In this episode of Indieventure Extra, Liam chats to Aaron Potter about his new book: 50 Indie Games That Changed The World.

Aaron is a prolific games journalist with bylines at GamesRadar, Edge, Wireframe magazine and Kotaku (to name just a few). However, real heads may recognise him as the former face of the Push Square YouTube channel, which he briefly hosted alongside a certain northerner from this very podcast.

Currently working at the Daily Mirror, Aaron has also published his first book. 50 Indie Games That Changed The World is a beautiful, coffee-table-style book that explores how more than 50 notable indie releases have influenced the medium as a whole. Each chapter features interviews with key figures involved in the game's creation, including Toby Fox, Ed McMillen, and Lucas Pope.

There are anecdotes abound in this episode as Aaron reveals what it was like to interview 50 indie developers, which interviews were the hardest to secure, and what it was like to create a gaming magazine in the modern era when working for the (now sadly defunct) Wireframe.

Make sure to pick up a copy of Aaron's book here. You can also follow him on BlueSky.

Enjoy the episode!

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Okay, technically there's still a month left before the official end of summer, but who doesn't get a bit wistful towards the end of August? It's probably a hangover from those school summer holidays, even though the Indieventure trio – along with most of our listeners – left those days behind longer ago than we'd like to admit.

Still, taking the sting off significantly is the fact that Summer 2025 has already been an excellent season for indie games. So good, in fact, that it was quite the struggle to narrow our collective list down to just seven titles we want to talk your ear off about today. Expect more updates in the coming episodes as we consider our regrets over the ones we cut for time, but in the meantime we hope you enjoy our enthused round-up of what we've been playing recently, including BUSTAFELLOWS season2, Jump the Track, Look Outside, Squeakross: Home Squeak Home, Sword of the Sea, and Tiny Bookshop.

Plus – for only the second time ever – your intrepid Indieventurers actually managed to coordinate our schedules outside of recording to play a co-op indie game together! We'd love to do this more often, but alas, adult life is a harsh mistress. But, on the other hand, it's bloody PEAK! Yeah, of course we had to play PEAK.

When the time rolls around for hyperfixations, Rachel immediately figures out that she can cheat and sneak another excellent summer indie in from her list by talking about Cipher Zero. Rebecca, unsurprisingly, has heard the siren call of Tears of Themis – something everyone predicted she'd love because it's literally an Ace Attorney-inspired otome game made by HoYoverse – which she's found compelling if (spoiler alert) a little less lovable than she'd always expected. And slightly more surprisingly, Liam has also fallen for the allures of a gacha game… but it's Pokémon TCG Pocket, which is allowed.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

The Indieventure trio are back from our slightly longer-than-originally planned summer break, and thank goodness, we can just about remember how to record a podcast! Luckily, we've had an idea in the back pocket for a while now that allows us to have a bit of a free-flowing chat as we ease back into the swing of things.

The theme of this episode is, broadly speaking, other media we'd recommend to fans of some of our favourite indie games. Be it books, movies, music, or even (gasp!) a triple-A title or two, turns out we've all had that experience of finding something that complements the vibe of an indie game we enjoy so perfectly we swear some plucky publisher ought to sell them together in some sort of limited-edition bundle.

Obviously, we kick things off with Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, a widely acknowledged must-read for any Hades fans out there, but we move on to deeper cuts as the episode progresses. Discussion topics include – but are very much not limited to – our thoughts on how Thank Goodness You're Here follows a proud tradition of British surrealist comedy best embodied by Reeves and Mortimer in Shooting Stars; which Margaret Atwood novel best reflects the vibe of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage; and of course which creature collection games are must-plays for fans of Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach books.

Other games finding their perfect pairing – it's kind of like a wine tasting evening, really – include series like OlliOlli and Simulacra, as well as stand-alones such as 1000xRESIST, Frostpunk, Signalis, and let's be honest, many more besides.

We end as ever with a fresh batch of hyperfixations. Liam is rounding out the regression to his mid-2000s teenhood described earlier in the episode by getting well into wrestling of all things, thanks to a surprisingly fun evening out at a NORTH Wrestling event. Rebecca's refusal to stop banging on about Tiny Bookshop for three solid years has paid off in the form of a preview copy of the game, which has immediately and gratifyingly shot straight to the top of her GOTY watchlist. And Rachel's been enjoying a couple of short and sweet recent indie releases in the form of Everdeep Aurora and Wheel World.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord, too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

Hey there, listener to the Indieventure podcast! Is your least favourite part of any episode the part where we actually talk about video games? Are you one of the surprising number of people in our Discord who actually seem to prefer the nonsense tangents we go off on at the slightest provocation to our years of indie gaming insight and experience?

Well, do we ever have the series for you! Welcome to Indieventure Side Quest, where we pause our games industry chat to gently float down every stream of consciousness we meet along the way and that's the whole point… except we open with a brief discussion of the GTA6 delay, because we're fundamentally incapable of staying on-task, apparently.

This episode was actually recorded out-of-sequence and so if you want to listen in "chronological" order (whatever that means) it should actually sit just before Episode 39, but we're pretty sure it's seamless, except for the fact that we dedicate part of this chat to our predictions for A Goofy Movie – a film we then reacted to in the episode we recorded the following night and released two whole months ago. Think of it as an artistic flashback?

The other "main" topic, such as it is, is a group review of Yorkshire Dales folly garden Forbidden Corner, a cartoonishly unsettling local attraction owned by an eccentric businessman-slash-politician and which is apparently a rite of passage for people like Liam who grew up in the area, but hits quite differently when you see it for the first time in your 30s as Rachel and Rebecca both did just hours before sitting down to record.

We also end up on-the-fly tier listing which Fellowship of the Ring characters we'd most (and least!) like to have brunch with, despite the three of us being casual Lord of the Rings fans at best; theorising as to why the modern cinema experience isn't as good as it used to be; sharing the best parenting white lies we were on the receiving end of growing up; and a lot more that has surprisingly little to do with video games.

We hope you enjoy listening as much as we did recording! Side Quest is planned as an irregular recurring feature for us when, for one reason or another, we don't have the capacity to record a "normal" episode, and while some might be more on-theme than others in the future, we make no promises. Let us know what you think!

No hyperfixations for this one but as ever our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

Hello, I'm the Ostrich that Indieventure commissions to write episode descriptions while Rebecca is on holiday. They pay me in small stones, which I swallow to grind up insects and plants in my gizzard because I don't have any teeth. That's a real ostrich fact, proving that I am indeed an ostrich. Stop EMAILING ME.

On this episode of Indieventure (a podcast about indie games that has never mentioned ostriches once in its entire run, just FYI), the gang discuss their favourite indie games of 2025 so far. That's right, it's summer, and instead of running around sand dunes and flapping their big wings like, oh, I dunno, a cool bird that deserves to be paid more for its writing, they're banging on about computer games they've played instead.

Liam - who looks like someone who would trap an ostrich's head in a car window at a safari park for a laugh - reckons Shotgun Cop Man might be one of this year's best platformers, but makes sure to circle back to the warm joy of tea-making sim Wanderstop. Rebecca - a known friend to Ostriches and the only host who looks me in the eyes while giving me my pebbles - is still not over Blue Prince, but finds some time to talk about The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy as well. And finally, Rachel - Ostrich enemy number one as far as we're all concerned - enthuses about a trio of truly excellent games in the form of Citizen Sleeper 2, The Alters, and Promise Mascot Agency. She may think Ostriches look like, and I quote, "if God shoved a long sparrow into a tumbleweed", but you can't deny she has good taste in games.

In this episode of Indieventure Extra, Rachel chats with puzzle bestie and Thinky Games colleague Joseph Mansfield about - you guessed it - thinky games!

Joe is the head puzzle expert over at Thinky Games.com and is the brains behind the Thinky Games database, the Thinky Awards, ThinkyCon AND the brand new and upcoming Thinky Direct puzzle showcase! That's quite the puzzle-focused CV, not to mention his thinky-based YouTube channel Joe Plays Puzzle Games, which you should definitely check out. You can also find Joe on BlueSky and play his games over on itch.io!

The two delve into their favourite puzzle games, different puzzle design philosophies, and have a chat about the wonderful thinky community too. 

If you'd like to see the Thinky Direct, you can tune in at 10am PDT, 1pm EDT, 7pm CEST, 6pm BST on May 29th. The showcase will be livestreamed over at ThinkyGames.com, the Thinky Games Twitch page, and the Thinky Games YouTube channel. 

Joe's Hyperfixation is the YouTube channel Sounds Like!

Enjoy the episode!

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome, welcome to Indieventure's second-ever episode recorded in-person! Your fabulous trio of hosts recently secluded ourselves once again in a caravan in Yorkshire and this time our resulting nonsense is even more unhinged than last year's "live" episode.

What began life, several months ago, as an idea for a fairly straightforward character-led Vault episode has instead brought us here, to Indieventure's Legally Distinct 77th (you'll notice it changes a few times) Annual Indie Game Death Match Battle Royale!* Surprisingly this originally had very little to do with the fact that we're all quite into The Hunger Games and there was a new book out recently, but as you might guess it does come up.

So, what's the plan? Well, quite simply, we fed 24 characters representing 24 indie games into a Hunger Games simulator and riffed on the results. I won't list all the contestants here but suffice to say if you've ever wanted to see a touching battlefield romance develop between Big Ron and Ábramar, know how Harold Halibut would emotionally reconcile himself with going on a killing spree once the red mist receded, or see if Tim the Terrible Boy will ever finally get what's coming to him, then I'm really glad that we've found an audience for the highly specific shared sense of humour we unleashed the day we recorded this.

The winner has the honour of having their game crowned the best indie game of all time, unless we don't like the outcome, in which case they just get bragging rights.

As a disclaimer, I just want to make it very clear that we're all highly media literate individuals who did actually read/watch and understand the point of The Hunger Games, but we also just love a bit that goes on far too long. If you want to sink to our level and try out this ridiculous concept for yourself – maybe at your next dinner party! – we used the BrantSteele Hunger Games Simulator, which also has a bunch of other franchises pre-programmed as well as letting you write in your own characters.

We may have realised halfway through that we've slightly uncomfortably aligned ourselves with the Capitol in this episode, but you know what, that only makes it even more appropriate that we end like it was any other regular week, ignoring the screams while we talk about our latest batch of hyperfixations. Rachel has been playing Promise Mascot Agency; Rebecca recently had a video game themed weekend seeing the Until Dawn movie (bad) and attending an Animal Crossing: New Horizons event at a Sea Life Centre (good); and Liam has been reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney and Saltwater by Jessica Andrews, the latter of whom turned out to have been in his English class at school! Small world.

* No indie game characters were hurt in the making of this episode. All involvement of indie game characters was overseen by the Indieventure Association for the Ethical Treatment and Enthusiastic Promotion of Indie Game Protagonists (Except for Tim the Terrible Boy)

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!

The end of April also marks the official end of the previous year's games calendar, as all of the Big 5 games industry awards shows (Golden Joysticks, The Game Awards, DICE, Game Developers' Choice, and the BAFTAs) have now been and gone. Which is useful because it means that here at Indieventure, we get to draw a line under 2024 at long last and turn our attentions firmly to the future of games released in 2025 – which, naturally, we'll be legally allowed to talk about until April 2026. It's the way of things.

But before we wave a fond farewell to a year that actually ended four months ago – and don't you dare remind us that we're totally undeniably ⅓ of the way through 2025 already – we're wrapping things up here by ceremonially rolling up the red carpet Indieventure-style. If this isn't your first trip around the sun with us, you'll know that mostly means "Rebecca gets very excited about award show stats", but this year we have some insider insight as well, since Rachel actually appeared on the BBC as part of their BAFTA Games coverage!

If industry accolades chat isn't your thing, don't worry, though, because we've also taken this opportunity to revisit some indie games from 2024 that we really wanted to cover but – mainly for reasons of there being so many of the things – didn't get around to until now. Stick around for belated chats about Anthology of the Killer, Arco, Arctic Eggs, Echo Point Nova, and Loco Motive, as well as brief swings by Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (again) and Vampire Therapist… plus more Blue Prince because we simply can't help ourselves.

Last but not least, this episode's batch of hyperfixations sees Rebecca trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of falling hard for historical girl power pop opera Six: The Musical and sci-fi romance gacha game Love & Deepspace during the same two-week period; Liam confirming what we already suspected about Strange Scaffold's latest game, survival horror match-3 mashup Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 (it's really good!); and Rachel discovering that The Rehearsal: Season 2 is completely unlike The Rehearsal: Season 1 and makes for strange and compelling watching.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!