is not a casual romp. You will literally be building an engine from hundreds of parts strewn around the area, going to your day job, and even dancing at a club house with a fully backing band. It looks janky in a way that harkens back to the early 00's that I appreciate, and while this is very much not MY thing, I am sure car fanatics like Hot Rice from our community will absolutely love it.

S4U: CITYPUNK 2011 AND LOVE PUNCH

Developer: U0U Games
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store page

Look. I worked on both the Orwell and Hacknet series. Some of my favourite narrative experiences are when you are sat at an immersive computer terminal and are digging through people's data. Games like Hypnospace Outlaw, those games are completely my shit. So when S4U: CITYPUNK 2011 AND LOVE PUNCH landed in my inbox the other week, I was 100% sold on what it's doing here.

You play Miki, a part-time operator who chats on behalf of clients online. It's 2011. You are using a clicky-clacky keyboard in various chat windows to make your living, make interesting decisions, and create your online legacy. There are over 300 choices to make, so that makes me think that your story could be pretty unique. It also looks like there's a section where you can step away from the screen and purchase some items and upgrades to make your life better. Think VA11-HALL-A, another one of my favourites. I am definitely picking this one up.

CRUEL

Developer: James Dornan
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store page

Another year, another onslaught of interesting Boomer Shooters. This time it's CRUEL from solo dev, James Dornan. A fast-paced run-and-gun horror game with some Roguelike touches, CRUEL throws you into a bizarre situation. You find a body in a hotel, and without hesitation you pick up the weapon laying next to them, and tackle the horrors ahead.

Shotguns. Chainsaws. Weird goblin looking folks?! CRUEL has that Hotline Miami pounding soundtrack that will keep you pushing forward at breakneck speed as you try to survive the onslaught and I assume, escape the hotel. Looks really neat, has a lot of style, and I have to imagine it will be getting a lot more attention over the next few weeks.

The Last Flame

Developer: Hotloop
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store page

Remember when Auto Chess came out? That was a moment in time where it seemed that a new genre was going to just take over the rise of deckbuilders that were hitting the space at that time. Alas, DOTA Uverlords failed, Auto Chess moved into the mobile space, and I feel like I personally have not seen much action in the space for a while. This week The Last Flame has exited a year-long Early Access period to deliver an endless roguelike auto-battler that focuses on strategic builds and decision making.

Each run has you crafting the perfect party, with thousands of synergies to consider. Then you move through a run and make decisions between combats, upgrade your party, and get as far as possible.

My brain is too small for something like this, but I really appreciate it. I hope some of you out there will check it out though, because it looks to have some great ideas and the production values are pretty impressive for a first release.

Sea Fantasy

Developer: METASLA
Steam rating: Mostly Positive
Store page

So yeah, the trailer may be a little too long, but Sea Fantasy looks like a pretty fun time for retro RPG fans out there. The main focus here is you need to save the world by fishing, finally thrusting everybody's favourite side activity into the mainstream! Travel around on your boat, explore foreign lands, and learn about an epic story featuring some world serpents by the looks of it, and how your knowledge of a fishing rod and the marine life could save the world from chaos.

That's a wrap!

Nothing extra to plug this week. We do have some new post ideas starting from next week, and I have a series I am working on that I'm pretty excited to dive into. That's going to take a while - I want to get a bunch of them prepped so I can drop them at a pretty frequent cadence so expect that later on I guess.

As always, if you enjoyed the newsletter please share it with a friend. Consider dropping a few dollars into our Ko-Fi cup to help pay for our server and new games to cover, join our community on Discord, and follow us over on Bluesky! Blue has been doing a bunch of streams lately too, so go give them a follow and help him grow on Twitch.

See you next week.