Naraka: Bladepoint, Teenage Blob and more indie favourites this week
The Indie games scene has produced another week’s worth of trailers, gameplay and plenty of new games to get excited about. This only means one thing: you’re reading our weekly hidden indie gems feature where we hope to keep you updated on the world of indie games.
There are no Steam festivals this week, so while there aren’t 20 odd demos to download, we brought you a couple of games you can play this weekend.
Hot indie games week of May 18
Naraka: Bladepoint
It has been close to six months now since we first saw Naraka: Bladepoint at The Game Awards. Bladepoint is a melee-based arena action game with a particular focus on stylish combat and fluid movement.
This week, developer 24 Entertainment dropped a new trailer to show the movement abilities of the game’s characters. Entire parts of the scenery seem custom-made for parkour, wall running and various ways of grappling and anchoring.
From the brief seconds of footage we have, movement appears as slick as the game’s combat, which was already looking pretty exciting. One of Bladepoint’s biggest ideas is that it doesn’t feature a block button - only parrying, which is part of why it looks so good in motion.
The game is still on track for release this year on Steam, but this week’s new gameplay trailer sadly didn’t come with any fresh news. Still, this is definitely one to keep an eye on.
Teenage Blob
Being completely honest, I am not entirely sure what’s going on in this reveal trailer for Teenage Blob. We like our fair share of psychedelic games here at VG247, but sometimes a game is just too weird to be called that.
Teenage Blob is essentially a mini-game collection of exactly six games from varying genres that even include dating sims. Each game is set to a new song by punk rock band The Superweaks. I honestly couldn’t say if that’s the most elaborate concept album I’ve ever seen, or some deep meta commentary on video games.
What I can say for sure is that Teenage Blob looks like a playable, acid-infused version of a Rick and Morty episode. It’s bizarre in the best way, and hard to ignore.
The developer admits it’ll take you around 30 minutes to play the whole thing, so wishlist it on Steam to keep it on your radar. We’re not yet sure how much it’s going to cost, but hopefully the price will reflect the game’s unusual nature.
Games you can play this weekend
Timelie
Timelie is an isometric stealth game with a neat mechanic: time manipulation. In Timelie, all your past and future actions are tracked on an interactive timeline.
Scrubbing through the past helps you avoid mistakes you may have made, whereas peering into the future could change how you make decisions in the present. To make things a little more interesting, Timelie has two main characters: a girl and her cat. You control both characters, which adds another layer to how you plan out moves, and potentially complicates certain moments as you try to make sure both survive a dangerous situation.
But having two characters also lets you create elaborate setups where one distracts a guard somewhere while the other is waiting at a nearby door, only for both to link up later. The trailer shows off some neat moments of both characters being in sync through the timeline, making for an interesting puzzle mechanic.
Timelie came to Steam this week, where it’s available for $17.
Project Genesis
If you’re an avid reader of this very weekly feature, you may already be familiar with Project Genesis from the March 20 chapter. Project Genesis is a space combat/space shooter hybrid.
The ambitious game attempts to bring together the ship-to-ship combat of Dreadnought with Halo’s first-person shooting mechanics. Genesis is designed to be accessible, so ship combat isn't as complex as space sims, and on-foot shooting mechanics should be easy for any shooter player to pick up.
Today, Project Genesis launches into Steam Early Access, which is about a month later than originally planned, but it means everyone will finally be able to jump in.