Break out the lederhosen, because some of this month’s best indie games are coming to us from Germany — after all, if there’s one thing that country is known for, it’s playful whimsy.
I was hoping for more romance/dating sims in February, what with Valentine’s Day nearly upon us. But the most lovey new release is Derpy Conga, which has a cute affectionate vibe that’s more friendly than romantic: You bounce about an island, grabbing hands with friendly creatures. Also soon-to-release is Super Dungeon Maker, which isn’t inherently romantic but I suppose you could use it to craft a gift for a hot nerd you’ve got a crush on. And then there’s Infernax, a violent castle platformer with lots of gore; I would not be surprised if somewhere in the game a monster rips out the player’s heart, which is what Valentine’s Day has really meant to so many of us.
Anyway! Let's check out some new games!
DERPY CONGA
Friendship and physics collide and then comedically fall over in this cute little offspring of Katamari and Fall Guys. You play as a little blob that needs to gather its friends on a pretty island, which is accomplished by running up to them and grabbing their hands. As the chain of friends grows longer, it also grows more unwieldy, resulting in a chaotic undulating mob. Online and couch co-op multiplayer allows friends to join the messy silly pile, and clever puzzles thicken the plot. A demo version, out now, has somewhat unpolished controls — it sometimes feels more like you’re fighting with the game than playing it — but that will hopefully be addressed in the final release. When you were a kid, did you have that playground game where all the kids join hands and then swing each other around, whipping the adults into a terror that someone’s arm was going to get dislocated? It’s that, but with humming monkey-aliens.
Release date: February 10.
Platforms: Steam and Switch.
SUPER DUNGEON MAKER
It’s sort of a make-your-own-Link-to-the-Past meets Mario Maker. An adorable pixel-art 2D dungeon-builder, this game gives you a palette of clever tiles to build your own animal-inhabited levels full of monsters, puzzles, and traps. An online sharing function allows you to publish your creation, and to sample all the weird worlds made by other players. And pleasantly, there’s a robust Discord community where you can toss ideas around and get help with your more abstruse ideas. (Beta testers have already published tutorials, which is very handy indeed.) New elements have been steadily added throughout the game’s early dev phase, and hopefully that growth will continue after release. An impressively pretty and well-thought-through toy, considering its small (two-person!) development team.
Release date: February 15.
Platforms: Steam.
INFERNAX
If you told me this was an early SNES game I would absolutely believe you, so convincing is Infernax’s tribute to old 16-bit vanias. You are a brave knight slashing your way through a deadly castle, collecting weapons and hopping from platform to platform like it’s 1992 and you just found a new title at Blockbuster to rent before realizing that this game is punishingly difficult and you’ll need to drop far more hours into it than the ones available in just a single weekend. There’s nothing particularly new or innovative here — at least not as far as the promotional materials or early response from testers have indicated. It’s all just finely-done nostalgia for a bygone style. (So why is it a 500 meg download? Oh well.)
Release date: February 14.
Platform: Steam.
