Simply keeping on top of the steady release of “AAA” game is challenging enough these days, with a larger market than ever before, and a massive number of devs and publishers trying to sate that demand. Unfortunately, that often means far too many good indie titles fly under the radar without the recognition they deserve. This weekly post aims to highlight some of those games we’ve got around to playing but never got around to reviewing.

Graveyard Keeper

I can’t think of that many games that start out encouraging the desecration of corpses, and the acquisition of fraudulent documentation, which’ll allow you to sell “meat” to a local tavern to earn gold. Of course, you don’t have to do it, but the floating skull that serves as an early companion and guide demands alcohol, and that requires gold.

Graveyard Keeper is an isometric, adventure/RPG/simulation game (with classic 16-bit visuals) that tasks you with juggling your protagonists stamina demands while he tackles a myriad of activities, such as tending for the titular graveyard, gaining favor with dodgy NPCs (usually by crafting items for them), and building up a self-sustaining home; all the while trying to gain components for a portal that’ll get them back to their own world.

You charge around a small but dense map - the bulk of which is your expansive graveyard and a large village - trying to stay ahead of a frantic day-night cycle, scavenging for resources like wood, metal, and stone, while also gathering or growing crops for creating food items that restore some of your limited stamina meter. You can sleep anytime to restore stamina, but each day (of a 6-day week) brings with it a specific NPC you’ll be trying to please, and you need to plan your outings carefully (as well as find time to function as an undertaker, should the carrot-craving commie-donkey bother to bring you corpses).

Basic activities and crafting all earn you skill points you use for upgrading several research paths, which in turn gives you more crafting or activity options (like woodwork, masonry, farming, and cooking). The number of options can be overwhelming at first - and some bad choices can leave you grinding out research points for a while - but Graveyard Keeper has no real failstate, nor does it punish you with deadlines (though missing an NPC for the week can be frustrating). You can do everything at your own pace, making it a great relaxing title with a short enough gameplay loop that you’ll always be trying to perform one more take; like skinning the recently deceased to craft hide for armour!

You can pick up Graveyard Keeper on PC, Xbox One (and it’s currently part of the Xbox Game Pass subscription), and it’s coming to Nintendo Switch soon.

Outer Wilds

Games with time loops have always been a favourite of mine, especially when there’s an intriguing narrative payoff. Outer Wilds has a cool backstory but the time loop concept is best realized in the fantastic gameplay loop. This first-person adventure puts you in the boots of a young alien about to leave his home planet for the first time (in a questionably low-tech ship). Your species has seemingly spent years exploring their solar system, trying to unravel the mystery of alien races that have come before. Unfortunately for them, the next 22 real-time minutes is all they have left before the sun goes nova.

After encountering a strange alien statue prior to launch (which records your actions in each cycle), you set out into a surprisingly complex, yet illogically tiny solar system, to explore entire planets - which are never as simple as they seem from orbit - decipher ancient writing, and follow the clues left by prior explorers; clues that which may hold the secret of quantum travel needed to save your world. Although you’ll wake up on your home planet with the world reset after each cycle, your memories remains, and you’ll slowly complete a sprawling flowchart of connected clues, which serve to guide you on your adventures and, ultimately, towards the end-game. It’s a simple yet effective way of keeping you on track in a game that makes its surprisingly easy to lose yourself (and/or kill yourself).

You’ll fly between worlds (taking off and landing with an impressive lack of grace); jetpack around on the surface of planets or in space (generally inadvisable), all the while keeping track of oxygen, fuel, and your health; collect weird artifacts to collect and decipher ancient text; meet other explorers from your home planet; all before incineration by supernova and the start of the next cycle. It’s annoying that you only really save the game every 22 minutes (or in the event of premature death) but the concept is unique and strangely captivating. In true Groundhog Day fashion, it encourages risky exploration that typically offers up some narrative or visually spectacular rewards (and some spectacular deaths).

Although Outer Wilds sports chunky, stylised, and charming visuals, I never expected the game to capture the terror of exploring the unknown so effectively. While exploring the shattered surface of "Brittle Hollow", I accidentally plunged off a ledge towards the core, now occupied by a black hole. Desperately gunning my jetpack did nothing as the shifting gravity flung me outwards - a brief moment of hope - before my trajectory eventually plunged me into the black hole. I was warped to a white hole on the edge of the system, left adrift to die amongst the twisted remnants of a space station and shattered planetary fragments, the horizon an ominous red-tinged ripple of gravity waves. It was truly terrifying, a moment etched in my gaming memory, and I can;t think of any experience quite like it.

You can pick up Outer Wilds on PC, Xbox One, and it’s currently on Xbox Game Pass.



Let us know in the comments below what you think of our choices, or if you’ve been playing an indie game this week you’d like to promote to the community.

Follow the link to see more of our picks for Indies of the Week.