It's Saturday! Who needs footie pajamas, cartoons, and sugar-flavoured cereal when you have free indie games to start the weekend off right? This week: a cosmic car ride on a trippy alien planet, a Gameboy Color-styled survival horror adventure from a first time developer, and an eerie but brief tale about a man who finds himself stranded in a village that really doesn't like outsiders. So sit back, relax, and play on! (... and if you want to wear your footie jammies, well, I won't tell anyone... as long as you hit me up with some of those Frooty Puffs!)
Naut (Windows, Mac, Linux, Unity Browser, free)- The Klondike collective invites you to go on a surreal drive across the surface of an alien planet. Hop in your car and trundle across a landscape filled with lightning, storms, and distant houses with strange residents, and then inevitably flip your car end-over-end because you didn't slow down fast enough to avoid a wee little bump in the road.
Overlooker (Windows, free)- "Gameboy Color-inspired survival horror"? Suits me! This is new developer Connor O.R.T. Linning's first game, made in just under a month, but while it has some rough edges as you might expect, it also has a lot of promise, so be sure to leave constructive feedback if you play! Play as a woman who wakes up in a dark and foreboding abandoned building... well, abandoned except for all the monsters, that is!
All The Way Down (Windows, free)- Sanctuary Interactive delivers an extremely short but extremely eerie Lovecraftian point-and-click adventure about a man who gets stranded in a small town and, not heeding the locals' advice to move on, gets more than a bed for the night. Great artwork and storytelling makes for an excellent creepy experience, but don't expect much of an ending!
Naut is really pretty. The music is cheerful and makes what might seem as creepy and surreal NPCs just seem friendly and strange. The pinkish terrain makes me think of driving in the desert.
It's a shame the driving is kind of a pain in the butt. It'd be nice if obstacles on the road were less likely to flip you, and if every time you flipped the car back, it landed right side up instead of on its other side.
Evidently everyone on this planet is as lousy a driver as I, given the number of cars I found laying upside down or on top of houses.
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