Verdict: ★★★✩✩ (6.5/10)

Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist is the long-awaited sequel to 2017's indie artist sim Passpartout: The Starving Artist, capturing the essence of the original game while expanding upon its mechanics to develop a unique gameplay experience. Expanding upon the first game’s “living puppet theater” aesthetic, Passpartout 2 features an actual traversable isometric map designed like a diorama for the player to explore. The game follows the journey of eponymous French artist Passpartout as they rebuild their reputation as an artist in the fictional town of Phénix following their disappearance from the public eye after the events of the first game (where Passpartout's initial rise to fame was depicted).

Passpartout 2 boasts a heavily improved gameplay experience. While its predecessor confined the player's artistry to fixed locations, such as at Passpartout's garage at the beginning of the game to Passpartout's new office by its end, the sequel allows the player to make and sell art all throughout the town or in their own studio (after earning enough money to buy it, of course). Commissions from NPCs are now available, as Passpartout is tasked to help out with developing art for the various denizens of Phénix and revive the art scene in an art-starved town.

Verdict: ★★★★✩ (7.5/10)

The Last Worker is a narrative-based adventure game centered around the reign of a corporate giant in a grim dystopian world. The narrative follows blue-collar worker Kurt (and definitely not Bill from The Last of Us) as he is thrust in the middle of the years-long battle between world’s largest retailer Jüngle and activist organization S.P.E.A.R. Kurt is a warehouse courier in one of Jüngle's "fulfillment centers," and works as the company's only remaining human employee — as the company's activities have since become automated and its former employees "terminated" — under the watchful eye of secretive Mr. Jüngle (who bears a marked but totally coincidental resemblance to a certain real-life businessman). In his journey, Kurt befriends the sarcastic robot drone Skew with a pottymouth Scottish accent and the S.P.E.A.R. drone HoverBird.

The story is played out in the first-person and involves moments of actual play, making it much less like a Telltale journey and more like The Stanley Parable. It features a well-designed mix of stealth exploration and riveting courier work to tell its story, as Kurt slowly uncovers the deepest and darkest secrets of his employer of 25 years. Simple puzzles are integrated into the various interspersed stealth missions which, while increasingly difficult through the course of the game, are relatively simple.

Read the full review here

Verdict: ★★★★★ (10/10)

King of the Castle is a player-led medieval fantasy narrative masquerading as a political party game with its host-and-audience interaction scheme, easy-to-use interface and design, and high level of player autonomy. The story of each game follows the political machinations of a newly-crowned monarch and their political advisors — composed of chiefs and nobles from the various territories under the crown’s rule — as they scheme against one another to gain ultimate control of the kingdom.

Gameplay is split between the monarch (the host) and the nobles (the audience), all of whom serve collectively as counsel to the monarch and effectively puppet their every decision. Each session pulls three nobles from a set of five: the Barons of the March, the Chiefs of the North, the Counts of the East, the Grandees of the South, and the Patricians of the Coast. The audience is then split into these three factions. From this comes the two-tier voting system that is central to the game’s mechanics: each “noble” (audience member) from a given domain would vote from a set of choices that respond to some given event, and the majority response would become that territory’s vote on the council. The decisions of the crown as such rest on the overall majority vote, influenced by the laws that the monarch would set for that particular voting session. King of the Castle has mechanical parallels to 2016 strategy game Reigns as different elements of the kingdom such as its treasury, stability, military, faith, etc. must be kept in balance to ensure the dynasty’s survival.

Read the full review here

Verdict: ★★★★✩ (8.5/10)

Scars Above is an indie video game title that does its best to emulate some of the 1960s’ most memorable alien invasion literature, unashamedly incorporating various themes from extraterrestrial stories to craft its adventure-based storyline. It works, for the most part. Developed by studio Mad Head Games and published by Prime Matter, Scars Above follows the story of scientist Kate Ward of the Sentient Contact Assessment and Response (SCAR) team as they interact with an alien structure known as the “Metahedron.” It’s a very 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque story, but I’d be lying if I said the game didn’t deliver with its extraterrestrial terror.

From the get-go, Scars Above flaunts its strengths as a tried-and-true sci-fi narrative, opening with a surprisingly well-developed — though technically unpolished — cinematic onboard the SCAR team’s starship as they prepare to conduct fieldwork to understand the Metahedron’s mysterious appearance and origins. Their attempts to probe into the impenetrable construction goes awry, and the team is transported à la 2001 to a hostile extraterrestrial planet. Kate comes across plinths that echo the monoliths of the Space Odyssey series, meets an imposing alien that looks suspiciously like Dragon Ball’s Frieza, and the game takes off from there.

Read the full review here

Verdict: ★★★✩✩ (6/10)

Developed by India-based one-person studio “chapliboy,” Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions is one of those one-in-a-hundred games with a truly bizarre premise. An interesting thematic mix of pirates and the corporate world, Konkan Coast follows the eponymous tech startup “Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions” as it works on the development of a new simulation program — which they dub the SimEngine — to help manage the flow of pirate traffic due to a “sharp increase in pirate crashes.”

The player begins the game with Swami, the new CEO of “Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions” who is tasked with testing out various scenarios and ensuring their product’s viability. As the game progresses, the SimEngine goes through new iterations, and the company’s lead designer Mani rolls out new updates while the market-savvy Rajan meets with potential investors and clients.

Konkan Coast’s simulation mechanics echo a diluted version of block-based programming in its drag-and-drop commands. Each level’s board contains black-sailed pirate ships that need to stop at pirate harbors and white-gold merchant ships that need to pass gold-filled docks; every other game element is designed to help or hinder the player (sometimes both) as they look to set up an iteration of the scenario where all ships reach their destination without crashing.