Sam Cornwell is developing Boxxy, a free Sokoban-style game with more than 200 hand-designed puzzles plus a new Daily puzzle every day. The developer says it is currently at v442 after hundreds of iterations, and that every level is made by hand rather than generated by AI. It runs in the browser with no download or ads on desktop, phones and tablets.
Radiangames has announced Miniopolis, a minimal city builder where players drag a selection box and extrude or subtract blocks of various types, with buildings and city mesh generated by custom procedural generation. It is a visual sandbox with no management elements or specific goals; playtest signups open this week, a demo will follow, and the full game is priced at $10, planned for Steam in Q1 2027 with other platforms to follow. Since the announce trailer, first-person walking mode and traffic vehicles moving through the city have been added.
TrampolineTales, the developer behind Luck be a Landlord and Maze Mice, has announced Category Connections, a chill puzzle game where players sort 3,000 things into 100 categories with no timers or stress. It is coming to Steam and mobile in 2027, with the Steam page live and pre-registration open on iOS and Android.
Nivalis Nights is Ion Lands' follow-up to Cloudpunk, reimagining that game's dystopia as a first-person management sim that mashes up Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, and Dave the Diver. Players inherit a noodle bar in the neon city of Nivalis, expanding the business while fishing, farming, and picking up side quests. It currently suffers from an unstable framerate, odd bugs, and a fiddly UI.
The Indie Sunday hub event on r/Games ran for 24 hours starting October 4, with submissions limited to developers and no game or developer shared more than once every 60 days. This week's spotlight featured titles including MineEmAll, DEEPWARD, WalkScape, FARAWAY GALAXY and Iron Expedition, with WalkScape's trading feature releasing next week.
Fallen London's monthly subscriber-only Exceptional Stories are largely written by freelance contributors, including writers who worked on Baldur's Gate 3, Dishonored, Stellaris, Destiny and Borderlands 4. These self-contained monthly tales let each author tell a complete story, so their individual voices come through more clearly than in larger AAA productions.
Section 9 Interactive's metroidvania End of Abyss received a patch just one day after launching on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the Epic Games Store, fixing most of the issues raised in the reviewer's critique. The main complaint was that the in-game map sometimes shared incorrect information, such as showing a door as locked after it had been unlocked or failing to mark when a key was found. The patch also addressed bugs, including a boss that failed to drop a quest item.
Nerial, the British studio behind the Reigns franchise, Card Shark, and The Crush House, announced it is entering 'hibernation mode,' ending development and laying off its remaining employees. Co-founders François and Tamara Alliot said in a social media post that the decision was made together with publisher Devolver, after 13 years and 11 published games. Devolver acquired Nerial in 2021 and laid off 40 percent of the studio's employees in 2024.
End of Abyss is a twin-stick survival horror game that blends Metroid-style exploration with tense combat, casting players as a technician entering an abandoned facility with soldiers and their captain. The review praises its winding map, scanner, and large-scale level design, but notes that boss fights drain ammo and grenades quickly, forcing resource grinding. The author also hit bugs including getting stuck in walls, invisible walls, falling out of bounds, map markers showing wrong states, and doors that would not open until a reload, though frequent saves limited the lost progress and several patches have already addressed some issues.
Using Claude Opus 5.5, released last week, modders are decompiling games and mashing them together, producing a flood of mod videos on X/Twitter this week, including World of Warcraft mixed with Call of Duty: World at War and Escape From Tarkov with Skyrim. These mods have not yet appeared on platforms like Nexus Mods, and some mod authors have criticized them as uncreative AI slop.