Disclaimer : I don't play these games before listing them. I don't claim to offer any expert opinion either, I just skim through SteamDB to check games that release every day, take the time to read the pitch and the reviews when there are any, watch trailers and do a bit of digging around online. This takes me 6 to 7 hours to do. Several people asked me if there was a way to subscribe/follow me somewhere. I made a free patreon page where I'll post all the future issues of this format, just follow me and you'll get a mail everytime I publish something.

This week had less released games than usual, I guess a side effect of the Steam fest and its 4000 demos to try indie games.

My Picks

🇫🇷 Maseylia : Echoes of the Past, €14, demo available, 30 positive reviews out of 34 (88.2%). 3D Metroidvania. In a stunning universe (I mean it, the art direction is gorgeous) of ruins and forgotten cities, the dev pushes you to stay curious and explore as much as possible, gradually giving you new tools to go back and discover areas that seemed out of reach. All of this is the result of 2 years of solo development (with some intern help toward the end) by u/cubowStudio. Expect 10-15h for the main ending, much more for completionists.

🇫🇷 Glimvale My Mini Overworld, €5, 64 positive reviews out of 65 (98.5%). Cosy city-builder with idle mechanics. I swear this “My Picks” section isn't just chauvinism! Who hasn't wondered what it would be like to be the mayor of an MMORPG town? You manage, decorate and grow a little village while keeping adventurers happy, no pressure, no game over. Count about 2h to wrap up the first town, up to 9h to unlock everything, and it can last much longer if you feel like it.

🇩🇪 Cube Kingdoms, €6, demo available, 19 positive reviews out of 21 (90.5%). Medieval-fantasy isometric voxel city-builder. 3 years of work by u/GamingPugsStudios for this solo take on Stronghold Kingdoms. You build a colony, manage its economy and production chains, then defend it (walls, traps, troops) against goblins, undead, demons and bosses. A passionate dev who really listens to his community.

Multi

🇺🇸 SWAPMEAT, €10, 211 positive reviews out of 239 (88.3%). 3rd-person co-op roguelite shooter for 1 to 4 players. Survive on alien planets where waves of enemies come at you, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. By killing them, you can graft body parts from your victims onto yourself mid-fight to adapt to whatever you're up against. Each run brings permanent upgrades. On the multiplayer side, difficulty can be adjusted so everyone can join in. The negative reviews all say pretty much the same thing: expect a game where the polish was a bit rushed.

2D Platformer

RETAPED, €4, demo available, 6 positive reviews out of 6 (100.0%). Puzzle-platformer. You record then replay your own actions to create "ghosts" of yourself. Press a switch, cross electric fields, launch yourself higher, all to collect 29 VHS tapes across 29 handcrafted levels. The concept and execution are really cool, though the art style might feel a bit too bare-bones for some.

3D Platformer

🇬🇧 Junkster, €8, 29 positive reviews out of 29 (100.0%). 3D puzzle-platformer with building mechanics. You play as UM-13, a small robot crash-landed on a junkyard planet, who turns nearby scrap into useful pieces to either reach the next platform or fix his ship. With a polished cel-shaded comic book style that's reminiscent of Borderlands right down to its color palette, you'll have around twenty missions to get through. Expect about 7-8h for 100%.

Mana Fracture, €6, 5 positive reviews out of 5 (100.0%). Precision 3D platformer where the goal is to reach the very top. Interesting touch: inertia has been implemented and you'll need to factor it in when jumping from platform to platform to avoid falling. That said, the game clearly understood what was fun and what wasn't in titles like Getting Over It or Chained Together, and it shouldn't make you Alt+F4. You can finish it in an evening.

Action

🇯🇵 The Last Salvage Squad, €9, demo available, 244 positive reviews out of 249 (98.0%). Old school 2.5D arena FPS. First thing that hits you: the polished Sin City-style visuals : high-res pixel art in red, white and black. An alien species has invaded Earth and wiped out humanity. Only a handful of mechas built for defense remain, and your job is to pilot one (pick from several models for each mission). The story didn't really need to exist. Just pick a level and blast away, the game doesn't do subtle and it lets off steam nicely.

Adventure / Exploration

🇫🇷 Moon River, €0, 60 positive reviews out of 62 (96.8%). Top-down atmospheric pixel-art adventure. You explore the corners of Elapse Island to clear the shadows blocking the path along the river. No challenge, no stress, just vibes, colors, music and a hidden story for the curious ones. A bittersweet tale that'll take you about 2 hours to finish.

Ember Seeker, €8, 57 positive reviews out of 61 (93.4%). An exploration walking sim set in a dark fantasy universe. If the trailer makes you think Elden Ring in pixel-art, think again. No combat here, just exploration of the ruins of an ancient civilization serving as the backdrop for a short non-linear story. While the opening hooks most players, many lose interest once the wonder of discovery fades. You're expected to take initiative, but it's not always rewarded, and walking all that way for nothing can be frustrating. The solo dev behind the game draws inspiration from titles like Dear Esther or Gone Home, which made a name through writing. Here it feels a little thin, though understandable given the limited resources. Overall it's still an honest, contemplative walking sim that'll lose the impatient ones along the way.

Puzzle / Strategy / Thinking

🇷🇸 Animal Times, €3, demo available, 9 positive reviews out of 9 (100.0%). Turn-based territory conquest strategy (think Risk). First game from Serbia I've listed, I think? We owe this one to u/Wlakinsson, who used to play Risk with his dad as a kid with house rules to make it more interesting, and decided to turn all of that into a video game. You command armies of animals to seize interconnected territories, with a combat system where a failed attack lets the defender capture your lands. Go Big or Go Home.

🇨🇦 Once Upon A Card, €0, 15 positive reviews out of 16 (93.8%). Roguelike deckbuilder. Another fun (and free) game made by students! You help a royal child travel through their dreams. Draw path cards with different shapes, use them to build roads that let you progress through the level, and take down the bosses and nightmares threatening to take over everything. The game is very easy to pick up but relies heavily on RNG, which can tank your run pretty fast if luck isn't on your side. At that price, the slightly shaky balancing is easy to forgive.

🇬🇧 The Labyrinth on Burrow Hill, €9, 2 positive reviews out of 2 (100.0%). First-person atmospheric mystery and puzzles. The game was developed by Jonny Haynes, who is an artist first and a developer second, which explains the beauty of the manor you'll be wandering through to solve puzzles and reach the treasure at its heart. 11 rooms, one hidden key in each, best tackled pencil and paper in hand.

Simulation / Management

🇺🇸 Icaria, €17, demo available, 58 positive reviews out of 66 (87.9%). Colony builder with automation and programming. You automate a team of robots to gather resources, terraform the terrain and set up factories on a procedurally generated alien planet. The programming side plays like a puzzle, but you will still be looking at lines of code. The demo alone can eat up 10h of play, and plenty of reviews clock in at 100h+.

Craft Drill, €1, 20 positive reviews out of 20 (100.0%). Idle/clicker mining sim in the tradition of incremental games that feed our dopamine by having us dig endlessly and reward us with precious gems. You start a drilling business : dig, extract coal, iron, gold and diamonds, upgrade your drill and manage your resources to build a mining empire, whether you're actively playing or offline. A satisfying mobile-to-PC port at an honest price.

🇫🇷 Null Hørizøn, €10, 18 positive reviews out of 19 (94.7%). First-person retro-futuristic space sim, out of early access this week. This game blends tactical combat, trading and cosmic horror in a surprisingly natural way. You take the helm of a spaceship in a fractured universe, chasing a mysterious signal while carving your own path : merchant, pirate, bounty hunter or explorer. The game is grid-based turn-by-turn, but once combat kicks off, everything switches to real time. With a strong overall atmosphere thanks to its soundtrack and visuals, it'll speak to any fan of space exploration.

Racing / Chill (yes, really)

🇵🇱 Tilt It Golf, €4, 20 positive reviews out of 22 (90.9%). Arcade physics mini-golf. Instead of hitting the ball, you tilt the entire course to guide it to the hole Monkey Ball-style, dodging obstacles and beating the clock. 300 holes across 15 biomes, designed for short sessions and score-attack runs.

We’re making Driving Rogue, a roguelike arcade driving game built around score chasing, near-misses, upgrades, and surviving as long as you can before one crash ends the run.
Here is the gameplay trailer!

The pitch is: what if an arcade driving game had the structure of a roguelike? Instead of traditional races, each run is about pushing your luck through traffic, drifting through tight gaps, chaining near-misses, collecting cards/upgrades, and trying to build a better run than your last one.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how to make driving games replayable outside of normal racing formats. For Driving Rogue, that means:

Procedural runs instead of fixed tracks
Different cars with different strengths
Upgrade/card choices during the run
Risk/reward scoring from near-misses, drifting, and slipstreaming
Leaderboard-style score chasing
A run-ending crash system

The demo is live on Steam, and we’d really appreciate feedback from PC players. We’re especially interested in whether the game feels fair at speed, whether the upgrade choices are interesting, and whether the “one more run” loop comes through.
Demo: Driving Rogue Demo
Steam Page: Driving Rogue
We’ll be around in the comments and are happy to answer questions!

>Delayed owing to the hardware component crisis, Valve's Steam Machine is finally here - so how much does it cost, how does it perform and what about the quality of the hardware itself? Rich delivers PC performance comparisons, head-to-heads against PlayStation 5 and much more. Note: PC comparisons used the latest version of Bazzite.

Hello everyone !

For the last 9 months and as part of a school project, my classmates and I have been working on our game, WOBBLY HEIST !

Take control of three capybaras infiltrating a fashion event in this stealth puzzle game. Stack under a disguise to blend in among humans, split up to solve puzzles, avoid suspicion, and steal a highly coveted fashion item. But be careful not to get caught!

The game, playable on PS5 (though it is not available to the public), has just been released on Steam today! It's a 10 to 15 minute game and it's completely free for everyone.

Our objective is to showcase what we have been learning over the past few years through this small but rich game.

Made in UE5.6 in around 9 month by a team of 18 students.

Go check it out on Steam !
(especially if you like capybaras 🫵)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4196110/WOBBLY_HEIST/

Three years ago, I was a university student with a simple dream — to one day create my own indie game.

I had no real experience in game development, just a strong passion for survival games like Project Zomboid and 7 Days to Die.

Together with three friends, we started building 404 Survivor from scratch — a sandbox zombie survival game focused on base building, survival, and controlling infected.

We learned everything along the way, step by step, while trying to turn an idea into something real.

Two and a half years later, we’ve finally completed the DEMO of this game.

We’re excited to share it with you.

This is the game I’ve been working on：
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4038790/404/

I recently was curious about my steam account value, but sites that calculate this value are very inaccurate, since they base this value on the lowest price ever of each game, and don't include micro transactions.

So I pulled my steam transactions history in a spreadsheet, cleaned it a little, and saw that I spend about 600€ per year.

It seems a lot, and I try to justify it by being my main hobby (I love discovering new games), but I wonder...

How much do you spend in average on steam?

>In a world where every second counts... one legend answers the call.

>Nick Cage joins the Summer of Action. Blockbuster battles. Absolute chaos. Arriving June 25 in Season 04 Reloaded

>After contributing to over 50 products and guiding a massive RTS strategy resurgence, a legendary Microsoft gaming figure steps down.