Category: Season 6

This video almost didn’t exist, because I almost didn’t finish playing the demo for Winds of Arcana: Ruination and was about to rage quit. Some 10-15 minutes into the demo, I came across this fight that seemed simple at first, with an enemy I had already faced earlier, but the twist was that there were two of these enemies at the same time, and the fight area was sealed, giving the player very little room to move around. And then for the next forty minutes, I kept trying again and again to clear the fight, but kept dying, again, and again, and again.

Usually the point of such fights is for the player to learn from their mistakes and try again. But here, even though I knew what I was doing wrong, it came down to how fast you could react to the enemies’ speed, and clearly my reflexes weren’t fast enough. At this point I had two options: either give up and admit that I didn’t have the skill to beat this fight, or seek help from the internet. I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods right then. 

After stepping away for a few minutes to calm down, I hopped into the game’s discord server, and asked for help. One of the devs replied that the fight was frustrating even for some of their own team members. This cheered me up a little bit, making me feel that maybe I wasn’t the worst player in the world. The dev then offered a helpful hint to get past the fight, and sure enough, I cleared it within a few more attempts.

Palm Sugar: A Village Story, also known by its alternate title Palletooru, is the upcoming debut game from Mono Tusk Studios. The demo for this game actually came out a few months back, but I was caught up with covering other games for the channel, and I wasn’t able to play it for a while.

Better late than never, so here’s a brief look at Palm Sugar: A Village Story. The title is pretty descriptive of what you can expect from this game, it is a story set in a village. That village is called Bellampakam, and it is located in South India, more particularly in one of the Telugu states. This is necessary to mention, because the game’s USP is that it offers a glimpse at life in a Telugu village, which I believe hasn’t been explored in a video game till now.

The village certainly takes centerstage throughout the demo. The moment you step out of your house, you are greeted with this colourful and vibrant image of Bellampakam that immediately makes you want to forget the story for a bit and just walk around, see what this place has to offer.

Since this is a demo, we are of course limited as to where we can go and what we can do, but it still felt like we got a pretty decent look at the village, and what to expect from the art style and ambience of the game.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard came out on October 31, 2024, and received pretty good reviews from critics. However, it was kind of a mixed reception. That explains why the scores didn’t cross 85 on either of the two major review aggregator sites, which is usually considered to be the bare minimum for a game to be considered great. 

As for players, well, it was the same response. The game currently has a mostly positive rating on steam, with 70% of the more than 34,000 reviews being positive. But that is more or less the same as having a 7 out of 10 score, which is usually reserved for games which are good, but not exceptional.

Anyway, why am I talking about this game nearly four months after its launch? 

Abashed is a psychological adventure game that narrates the story of Isaac, who not only has to deal with the reality of his missing partner, but also has to constantly question reality itself.

I stumbled onto this game while making a list of Indian indie games coming out in 2025, and later the developer reached out and kindly offered me early access to the demo, which you can play right now on Steam.

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/

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.