Lewis Gordon

Ithaca, a road-trip role-playing game from French studio The Pixel Hunt, follows Penelope, an environmental lawyer transporting an oil executive held captive in her car. Its branching narrative and procedural roads force players to confront questions about climate activism, political violence and the morality of punishing those seen as responsible for environmental destruction. Writer Florent Maurin developed the game in response to the worsening climate crisis, drought in Burgundy and changing public attitudes toward violent political action. The destination of Ithaca invokes ideas of collective planetary responsibility and humanity's uncertain future.

Haex is a cooperative open-world survival game from the 12-person Scandinavian studio Dead Astronauts. Players explore procedurally generated landscapes as research scientists, using Seeds—plant-growing cubes that dynamically terraform the environment, generate new storylines and introduce enemies. The game combines shooting and survival mechanics with shapeshifting creatures, alien mysteries and a language of arcane sigils, drawing influence from films such as Annihilation and Arrival, Jeff VanderMeer's weird fiction and cosmic black metal. Creative director Tobias Nyman says the game's changing world and personal Scandinavian setting are intended to create an experience that is simultaneously beautiful, awe-inspiring and threatening.

D-topia is a cosy sci-fi puzzle game set on a future planet governed by an AI Optimization System designed to maximize human happiness. Players act as a Facilitator, performing simple tasks and building relationships with residents whose lives reveal the costs of a frictionless, over-optimized society. The game avoids alarmism, instead using serene environments and gentle mechanics to suggest cultural flattening, managed human decline and eventual obsolescence, although its deliberately calming pace can become soporific.

Hyper Games’ Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth adapts Tove Jansson’s 1957 novel Moominland Midwinter, placing a young Moomintroll alone in a frozen world while his parents hibernate. The game uses gentle exploration and accessible mechanics to address mortality, grief, change and adapting to unfamiliar circumstances. Like the studio’s 2024 game Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, it preserves the scratchy, hand-drawn character of Jansson’s illustrations while undergoing close scrutiny from Moomin Characters Ltd. The developers also expand the source material with characters and ideas drawn from Jansson’s wider work, arguing that the Moomins’ anti-fascist, non-traditional vision remains relevant amid contemporary political uncertainty.

Replaced is a visually impressive 2D action-platformer set in a post-nuclear alternate-1980s United States. Its warm, nostalgic pixel art and refugee-camp setting give the cyberpunk formula an unusual softness, while a later sequence involving a militarized wall evokes the Mexico–US border wall and the West Bank barrier. However, much of the roughly 10-hour game closely imitates established cyberpunk and action-platformer conventions, its environments can feel generic, and its detailed visuals sometimes obscure interactive elements.

Inkle's TR-49 is a literary database mystery set in an alternate wartime Britain, where players help codebreaker Abbi operate a machine that searches an archive of fictional books for clues to the reality-threatening text Endpeace. The review praises its non-linear investigative design, cascading connections and richly imagined treatment of scientific and technological progress, comparing it favorably with Sam Barlow's Her Story and Immortality. It criticizes the thin characterization, radio conversations and vague depiction of the conflict outside the machine, but concludes that the game's central codebreaking experience is an unqualified success.

The remastered Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles preserves the 1997 original’s Shakespearean political drama, depicting peasant revolutionaries, royalists, elite power struggles and Ramza’s ideological awakening. Its fully voice-acted dialogue and highly customizable turn-based combat enhance an already exceptional role-playing experience, while the game’s tragic, historically framed narrative emphasizes how individuals become pawns of forces larger than themselves. Its focus on inequality, class struggle, fascism and resistance makes it feel especially relevant amid contemporary political unrest and the concentration of wealth and power.

Skate Story is praised as an exceptionally fluid and emotionally resonant skateboarding game created largely by solo developer Sam Eng. Set in a glittering vaporwave underworld, it combines precise tricks, grinds and manuals with a surreal quest to swallow the moon and escape the devil. Its difficult, sometimes painful mechanics and melancholy narrative distinguish it from more conventional arcade-style skateboarding games, giving the experience unusual poetic and emotional depth.

Sleep Awake is a first-person psychological horror game set in the last surviving city on an apparently lifeless Earth, where protagonist Katja risks disappearing into another realm if she falls asleep. The game’s imaginative setting, psychedelic visuals and surreal FMV sequences are praised, as is Gary Numan’s bizarre cameo as the floating head Hypnos. However, predictable stealth, simplistic environmental puzzles, weak enemy AI and a lack of genuine tension make the experience feel like a lightly interactive ghost train rather than a fully realized horror game.

Keeper is praised as a visually extraordinary action-adventure in which players control a life-giving lighthouse that transforms through surreal ecological environments, accompanied by a driftwood-beaked bird named Twig. Its imaginative art direction, lighting mechanics and evolutionary transformations create moments of genuine wonder, but basic puzzles often obstruct exploration and fail to match the world’s inventive biology. The game’s wordless storytelling is also weakened by explicit button prompts and a conventional shape-based puzzle at the climax, leaving it visually dazzling but less interactive and conceptually resonant than its setting promises.

Double Fine’s Keeper is an experimental action-adventure in which players control an animate lighthouse exploring a surreal, post-human island. Its beacon causes plants, creatures and objects to evolve or transform, drawing on ecological ideas, mycelium networks and the visual imagination of 1980s fantasy films. Creative lead Lee Petty describes the game as a slow, exploratory experience shaped during the Covid lockdowns. The feature also highlights a political tension: Keeper is funded by Microsoft while Azure has faced allegations of facilitating military operations in Gaza and the West Bank, prompting BDS calls for a boycott and criticism from unionized workers. Microsoft says it is investigating whether such use breached its terms of service.

Failbetter Games’ Mandrake combines the comforting routines of a rural life simulation with folkloric and macabre elements, including magical crops, conversations with the dead and the possibility of befriending a river. Set in the Brythonic-inspired village of Chandley, the game emphasizes close observation of a community across changing days and seasons while avoiding the genre’s repetitive grind. Its gift-giving system creates relationships based on declared obligations rather than random presents, and its influences include anthropology, British folklore and Renaissance alchemy. Game director Adam Myers says the studio is deliberately introducing its stranger ideas gradually, maintaining an emotionally gentle and accessible tone despite the mysteries and creatures inhabiting the world.

South of Midnight impresses with a richly atmospheric vision of the American Deep South, combining folklore, magical realism, striking art direction and a lively blues-, folk- and jazz-influenced soundtrack. Its protagonist Hazel and unusual setting provide a strong foundation, but the mostly linear platforming and melee combat are shallow, prescriptive and repetitive. Repeated escape sequences, area-clearing tasks and lightly animated flashbacks make the roughly 12-hour adventure feel rote, leaving its visual and thematic ambition greater than its gameplay depth.

DigixArt’s Tides of Tomorrow is a seafaring climate-fiction adventure set on the flooded planet of Elynd, where toxic plastic has caused a devastating disease. Alongside exploration, minigames and branching choices, it introduces an asynchronous multiplayer system in which players encounter phantasmal versions of people who have already played the same events and whose decisions and items can affect their journey. Lead designer Adrien Poncet describes the experimental mechanic as both a major technical challenge and a metaphor for collective action and maintaining hope amid the climate crisis.

Glasgow’s independent game festival showcases unconventional, small-budget games created by developers from Glasgow and the surrounding region. Titles such as ZOE Begone!, Left Upon Read, Anthology of the Killer, Tamagotchi Seance, Apartment Story and Kevin (1997-2077) challenge familiar game conventions through experimental mechanics, surreal themes and participatory play. The festival offers an alternative to large commercial events such as Gamescom and broadens Scotland’s gaming identity beyond Rockstar North, highlighting a lively and irreverent independent development scene.

Cairn, a survival climbing game from French studio The Game Bakers, challenges players to guide alpinist Aava up a dangerous mountain using a simple control system that requires careful attention to her posture, breathing, balance and trembling limbs. The game’s mountain is being designed entirely by hand, with every rock, crack and handhold placed by the development team. Inspired in part by advice from alpinist Élisabeth Revol, Cairn will feature a story mode focused on a gruelling multiday ascent, an expedition mode with additional mountains and challenges, and free-solo climbing without ropes. Its creators aim for realistic, demanding mountaineering rather than a rage-inducing experience, with failure and repeated attempts leading to a strong sense of achievement.

Dutch game-maker Céline Veltman is developing Curiosmos, a playful space simulation in which players create solar systems, planets and life through interacting physical and chemical systems. Inspired by her childhood fascination with astronomy and a desire to create an engaging game for children, Veltman combines accessible picture-book visuals with technically rigorous physics from collaborators Guillaume Pauli and Robin de Paepe. The game aims to make the complexity and fragility of the universe understandable and enjoyable, while helping Veltman reconcile her artistic career with her interest in science.

Creative director Dmitry Svetlov explains how his religious upbringing and teenage rejection of faith shaped Indika, a dark adventure game about a young nun questioning the Russian Orthodox Church and the fear-based doctrines surrounding her. The game combines philosophical dialogue, spatial puzzles and surreal visual design to reflect Indika’s psychological upheaval. Svetlov also condemns the Russian Church’s support for Vladimir Putin’s government and the Russia-Ukraine war. Most of Odd Meter’s 14-person team relocated from Russia to Kazakhstan because of propaganda, conscription risks and the broader political climate.

Harold Halibut is a character-driven science-fiction adventure game developed over 14 years by the small studio Slow Bros. Set aboard the retro-futuristic aquatic colony Fedora 1, it follows Harold, a melancholy caretaker searching for meaning as a cosmic catastrophe approaches. The game's handcrafted puppets were eventually digitized through photogrammetry, producing a striking blend of stop-motion aesthetics and virtual rendering. Despite funding difficulties, a publisher split, the Covid-19 pandemic and internal crises, the team persevered to realize its original artistic vision.

Jusant is praised as a mostly wordless climbing adventure set on a vast, troubled mountain. Its distinctive control scheme gives each hand independent movement, creating a compelling rhythm between tense ascents and calmer exploration. The game builds its story through abandoned human settlements, magical shells and wildlife rather than exposition, though explanatory letters are viewed as a weaker narrative device. With no enemies or meaningful risk of death, the game frames the mountain as a partner rather than an adversary. Its environmental themes emphasize restoration, interdependence and the ambition required to rehabilitate a damaged world.

Artist and designer Harry Nesbitt discusses Summerhill, a puzzle-adventure game in which players guide sheep through pastoral landscapes with help from a dog. Inspired by Derbyshire, ancient shepherding traditions and aerial footage of flock behaviour, the game uses ruined structures to create spatial reasoning challenges while evoking mystery and awe. Nesbitt connects its expressive movement and visual style to Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey, and cites Fumito Ueda’s world-building as an influence. Summerhill aims to create an emotional sense of responsibility and connection to the land, animals and longstanding shepherding customs; its release date remains unannounced.