Indies to Catch in April 2026!

Back from a bit of vacations to escape the dreadful cold of early Spring that settled across the land and reset the weary soul. April is already nearing it’s second half over the horizon, but nonetheless, there are still great games to look forward to. And I am more than happy to share a selection of titles I am most excited about. Let’s roll!

CURSED WORDS | 6th April

It’s awesome. That’s pretty much the core review here, in its very essence. I played a bunch of word-driven roguelites before, but CURSED WORDS is so far the best example in a sea of such attempts. Developers on the game Discord revealed why it feels so good – because it doesn’t focus on words. That might sound a little counterintuitive, but it clicked with me once I absolutely milked the demo of every piece of content it packed. See, in other word scrabbling games you win by having a rich lexicon, good eye for finding connections between letters and sometimes utilizing various boosts and tools to get you the score you need.

But in CURSED WORDS your goal is a bit different – it’s about freeing yourself from the tyranny of words! You are attempting to construct an engine that will allow you to key in a word like YZ3!W and the game will be like “Yeah, looks legit to me, here are your points bud!”. Words, symbols, numbers, even chess pieces – get ready to assemble a very eclectic selection of tiles on your journey to smash the required score thresholds and defeat nasty bosses with demanding modifiers.

REPLACED | 14th April

It feels like a decade passed since last time I’ve seen the initial announcement of this title. I might get some dates mixed up in my nogging, after all, time is just an illusion… but still! It was worth the wait, though, and the demo proved that – it is a gorgeous game, a pixel-art crafted to its highest polish, with fantastic art direction, impressive lightwork and atmosphere seeping from every nook and cranny. It is a visual feast to behold, and I am all ready to behold it well.

It also betrayed what kind of game its going to be. I know some would be disappointed by it’s rather rudimentary platforming, pretty basic puzzles and simple combat, but for me it is hardly a thing to notice. The game is clearly a narrative driven experience. A story to tell, a journey of a character to experience. A world to sink into and events to unfold with you as their witness! For a story focused game, I do not mind the mechanics being simple – as long as they are still fun to engage with and doesn’t mess with the flow and pace of the narrative, I am all good. And so, I am very much excited to bite into REPLACED and explore its troubled world through its protagonist eyes.

SHANTY TOWN | 16th April

Gosh do I like a little town builder. Not so long ago I immersed myself in NEON GARTEN – a fantastic, cyberpunky rigid grid district builder, in which you use blocky constructions from a variety of categories to beat the ever-increasing taxes via generating chained combos of income. It was great fun in a tight, little game! SHANTY TOWN demo showed me that I will be in for similar fun time once more, but with a bit more chill vibe and a bit heavier focus on the aesthetics. Sure, the little corners you will create do have their little demands – proper placement will still matter if you wish to keep upgrading your structures. But the big part of the fun lays also in the craftsmanship of the scene. Making it pretty, making it nice… Making it yours.

I greatly enjoyed the intimacy of the scenes in question. There are no sprawling lands to populate, no vast areas to construct massive, jumbled towers of dense populations. It’s always going to be a little spot, a tiny nook or cranny. Little pier, edge of a mountaintop cliff, a shadow of a giant temple, a cutesy bay… A tight spot to fill with some charming and fitting infrastructure. Like crafting a post-card that tries not to focus on the obvious big attractions, but more the real lifeblood of the city quiet spots. And I am into that.

GECKO GODS | 16th April

I liked the demo, quite a lot. It is a very chill game in its core, one more aimed at a relaxed pace and sort of meditative flow. But it doesn’t mean that it is boring or lacking in challenges! No, the whole vibe is sort of an earlier ZELDA games temples, stripped of combat to a high degree and focused entirely on puzzle solving and exploration. Mysterious shrines and temples have plenty of hidden bits up their sleeves, and you’ll need to engage your brain cells a solid bit to figure out a variety of logical and spatial challenges.

Spatial! Yes, that is the “big twist” of the gameplay here – as a little gecko you are quite a climber. Those sticky footies can take you all over the walls and ceilings, flipping camera around, making most geometries an open-ended puzzle. The game is well designed about that aspect of your mobility and plenty of brain teasers are all about utilizing level geometry in some clever fashion. Knowing how to traverse moving elements, in what order to trigger this or that and where to cling to pass through. It’s fun, if a little dizzying at times. GECKO GODS has that warm feeling to it – calm, soothing, but with enough bite behinds its mechanics to keep you curious and engages with its archipelago of scattered puzzle-islands.

TIDES OF TOMORROW | 22 April

The gimmick here is the selling point. What if a narrative game had a different story to tell based on decisions made by someone else? Now that is intriguing. To start a story, pick a playthrough of a ghost from another player and see how your experience will shift due to the picks of that other player you’ve never met? And then your very own story can be used as a seedling for another run? Great stuff.

Everything else works for me here, too! The flooded Waterworldesque post-apocalyptic world. Vibrant colours, great art direction, solid sounding voice acting… It all looks good and promising. If the narrative holds, this might be quite an experience, and frankly, I have rather high hopes considering that the previous game of the developers – ROAD 96 – was a wacky, zany romp with unexpected events and conversations left and right, keeping me well engaged with every twist and turn. So yeah, if TIDES OF TOMORROW are written in similar fashion, with the added spice of someone else changing the world around you with their previous actions, this shapes up to be a rather unique adventure to enjoy. Bring it on, I am ready to dive in.