It’s time for another episode of Indieventure EXTRA, our bonus series where we interview key members of the games industry.

In this episode, Rachel chats with fellow podcast pal Robin Bea about some very good Steam Next Fest demos! The duo discuss three of their favourites, then end with two honourable mentions. Rachel also forgot to ask Robin her hyperfixation, so Robin will have to come back as a guest in the future!

If you'd like to follow Robin's work, you can find links to all her socials and projects here, PLUS her podcasts Girl Mode and dotzip! You can find the Steam Next Fest demo episode of dotzip HERE.

Demos mentioned in this 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.

Being firmly children of the '90s, all three hosts of Indieventure are at least passingly familiar with Blind Date, the British dating game show that ran from 1985 to 2003 which was iconically hosted by Cilla Black and Paul O'Grady. Look, I promise this is relevant. When we realised we couldn't do our originally planned topic for this episode and needed to come up with something else at short-notice, and also that the release date fell right around Valentine's Day, we threw around some ideas and eventually realised we'd just re-invented Blind Date with extra steps. Such is the millennial curse, I suppose (one of many).

So yes, this is one for the bit-o'-bullshit fans, as we trot out indie gaming's most eligible batches (I'm told that this is the gender-neutral term for bachelors and bachelorettes – I'm personally a proponent of bachelandorette but fine, it's fine) for a dating game panel show type arrangement. We each attempt to embody our chosen singletons (and a few that we thought just ought to dump their canonical partners); ask some off-the-wall questions of one another; get briefly weirded out because as long-time friends playing a dating game together is a surprisingly odd experience; and generally attempt to do improv despite none of us being trained in the art. It goes surprisingly well! We had a lot of fun, hopefully you will too.

I won't spoil the surprise by revealing the dates right here, but suffice to say if you've ever wondered which character from another game should be the next addition to Melinoë's polycule, or whether Chef Fujimoto from Octodad has healed enough to move on with his life and find love… well, the answers are all in this episode. Allegedly. I cannot stress enough that none of this is canon, and for legal reasons we don't claim that it is.

We finish, as ever, on our hyperfixations, and it says a lot about the vibes of this episode that they're comparatively quite hinged this week. In preparation for the imminent release of Resi 9, Liam has been addressing the sole gap in his Resident Evil franchise knowledge by finally playing RE6 to see if it's as bad as he remembers from when he played half an hour at launch and then dropped off it. Rachel continues her commitment to playing fewer games slower with shout-outs to upcoming Paranormasight sequel The Mermaid's Curse, Cairn, and hidden gem of the farming/social sim genre Before The Green Moon. Rebecca, meanwhile, has been tempted back into the MCU by the word-of-mouth reputation of Wonder Man – an honestly brilliant buddy dramedy about the vicious world of Hollywood that just happens to feature some superheroes occasionally – and can't believe that Disney isn't doing more to promote their best Marvel offering in years that just happens to feature two men of colour as the leads, hmmm how strange, GO WATCH WONDER MAN while you ponder that one everybody.

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!

There's still officially six weeks of winter left – seriously, look it up, the groundhog saw his shadow this year and everything – but here at Indieventure we've been bundled up cosy playing so many lovely games that we figured we'd just talk about them right now!

In keeping with our general commitment not to force ourselves to always play brand-new stuff, this episode's line-up is a respectable mix of games that were released in 2026 and games that are just… new-ish. Okay, in all honesty, none of our picks have gone back more than a year – the oldest one is only from February 2025 – but hey, baby steps.

So, what have we been playing? Well, our digital climbing expert Rachel has unsurprisingly already been caught up enjoying Cairn, while Liam once again throws himself at the electric fence labelled "what you can get away with calling a Double-A" to talk about Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar. Rebecca has been excavating under last September's Silksong rubble and surfaced clutching the slightly neglected but still well-worth-playing Strange Antiquities. On a break from the mountain, Rachel turned her talents to playing ghost detective in Utter a Name. Meanwhile, Liam has been playing one of those Steam games, you know the ones… this one's called Wicked Seed, and it's not actually what it sounds like, but your first thought was probably not entirely wide of the mark either. More importantly, though, it's actually a pretty decent solo-dev effort at a Resi-like, so to try to focus on that.

And finally, it turns out we've all played TR-49, the latest short outing from inkle that sees you sifting through an archive of digitised books to understand an alternate history of 20th century Britain. So we whipped up a quick group review, starting with a safe, spoiler-free chat before turning to all the spoilers at 1:38:16, because this game is really too short and involved to dance around the main themes. It's a game that's best enjoyed fresh though, so skip to 1:54:03 if you'd prefer to play it for yourself first.

We end, as always, on our latest hyperfixations. Rachel sneaks in one more indie game rec (technically legal, but irregular) in Type Help, an in-browser itch.io text adventure from last year that's anticipating a shiny expanded re-release in 2026 as adventure game The Incident at Galley House. Liam has been reading The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow – yes, it's a sad book, but it's also kind of romantasy, so he knows the other two will be extra on-board with this particular recommendation. And Rebecca has been feeling a little bit too seen as a queer millennial gamer thanks to the YouTube comedy oeuvre of Blake Jennings.

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!

Happy New Year, Indieventurers, welcome to 2026! What's new, what's good? Well that's what we're here to tell you of course!

Last year may have been a bit of a washout for AAAs, but the indie game scene is still going strong, despite the many obstacles presented by the modern games industry and… our contemporary world in general. Happily, this year looks set to continue the indie gem trend; even though the calendar is so far looking pretty empty of firm release dates as every game developer and their mum attempts to edge away from the all-consuming spectre of GTA6, there's already plenty on the horizon for us to get excited about all the same.

Join us as we evangelise on our upcoming highlights (plus way more bonus honourable mentions than we'd planned) including, in no particular order (just kidding I'm alphabetising them like always): Beware of the Cartographer, Cairn, Denshattack!, Dosa Divas, Find Your Words, Hellmart, inKONBINI, Mandrake, Masters of Albion, The Mermaid Mask, Mixtape, Moonlight Peaks, Orbitals, Paralives, Peace Island, Penguin Colony, A Planet Full of Cats, Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike, ReAnimal, Roman Sands RE:Build, Servant of the Lake, Starsand Island, and – maybe the best-named game ever – Virtue and a Sledgehammer.

Our first hyperfixations of the year are here too, and you may not be surprised to learn that over the Christmas break Rachel has been enjoying the latest series of The Traitors, while Liam has been equally diverted by the surprisingly excellent Scooby-Doo licensed DLC for House Flipper 2. Rebecca, meanwhile, thinks that 2026 may have peaked already as far as AAA gaming goes with the release of Heartopia – an Animal Crossing inspired "slow life sim" that somehow also encompasses all of the other trends she's associated with (a mobile live-service game possessed of the world's most useless and forgettable gacha).

Also, if you ever read a novel called The Mouse Butcher, can you please let Rebecca know? It'd be a great opportunity to head on over to our Discord if you haven't already, just saying.

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!

Ring out those solstice bells, the longest night of the year is now behind us! But we've still got weeks and weeks of winter left to go, so if you're looking for some indie games to help pass those cold and dark nights, you're in the right place: it's the third (or maybe fourth, depending on how you count) annual Indieventure GOTY episode!

This is our smallest GOTY cohort ever, with just 12 games – not because this wasn't a great year for indies, but because your trio of hosts are in greater agreement than ever before as we slowly but surely merge into a single terrifying gestalt consciousness. As a fun challenge, why not pick one game from this list to play every day during the 12 days of Christmas? Sure, that'd be prohibitively expensive and impossibly time-consuming, but if you already have some to hand, consider this the sign you were waiting for to tackle some of that backlog – truly a festive tradition for many of us gamers at this point.

As ever we won't spoil our Christmas selection box here in the show notes, but you can always check the Indiventure website for a full list of games mentioned in the episode. Furthermore, maybe keep an eye on that blog over the festive period if you're interested in some additional stocking stuffers in written form from your Indieventure hosts and some friends of the podcast…

Our final round of hyperfixations for 2025 progresses at lightning speed because we're all very tired and want to start our Christmas break, please. Stranger Things 5 has Rebecca's seal of approval, while Super Mario Galaxy on Switch 2 is similarly acclaimed by Liam, and Rachel recommends The Chair Company season finale. Thank you all and good night: merry Christmas, happy holidays, a peaceful midwinter to you all, and we'll see you in 2026!

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 festive season is well and truly upon us, which can only mean one thing! …Actually that's not true, it means loads of things to all sorts of different people. But to an Indieventure listener, it means our increasingly established tradition of putting together a two-part end-of-year round-up! Tune back in for our Game of the Year list discussion on December 22nd, but first, it's time for a more free-form look at the year that was.

If you've listened to one of these before you'll know that this episode can end up being quite… cathartic for your trio of hosts, who've once again witnessed a year in the games industry that can generously be characterised as full of highs and lows. But aside from… all that, what were this year's big trends in indie games specifically? We delve into the unusual prominence given this year to longer indie games, indie game sequels, and indie games as digital third spaces (because we know "friendslop" is mostly meant as an affectionate joke but haven't we landed on a much better name there?). Also, expect some spicy takes on whether Steam's monopoly in the PC gaming market is causing them to increasingly become more of a problem than a champion for indie publishing.

We end as ever with our hyperfixations, and Rachel is keen to bring your attention to Thinky Dailies, a new daily series of in-browser brainteasers from our good pals over at Thinky Games – guaranteed to make you feel smarter than Wordle as well as being much, much less cursed. Liam is eager to highlight the excellent and highly timely video essay Greed is Destroying the World by Drew Gooden. And finally it's a rare musical recommendation from Rebecca, who's been listening to the Mountain Goats and their amazing new concept album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan.

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!

It’s time for another episode of Indieventure EXTRA, our bonus series where we interview key members of the games industry.

In this episode, Rachel chats with award-winning indie developer Lucy Blundell! Lucy is someone the Indieventure gang have wanted on the podcast for SO LONG, so we are very honoured to have her insights on what it’s like creating semi-autobiographical stories, the challenges of putting your personal life into your work as an artist, and the ways players can connect to the games they play on an emotional level.

If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s work, you should play her games! You can play both One Night Stand and VIDEOVERSE on just about every gaming platform you can think of.

Lucy’s Hyperfixation is The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy!

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.

The title says it all really: the Indieventure podcast is celebrating a couple of milestones, and you're all invited! Hope you like parties where three people indulge in absolute bullshit banter at length because that's what we've got for you today as we mark both our 50th episode and our podcast's only ever-so-slightly belated second birthday.

You really do deserve to hear some of this without being spoiled by any pesky context beforehand, so suffice to say that Rebecca has put together a quiz with a heavy visual component (check out our blog for the companion piece to that!) and Liam has written A Thing. Don't ask. Just listen. Trust me, it's better that way.

After completely wearing ourselves out with that nonsense, we mellow out a bit with a slightly more sensible second half in which we discuss a few games we've been playing recently – including The Séance of Blake Manor, Hades II, PEAK, and Demonschool – before making a very optimistic wishlist of all the amazing 2025 indies we'd love to play before recording our GOTY episode but, like, we're starting to get a bit nervous about the timeframe on that, not gonna lie.

Finally onto hyperfixations, this week with some completely improvised bonus bullshit about which Pokémon starter type each of us would be! Liam (grass type) has been finishing his 2025 Goodreads challenge by reading some of the most acclaimed short novels he could find, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, Foster by Claire Keegan, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Rachel (fire type) is once again bingeing The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which has become surprisingly meta in its new season. And Rebecca (water type) somehow hadn't heard of The Amazing Digital Circus until very recently, but now she's been completely drawn in by the hype.

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!

Now that the nights are well and truly closing in (for us here in the UK at least) and Halloween is behind us, there's just enough time for the Indieventure trio to take one last look at the latest batch of new(ish) indie games we've been enjoying before turning our attention to the serious business of end-of-year celebrations.

We say new-ish because, while Rachel and Liam are as on it and up-to-the-minute as ever, Rebecca has wandered off on a bit of a side-quest. Basically, it's still Halloween in her heart, and if that means shining a spotlight on some spooky (and/or romantically spooky-adjacent) games from six months or two years or heck, even nearly a decade ago, then it's more than worth it to create what we hope you'll all agree is a suitably autumnal vibe.

To that end, our round robin discussion in this episode encompasses games including Absolum, Ball x Pit, Easy Delivery Co., Herdling, Layers of Fear (both the 2016 and 2023 versions), Monster Prom 4, Monstrous Love, and of course, PowerWash Simulator 2.

Regular listeners might already have noticed that we've had a longer break between episodes than usual, and so naturally we've found plenty to be hyperfixated on in that time. Rachel has discovered the SCP Foundation collaborative fiction project, and while it's given her a bit of a crisis over her love for a certain suspiciously similar Remedy game, she nevertheless thinks you all should go and read about an eldritch basketball game in SCP-1733 if you haven't encountered it yet.

Meanwhile, Liam's been enjoying some movies courtesy of Eatflix in Newcastle, and also thanks to everyone's favourite breathtaking meme machine Keanu Reeves' latest starring role in Good Fortune. And Rebecca has finally got her hands on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, her feelings on which are far too complex to condense down into this brief text summary, but on which she is at least qualified to speak with some authority as an OG mega-fan of the 21-year-old original cult classic.

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!

This episode of EXTRA is a particularly special one, as our guest today is none other than our very own Rachel Watts!

Rachel has spent the last 12 months writing a book all about COCOON, the 2023 puzzle game developed by Geometric Interactive. The book chronicles the development of the game, including its puzzle design, world-building, and soundscapes. Featuring exclusive interviews with its creators, this stunning tome is available for pre-order RIGHT NOW via the Lost In Cult website. In the episode, Rachel reveals what it was like to undertake a project of this scale, as well as providing some teasers of what you can expect when the book is released next year.

Of course, this wouldn't be an EXTRA episode hosted by Liam if it didn't dive into Rachel's past a little bit, too. Listen to find out about the early days of Rachel's career in journalism, an incredible anecdote about her time studying film at university, and an absolute gem about her brief stint at Card Factory.

You can read Rachel's work on FemHype here.

Pre-order COCOON: Design Works here!

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.