Author: A.K.H.

6 Indian Indie Games Releasing in 2025
The gamedev scene in India has come a long way since the days of making movie based tie-ins. These days, thanks to the wider availability of powerful game engines and other tools required to build high-quality games, there is a thriving indie game community in the country.

In this video, we will take a look at six upcoming indie games that are being made by Indian developers. The games in this list were chosen based on the release date currently displayed on their steam pages. Also, we can certainly expect a whole lot of other interesting games to come out from Indian studios later this year; it’s just that they haven’t finalised their release schedule yet.

To keep track of these and other games being developed by Indian studios, I highly recommend that you follow the list curated by Gamedev.in on Steam.

The steam pages for the games featured in this video can be found below.
1. Abashed – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3116230/Abashed/
2. Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3194550/Bao_Baos_Cozy_Laundromat/
3. Detective Dotson – https://store.steampowered.com/app/2450840/Detective_Dotson/
4. Frontier Paladin – https://store.steampowered.com/app/2804970/Frontier_Paladin/
5. Spook-A-Boo – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3154150/SpookABoo/
6. The Last King – https://store.steampowered.com/app/2307400/The_Last_King/
January 22, 2025
Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat Demo Gameplay

Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat is the third game developed by the one-person studio Destroyer Doggo. It is the latest in a series of desktop-focused idle games that were inspired by the success of Rusty’s Retirement. This isn’t just a 1:1 copy though. The developer has taken the core concept and come up with his own interpretation of it. And it involves pandas.

Before we proceed, I need to put in a disclaimer for something important. I have been playtesting this game since its early days of development, and am even listed in the credits as a tester, for which I am quite thankful to Prateek, the developer of the game.

This means that my opinion about the game might be a bit biased, but if you have seen some of my older reviews, you might know that I always try my best to provide a balanced opinion, highlighting both the positives and negatives of a game. And that’s what I’ll try to do here as well. I will put up a review once the full game is out, and in this video I will mostly be showcasing gameplay from the demo version, which you can try out for yourself right now.

January 15, 2025
World 6-1: Channel Update

A brand new year has started, and it’s time for another channel update. Over the past 14 months, I have tried various formats for the channel, and tested different types of videos, in order to attract more viewers.

The results have been a modest success, with the channel acquiring a little over 8900 views. That’s not a lot in the grand scale of things, but it’s not a totally small number either. At this point, I know what sort of content works best for my channel, and that is gameplay or reviews of recently released games.

At the end of 2024, it was time for me to make an important decision – should I try to continue growing the channel with further experiments, or should I focus on other projects. After all, from day one, I have been clear that running this youtube channel was only a part-time pursuit.

And after much thought, I have decided that I’m going to go easy on the channel going forward. It means I’m not going to entirely shut down operations. The channel will still remain active.

The only change is that I will no longer stick to a strict schedule of uploading every single week. I started season one with two uploads per week, and that gradually came down to one upload per week. Going forward, it is going to be open-ended, with new uploads going up only when I feel I have something interesting to share.

This relaxed schedule means it no longer makes sense to have quarterly seasons. So going forward, each season will run for an entire year.

That was it for the channel update. As always, thanks to each and every one of you who have supported my work so far. Wish you all a Happy New Year!

January 1, 2025
2024: Year in Review

2024 is on its way out. It wasn’t as big a year for gamers as 2023 was, and it was certainly a much more scarier year for developers, as the industry continued to remain unstable and layoffs continued to happen. Still, 2024 managed to produce some noteworthy games, and a lot of stuff happened that will no doubt affect the next year in gaming.

In this recap video, let us take a look at some notable games, as well as some notable events that shaped the year.

December 25, 2024
Monster Hunter Wilds: Open Beta Recap

The open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds offered a generous trial of the game’s core systems, allowing players to get a taste of what to expect from the full game. Returning players of the franchise will be able to appreciate several quality of life improvements, while new players will get a very well-designed tutorial that lets them understand the basics of monster hunting.

The beta focused on showcasing three things: character creation, a trial of the main story, and an open-world hunt of a monster called Doshaguma. Let me quickly run through all of them.

December 18, 2024
My First Gran Turismo: Review

My First Gran Turismo is a free-to-play driving simulator that is essentially a demo for Gran Turismo 7. It is targeted specifically at a group of players who have never played racing games before, but have been curious about them. This demo is designed as a friendly introduction to Gran Turismo, which continues to be the best-selling franchise in the history of PlayStation consoles.

This review doesn’t really need to exist, because why watch a review of a demo when you can go download it for free right now?

But…I am making this video for a very niche audience, which includes people who already own the full version of Gran Turismo 7, but are curious to see if My First GT can act as a lightweight alternative to the bulky GT7. And the short answer is, no, not really.

Developer Polyphony have been very careful not to include too much content in this demo so that once you are done, there’s little reason to come back. But, that doesn’t mean existing players of GT7 shouldn’t give this demo a try, because you can still finish it in a couple of hours or less, and walk away with 18 free cars that you can sell in GT7 for a neat amount of credits. Apart from that, it is not the GT7-lite experience that some people were expecting.

December 11, 2024
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Secrets of the Spires: Review

Secrets of the Spire is the second DLC for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and it is a lot of fun, as long as you enjoyed the base game. I said the same thing for my recent review of the new Star Wars Outlaws DLC, and it’s not a coincidence. Both DLCs were developed by the same Ubisoft subsidiary – Massive Entertainment. It’s no small feat that two teams within the same studio were able to release two high-quality DLCs in the span of a week.

Sadly, similar to Outlaws, Frontiers of Pandora also has been largely forgotten by the larger gaming community, due to its average launch reviews, so only a small portion of the people who bought the base game will actually discover this second DLC. And once again, Ubisoft’s marketing team is partially to blame. There was no trailer or details on what to expect from this DLC until after the DLC was launched. They did the same with the Star Wars DLC as well, so I’m not sure why they have adopted this strange strategy.

Anyway, Secrets of the Spire is a massive improvement over the first DLC, the Sky Breaker. It finally gives you a new gameplay mechanic in the form of a mounted crossbow, which you can use while flying your Ikran. The new map looks great, and while the story is once again a bit dull, the level design and general gameplay offer a good mix of missions that kept me going. Best of all, at nearly six hours for the main quests alone, this is a much longer DLC than the first one, and is quite memorable as well.

December 4, 2024
Star Wars Outlaws: Wild Card – Review

Wild Card is the first DLC, or “story pack” for Star Wars Outlaws, and it has come out a little less than three months after the base game’s launch. As a reminder, the launch of the base game was criticized so much that it is rumored to have been part of the reason for the delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The key points of criticism were the forced stealth sections, and the general feeling of the world not being interesting enough. While the second part is now too late to change, Ubisoft have done their best to make the first part more tolerable.

Along with the release of Wild Card, a huge title update to the base game was also released, which makes all the stealth sections in the game totally optional. You can still use stealth if you want, but if you get caught, or if you ignore it, you can continue the mission with direct action. This applies to missions in the new story pack as well, and it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the level designers, who had to work with this restriction in mind.

Anyway, Wild Card is a brief, standalone Star Wars adventure. Is it going to be nominated for any game of the year lists like the Elden Ring DLC? Probably not. But if you’re among those who liked the positive aspects of Star Wars Outlaws, then Wild Card is a good excuse to get back into the game.

November 27, 2024
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Gameplay Impressions

MS Flight Sim 2024 got off to a very rough start, with thousands of eager aviators trying to login on day one, only to be blocked by a login queue and multiple server issues. I logged in around two hours after the global launch and was fortunate enough to get in quite quickly, and it didn’t me long to discover that behind all the online barricades, there was actually a very technically well-built game waiting to be discovered.

Before I proceed, let me mention that this is not a full review of the game. I am not a serious flight sim player, and I am not too much of a casual flyer either, because flying even casually is more stressful than playing a racing simulator seriously. If this title was not on game pass, I would certainly not give it a try. But it is a day one release on game pass, and it seemed like something different from what I usually play.

With that said, let’s look at what this game has to offer to people like me, who just want to play it out of curiosity, and not for actually using it as a flight simulator.

November 23, 2024
IGDC 2024 Recap
The 16^th edition of the India Game Developer Conference was held from November 13 to 15, 2024. I have been attending this conference for quite a few years now, but this was the first time that I took out my phone and pointed the camera everywhere I went.

The resulting “vlog” is linked to this post, but I also wanted to link to the many interesting games I saw at the event, that I could not highlight in the video to avoid it running for more than an hour.

In alphabetical order, here are some of the games showcased at the event. I am only including games that have a steam page or official website available as a bare minimum, to allow for readers to discover more about these games. This is not an exhaustive list. I will add to it as and when I collect more store page/website links.
November 20, 2024