Wilderings: The Lost Spring wants you to make friends with spirits and then go fix a broken world with them. That's the pitch, and it's a good one. The game is a creature-collecting roguelite that mixes fast action with open-world exploration, and its beta is now taking sign-ups.
What caught my eye is who is behind it. Wilderings comes from Herobeat, the studio that made Endling and won a BAFTA for it. For anyone outside the UK, BAFTA is the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, whose game awards are among the bigger honors in the industry. That pedigree doesn't guarantee anything, but it does make this one worth a closer look.
Dwelltris takes the most familiar puzzle game on the planet and bends it around a globe. Beta sign-ups are now open for this block-stacker, which puts falling pieces on a sphere and asks you to keep something called Core Stability from bottoming out.
I'll be honest. A new Tetris riff doesn't usually make me sit up. Dwelltris is different because of where the game takes place. The well has turned into a ball.
A Well With No Walls
The basic idea is that lines don't stop at the edge of a board. In Dwelltris there is no edge. Rows wrap all the way around the sphere, so a line keeps going until it comes back to where it started.
Some people dread the first proper snowfall of the year. Others secretly love it, because it means grabbing a shovel and turning a buried driveway back into something you can walk on. Clear the Snow is built for that second group, and it's now taking sign-ups for a playtest.
The pitch is simple. Up to four friends team up to dig a snowed-in city out from under the white stuff, using everything from humble shovels to snow blowers and heavy machinery. There's no monster in the basement, no timer ticking down to doom. It's just you, your friends and a lot of snow.
October has arrived, and the indie release calendar is already getting a little spooky. The Indie Informer's weekly roundup for October 5 to 9 compares this month's games to autumn leaves: they're turning darker and falling fast. I can't argue with that. Three of the four games out this week lean into mystery, and two of them are about as cozy as a flickering streetlight.
First up is Echo Weaver, which arrives on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC on October 8. It's a Metroidvania, but with a twist that caught my eye right away. Instead of collecting new gadgets or double jumps to open up the map, your progress comes from what you know.
Some games want you to rush, and some games just want you to sit down and poke at things for a while. Burial for a Butterfly is firmly in the second camp. Indie Games Plus recently went hands-on with a short demo, and their impressions describe a quiet, narrative-driven slice-of-life game that cares more about curiosity than about clocks.
You play as a lone figure on a very small planet. That's the whole setup at the start, and it works. There are bits and pieces to interact with and puzzles to solve, but nothing is timed and nothing is breathing down your neck. The point is to explore the little island you're standing on and find out what it does when you mess with it.
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