I recently attended a screening of Indie Game: The Movie and after this my interest was thoroughly peeked on indie games. Once I came home I looked at my Steam library and saw that in fact I had one game made by one of the teams featured in Indie Game: The Movie. So I started playing The Binding of Isaac which was made by the “Super Meat Boy Team”. Isaac is a combination of the original Legend of Zelda added with the hardness of Super Meat Boy and blended together with the crazy art design that the Meat Boy team is known for.

After playing it for a while and dying multiple times I decided to check out another indie like game that a friend had given me, Psyconauts. Honestly I haven’t played much past the intro of the game, but I have watched some parts of a Let’s Play. The game follows young psychonaut named Raz, as he goes through Psychonaut training camp. In the course of the game Raz has to get all the camp’s merit badges before his dad comes to pick him up, since he infiltrated the camp illegally.

After that I did a quick search of any new indie releases and stumbled upon the survival horror game Lone Survivor. I watched the trailer, and the music alone grabbed me and would not let me the fuck go. It was on sale for seven dollars and I picked it up faster than you could believe. Set in a post zombie apocalyptic world players step into the shoes of “You”, a medically masked man who no longer can tell the difference between the real world and events that seem to have transpired or events that may have never happened in the first place. For the first hour or so of game you are trapped on the second floor of your apartment building. During this first part of your physiological ordeal, you are somewhat forced to learn on the job, when it comes to solving puzzles and fighting back the faceless zombies. To combat the faceless zombies you can hide against certain walls and wait for them to pass by, or you can survive long enough to get a gun. Your health is only shown by how red the screen gets after you have been attacked, and the only way to regain health is by cooking food. The more complex the meal you make the more health you regain.

Last week, for those of you who don’t use steam, the action game Bastion went on sale for six dollars. Much like Lone Survivor, Bastion is set in a post apocalyptic world, the events of which were called “The Calamity”. Players accompany the silent protagonist only known as “The Kid”, with narration from the omnipresent Rucks whose deep rough voice gives even the most manly of men boners. Bastion is a 2D isometric action game, the goal of which is to collect crystal cores to rebuild the hub of the remnants of human society, The Bastion. With each core gained, parts of the Bastion start to return and “The Kid” gets to pick what shops and/or buildings go in the renewed areas.

Finally, the last two indie games that I have been playing in my revolution are Cave Story +, and MineCraft. I will quickly cover MineCraft by saying ninety percent of the time that I am playing on RootBeerKing’s server, I am blowing up shit just to see how much damage I can do, and also I am trying to see if I can crash the server.

Finally with Cave Story +, I get that the world is now run by rabbits and there are only a few humans left in the world, and that the player plays some sort of robot boy who is sent out in the world to save a human girl, and that the rabbits are KKK style racist, but other than those few details I really haven’t figured out what the hell is going on in that game.

In conclusion I would recommend all these games as an amazing introduction to the indie genre; which seems to have entered an amazing golden era, with many games that are slated to be really great, for example Penny Arcade Adventures III which has been taken over by Zeboyd games the creators of Breath of Death VII and Cuthulu Saves the World, also Mojang’s Scrolls is shaping up to look like an amazing follow up to MineCraft. But out of all of these upcoming indie games the one I am most looking forward to is Runic’s TouchLight 2, which promises great multiplayer and massive steps forward in gameplay and design since TorchLight 1. Indie games are defiantly here to stay and if they continue to do what they are doing then I will keep supporting them.

What indie games have you, the readers, been playing lately? Please join in on the discussion below.