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.
It has been a while since a proper first-person dungeon crawler crossed our desk from the Commodore 64 scene. So when Labyrinth of Ur showed up, with its grid-based corridors and a lone hero clutching a sword, it got my attention fast.
The game comes from a developer going by Ursimon. It wears its influences openly: Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder are named as the inspiration. Anyone who has spent a few late nights mapping corridors on graph paper will know exactly what kind of game this is trying to be.
There is a twist in how it was made, though. Labyrinth of Ur was written from scratch in C, and Ursimon built it with the help of AI. That detail will spark some debate, and we will come back to it.
Heliobane is the latest modern game to make the trip backwards in time. According to IndieRetroNews, this shoot 'em up started out on Steam and has now been rebuilt for the Amiga 1200 by a developer going by the name Coze. The headline also describes it as an "AI shoot 'em up," which is an interesting label for a game heading to a machine from the early nineties.
I'll be upfront. The original post is light on details. There's no feature list, no breakdown of levels or weapons, and no word on how the port was put together. What we do have is the core idea and one very happy player.
TIL THEY CROAK has one of the more stressful premises I've come across in a while. Someone has planted a bomb in your chest, your heart is about to blow, and the only thing keeping you alive is hitting people. Hard, and often.
The game calls itself a melee-only boomer shooter, which sounds like a contradiction until you think about it for a second. You keep the speed and the room-clearing rhythm of the genre, but you leave the guns at home. A beta sign-up is now open for anyone who wants to try it early.
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