Rising Fox puts you in the paws of a small, quick fox with a very big job. It's a 2D metroidvania built around a hand-crafted pixel art world, and right now anyone curious can try it through an open beta.
I'll be upfront. The genre is crowded, and a cute animal hero alone doesn't sell me anymore. But there are a few details here that caught my attention, and the price of entry for this playtest is simply asking to join.
A Village on the Brink
The setup is classic adventure material. A catastrophe is heading for your home village, and you are the one who has to stop it. That means leaving the familiar behind and heading out across ancient ruins and strange, mysterious lands.
Bon Vivant: Plan the Perfect Party wants you to become the most talked-about host in 1920s Paris. It's a strategy game, but the battlefield is your living room. Your weapons are canapés, armchairs and a carefully picked guest list.
A playtest is now taking sign-ups, and I have to admit, the premise got me. Most strategy games ask you to conquer something. This one asks you to throw a good party.
One Hour, One Party, No Pressure (Okay, Some Pressure)
Each run in Bon Vivant is built around hosting a party that lasts about an hour. The developers make a point of saying that every choice matters, and that seems to be the core hook. You decide what food gets served, what furniture fills the room and, most importantly, who gets an invitation.
Vacuum Pilot 2 is opening its doors to anyone who wants to play. The 2D speedrunning game is now in open beta, and it keeps things simple on the input side: everything runs through your mouse. No keyboard, no controller, just a cursor and a clock that never stops ticking.
The pitch is fast times against players from all over the world. The beta also brings a level editor, ranked play and servers that host up to sixteen racers at once.
Point, Hold, Go
The core idea fits in one sentence. You hold the left mouse button, and your little vacuum pilot speeds toward wherever your cursor happens to be. Let go, and you stop pushing forward. That's the whole control scheme.
Chosen by Odin is a co-op action role-playing game that takes Norse mythology and adds a tabletop twist. The end of the world is coming, cults are pushing it along, and your only hope is a handful of mythological warriors and a set of dice. A playtest is now open for sign-ups, so anyone curious can request access and try it before release.
There's something appealing about a game that treats Ragnarok as a deadline. You aren't just surviving the apocalypse. You're racing it.
Nine Realms, One Bad Day
The setting spans the Nine Realms, the interconnected worlds of Norse myth that include places like Asgard and Midgard. In Chosen by Odin, apocalyptic cults devoted to Ragnarok, the prophesied end of the gods, are working to bring about the final collapse. Your warriors are there to stop them.
Some games want you to save the world. Littlehaven just wants you to make a small town a little nicer to live in. Honestly, that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
The game was playable at Gamescom, the big annual games trade show in Germany. The folks over at Indie Games Plus got their hands on it there and came away charmed. It's a cozy builder about community, decoration and slowly turning a quiet village into somewhere people actually want to be.
The Town's Official Decorator
Here's the setup. You play as a very handy person who has just moved to a small town. Nobody hands you a crisis to fix or a deadline to beat. There's very little pressure on you at all. You spend your days wandering around and making the whole village better, bit by bit.
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