Indies to Catch in October 2026!
Spooktober is upon us! Autumn, full blown. A lovely time of hoodies and collecting chestnuts. Of warm days and cold morning. A time to dust off the scented candles, to fix up my tea corner with fresh leaves and concoctions. A beautiful time when mornings come late and evening cut it earlier and earlier day after day. Also… A time for Gaming. It is that nearing-of-the-end-of-the-year time, which gets very heavy in new games, as everyone is slowly ramping up to the season of biggest events and sales. No wonder there are too many games to talk about, but as always, I want to bring to your attention a few I am excited for to play this month! Let’s roll.
TRUCKFUL
A beautiful and deeply frustrating game, but with this kind of frustration that never turns bothersome and more just tickle the desire to Do Better. TRUCKFUL biggest selling point lays in its astonishing art style and presentation. It’s vibrantly colourful, stunningly beautiful; and yet, manages to be at times both tranquil and cosy as well as ominous and spooky. There are spots of familiar civilization, huffy patrons and customers asking for deliveries… and there are moments of solitude with rumbling truck engine as your only company as you traverse some forlorn, forgotten pieces of nature.
But there’s more! Horror! Mystery! Eldritch engine of spookiness! And some proper gaming about balancing a very wobbly cargo on your very shoddy pickup truck, which seems to want to spill out at any moment, at every turn and any singular bump in the cracked asphalt… It can get tedious, yes, to constantly roll back to pick the dropped goods and folks back, but that’s where the FUN happens. It’s a bit of a puzzle to fit the items on your back properly. To find a balance of proper speed and turning without constantly dropping your stuff. And as you slowly upgrade your ancient truck, bit by bit, it should become easier, more manageable. It is fun, even if it can pluck a string of your nerves here and there. One thing for sure - it’s a delightfully unique game that somehow flashes soft nostalgia lights in the fog of my memories.
LEGION WAS HERE
Now this is what I like to see - a twisted idea and possibly a new sub-genre in the making! Someone clever called Geoffroy Monde figured out that, hey, character creation is such a big mechanic in so many games… Why not MAKE a game focused entirely on that bit? You might scoff and think that’s an old idea - plenty of dress up a doll game out there focused on fashion and looking snazzy, right? But what if it is not about dressing up, but a detective game instead? Where you’re a secret agent, codename Legion, and for each mission you undergo an extensive plastic surgery to put on a new face?
And the whole fun part lies that you never ever get a simple photo to recreate. You get… bits and pieces of information. Partial picture. A sketch. Descriptions. An assortment of data you need to correctly interpret and parse to sculpt yourself a spanking new identity! I love that idea. And it seems the game doesn’t end there, as you also need to properly study the life of the person you’re going to impersonate so you can pass the mission swimmingly when engaging in a conversation with people who knew the original. Clever, funny, focused. This is the kind of ideation that I want to see manifested into new games.
THANK YOU BUS DRIVER
I will always have a bit of a soft spot for whatever projects Double Fine is working on. No matter if you like their games or not it is hard to deny they are artistic about them. Always bold, always zany, never doing anything mundane or by-the-book. THANK YOU BUSDRIVER seems to be a smaller game baked by a subdivision called Action Labs, and it is looking hilarious and promising. A chaotic ride with goofball energies soaking through screen.
As the title suggest, you’re a bus driver, in a strange town filled to the brim with wacky characters. Talking skateboards, anthropomorphic microwaves, hardworking chicken and even Steves and Georges. You need to get them around town proper, pick on new passengers, make good time, the usual fair… But you also get a selection of weirdo rules, it seems, and the Godly Power of Smackdown in your stretchy limb to “correct” the unruly passengers being a menace to the society-at-large with their blatant disregard to said rules. Smack’em. Toss’em off the bus. Make sure everyone else is happy. Don’t crash too much (only an acceptable degree of crashing is permitted). It looks like superb fun, and I am excited to give it a go.
DUPERY
What if old school MAFIA game was a single player entertainment? To the uninitiated, by MAFIA I am talking the old social game player with many people by the table where each assume a secret role. There are traitors and thugs and bosses and such and by asking question and doing variety of simple actions you try to deduce who’s who and fast. I believe the original was about werewolves? Anyway, the point is that you have a selection of folks with hidden roles and using their actions you try to figure out what they are!
And in DUPERY each case is a conundrum of similar nature. You’re given a bit of info, a spread of roles and what those roles can and can’t do. Then based on that info you try to chain up a rational, logical pathway of actions and possibilities. Innocents can do no wrong but can still annoy you here and there. Meddlers are not culprits, but their mechanics will make sure to screw your deductions. Traitors and Underlings are the main baddies, and you’ll have to pin them down in variety of scenarios… And best part? You’re not having your leisure to solve cases at languid pace. Each action costs you time, and plenty of roles have time sensitive triggers… Take too long, and a hitman will take someone out. A traitor turns. A bad guy does the deed. In short, it’s an excellent and robust deduction game that will have you scratch your noggin and take hefty notes to get things done right.
SHADY BUSINESS
What a premise! On that alone I got curious in this game, but the gameplay itself looks interesting in a cosy, gloomy way, too! A nice fit for Spooktober, I think. Anyway, the idea is that you’re a lamp maker for a specific clientele. And by specific, I mean villains of every shade of evil! Vampire lords, criminal masterminds, twisted old ladies, monsters and creatures of the night… Why? Well, no proper evil lair would work without a lovely lighting fixture! How could a monstrous naval captain welcome guests to his desk if his desk wasn’t decorated with a properly maritime and ominous lamp? You get the gist.
The fun part of course seems to lay is a bit of creative freedom when crafting the lamps. You have, it seems, a pretty hefty selection of pieces, materials and hand-crafting bits to make each fixture have its own flavour. But you can’t go too crazy, either, as each customer has their likes and desires when it comes to their desk illumination - and so, as they handle you their brief, your goal is to help them realize their dream of possessing a lovely lamp that fits their whole vibe. It’s a fun premise and I am here for it.
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