You probably woke up in an unknown place. In walkable distance there were loose branches, small rocks, perhaps some grass. To stay safe or to get cozy, you were told to create a base, which required you to craft some tools. For these you obviously need a workbench which can thankfully be build using the aforementioned sticks and stones.

From the most pre-historic settings to the most futuristic, this initial blueprint often remains the same. If you’ve played more than a few survival games, their starting hours begin to blur together, except for the special ones that go the extra mile to immerse you in their world, like Witchspire.

In the Early Access survival game developed and published by Envar Games, you play as a Hogwarts-ish wizard, flying broom and all. You collect familiaras that can assist in your menial tasks like you do in Palworld, but you also need to mine rocks and chop wood. Unlike in most games in the genre, though, you don’t hit trees with an axe or rocks with a pickaxe. After all, your a wizard [Harry!].

Your sickle is magical. You throw spirit apparitions of it that chop trees by themselves. For minerals, just throw a couple spirit pickaxes at each rock and you’ll be done. This alone helps bring new life to tasks that are so ubiquitous in the survival genre they inevitably feel like chores. Envar Games didn’t stop here, though.

As you progress through Witchspire, you unlock new versions of your tools. Not only do these allow you to farm better materials, they also change the farming mechanic itself. For example, once you unlock the Spirit Logging Sickle, you’ll go to chop a tree and the sick apparitions will start orbitting around your character instead of flying where you were aiming. Throw a few in a row and run into a wood area and you’ll become a tornado chopping every tree unlucky enough to be in your deadly radius.

This might seem like a minor detail in a game that has a lot more to offer, but it really isn’t. Unless you play a survival game that also veers toward automation, you’ll likely be farming resources even during the final stages of the game. Even if those resources, get progressively more valuable, that only increases the reward you get for farming them, it doesn’t improve the act of farming in itself.

With this seemingly minor change Envar Games shows that the studio respects my time and that even menial tasks should remain engaging and fresh. Furthermore, it also ensured that Witchspire stays consistent with this wizardry fantasy. You wouldn’t manually chop a tree or hit a rock if you do it with a swish of a wand, would you?

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Witchspire is now available in Early Access and already has enough content to keep you engaged for 20 or so hours. You can play it solo or in co-op. Now that its release discount is over, it costs 22,99€, which is a completely fair price for fans of the genre and/or the wizard fantasy.

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You already know by now that IO Interactive blew it out of the park with 007: First Light. Reviewers enjoyed it, players adored it, and it sold extremely well. One aspect of the game that you might’ve seen highlighted is its attention to detail and how much work the developer went through to reward creative players— “always do the unexpected, right?”.

What you likely missed is one surprising detail in the game’s phenomenal voice cast. Here’s why finding a Portuguese actress in 007: First Light made me smile.

Theresa Lorca

For those of you who haven’t played the game, Theresa Lorca is one of the Bond girls. She shows up as target to protect during Chapter 8: Time To Die. Lorca is one of three people you need to track to protect from the villains.

She’s portrayed as a gorgeous, extremely smart, powerful woman who inevitably activates James Bond’s radar. As all other characters in First Light, she is expertly voice-acted, but stands out for one specific reason.

As soon as I heard her speak in the initial stages of the chapter, her accent sounded familiar. I was almost sure she was a native Portuguese speaker talking in English.

Progressing through the quest line led me to Ellis White, one of the two other targets. After completing his section of the level, you can just leave the area or engage into three optional dialogue interactions.

One of those is asking White if he has any plans for the night. That is when he mentions Theresa Lorca as “hot Portuguese chick” that he has his eyes on. As far as I could find, this is the only time the game says that Lorca is Portuguese.

So I went to IMDB searching for who voiced Theresa Lorca and, sure enough, it really was a native Portuguese speaker. Raquel Cipriano, known for The Wheel Of Time and Lisbon Noir, voices Lorca. Not only is she Portuguese, she’s mostly done Portuguese projects in her career.

Kudos to IO Interactive for having this much attention to detail, especially when the overwhelming majority of players will completely miss this. The dialogue which mentions Theresa’s nationality is optional and her accent is subtle enough to likely be impossible to identify by anyone who isn’t also a Portuguese speaker.

The ones who notice it, though, appreciate it, and I hope you do too now that you’re reading this. Cipriano did an excellent job as the seductive Lorca and was one of the most memorable characters outside of the main cast.

Is there any other subtle detail that you noticed in 007 First Light? Let me know in the comments.

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Disclaimer: the event paid for two complimentary dinners (Friday and Saturday) and a one-night stay at a nearby hotel. They did not pay for coverage and haven’t influenced this article in any way.

Portugal hosts some renowned gaming events, most notably Gamescom Leadership Summit and DevGamm Lisbon/Madeira, but those are entirely B2B focused. In the consumer-facing front, things are still evolving. We do have multiple events which include games, but those have rarely highlighted the work that is done in the country.

This year’s edition of Comic Con Portugal brought with it the Innovation Lab, featuring some Portuguese-made videogames and a few talks about the industry. Dev Logs in Óbidos Vila Gaming went for a similar approach, but with a bigger focus on letting developers and industry people share their world with both industry people and consumers.

The Dev Logs took place outside of the main event’s venue, but literally right next to it. I agree with this approach and hope it is followed in future events. If you want to host talks and let people interact with developers, do not shove them into the middle of an extremely noisy venue. You might lose a few people in the process, but the ones who show up will most likely stick around.

In this smaller, secondary venue, Dev Logs hosted talks from over 20 speakers from all facets of the Portuguese videogame industry. But before we reached that phase, we did have an industry-only dinner at a nearby hotel with a delicious talk—and equally delicious dinner.

On Swiss Army Knives And Jacks Of All Trades

Marco Vale, an absolute veteran in the industry, spoke at length about his journey through the many evolutions of videogames and through the multiple transformations of the industry in Portugal. What stuck with me the most about this talk (I did not have the courage to pull out my laptop to take notes at the dinner table, so this is fresh off my brain) was his repeated use of the Swiss Army Knife analogy.

It fascinated me not just due to the lengths Vale went with it, going so far as to use multiple versions of the Swiss Army Knife, including ones I’d never seen or heard of, but because it echoed a talk from a completely different person in the industry. At the end of February, I attended the Spotlight Awards, where I watched a talk given by Tristan Michael. In it, Michael, who got his start in the industry back in the States, used a different analogy to say essentially the same thing: Jack of All Trades.

Both Vale and Michael highlighted the importance of learning more than one skill, even if you spent the first few years of your career and your formative years honing into something specific. They recognise that the industry has been pulling in the opposite direction to them for a long time. AAA studios have hyper-specialised developers that are the best in the industry at doing a specific thing.

For better or worse, though, we see the industry evolving again into something new. AAA companies are fewer and take longer to make games, so smaller studios and indie projects take center stage more and more often. I’d argue that those studios are the ones that will bring back the Swiss Army Knives and the Jack Of All Trades.

Saturday

The Dev Logs kicked off on Thursday, but I did not get to the event proper until the weekend. I got there late on Saturday but, thankfully, the talks were late too. These presentations were as diverse as their speakers.

I got there in time to attend Rui Guedes’ talk on Desert Race Adventures, Ground Control Games’ most recent title. He gave us a peek at the amount of work that goes into a project that might appear small from the outside.

Afterwards, Vanessa Vieira Dias led a conversation titled "Women Of Videogames: Playing, Creating And Belonging”. Dias took the stage alongside Beatriz Avelino, Catarina Esperança, Diana Pinheiro and Nicole Concha. They spoke about their journey through the industry of videogames in Portugal and what kind of evolution they had and hadn’t seen when it comes to gender-inclusion.

While they agree that a lot of progress has been made, there is still work to be done, including via events like these. Having women on stage discussion their journey in the industry gives the future women in videogames an example of what can already be done.

This was the first talk that got me taking notes, and I want to highlight a quote from Dias that stuck with me, which I’ll paraphrase:

People sometimes say: ‘You play? You don’t look like it!"‘ What does a woman who play videogames look like?

Tiago Franco took the stage around 6PM to tease us with early looks at Shelf Heroes and the bizarre journey that studios go through to get their games made. Franco and the Fun Punch team started working on this game as a sort of self-dare after a publisher doubted their ability to create a first person shooter. After all, they had no track-record.

Instead of sticking to their lane and iterating on the work they’d done with Striker’s Edge, Fun Punch started developing prototypes of FPS based mostly on concept art. Through this exercise, they eventually ended up with Plastic Heroes, renamed to Shelf Heroes after the studio made a publishing deal with Gameforge 4D.

Day Two- Sunday

Jasmine James kicked the stage off with an enlightening talk about Steam and some of its secrets. While this was mostly aimed at developers and studios, it was by no means useless to the public. The main message I want to highlight is: wishlist games you’re interested in, it can really help studios out!

David Ho followed suit with a presentation entirely focused around his first solo-developed game: Bobo And The Chest Of Nightmares. It is a 3D platformer inspired by the classics, including ones you might’ve never heard of, like PS1’s Jinx, which also stars a court jester as the playable character.

At around 3PM, Ricardo Cesteiro told us about Camel101’s journey as one of the longest running videogame studios in Portugal. Found by him and his brother Bruno, Camel101 has been developing games for nearly two decades. They’ve found their expertise in the immersive-horror narrative space since Syndrome in 2016, and are planning to release a new title this year, Dead Stop: No Vacancy.

Cesteiro highlights the fact that, while they’ve stuck to horror for the past decade, it hasn’t been one note. They change subgenres from project to project and, crucially, are intending on shortening development cycles even more. Dead Stop will be an anthology of “one-sitters”, short games meant to be played all in one go.

I managed to listen to the last talk of the event, given by Maria Gomes. Barking Beagle Studios is a small indie team with a handful of ambitious young people. Gomes is the narrative lead for their third game, Buried Within Clay, a Sumerian puzzle adventure.

Gomes spoke with an enthusiasm that was infectious. As the narrative lead, she was tasked with tying together the game’s story. She apparently found that too easy— my words, not hers- so she decided that, instead of simply dropping in some hints about ancient Sumeria and its history, she would create her own phonetic approximation between English syllables and Cuneiform characters.

This dedication infected the other departments, too. All architecture is inspired by real Sumerian buildings and has impacted the entire project.

Conversations

I missed a bunch of talks. Some of those were due to my tardiness, but most of them were because of the developers that kept dragging my attention away, blame them. There were 13 studios and two student organisations present at Dev Logs Óbidos. They were:

I spoke to almost everyone on this list. João Antunes Eiras developed Employee 925 through many years as a side-project to his full-time positions in the gaming industry. He was fascinated by the unique approaches that certain players took when playing his game right in front of him.

Employee 925 was a unique fit for a setting like the one we were on. You an easily finish a route in under a half-hour, but that was just a taste, leaving you wishing for more. I’m being intentionally vague about the game because summarily explaining it would ruin some of the magic.

Nerd Monkeys were showcasing Nok, a lovely physics-based hidden object game in which you destroy entire locations looking for a handful of items. Massive Galaxy’s Gonçalo Monteiro brought ARC Seed, his take on the roguelite deckbuilder craze with a unique focus on a grid-based tactical combat.

Lastly, I had the pleasure of speaking with the young folks at Loading Studios, which brought a massive functional Gameboy to showcase Alentejo: The Tinto & The Ugly. See for yourself:

Daniel Penão and Vasco Oliveira had their Alentejo games playable on multiple Gameboy systems (including regular-sized ones) and on a SNES. Following the success of their take on the Western genre set in the lands of Alentejo, Loading Studios is now working on an adaptation of the most famous Portuguese book of all time: Luís Vaz de Camões’ Os Lusíadas.

I did not get a chance to speak with them, but students from Lusófona University were present with their projects. Sharkcoders was also there, showcasing simple projects entirely coded by children and young teens.

Final Thoughts

Dev Logs at Óbidos Vila Gaming was another great step in what I hope we’ll be a new-ish tradition in Portugal. We should obviously highlight the international successes that still dominate the market here, but consumer-facing events should strive to also show what is done in Portuguese soil.

There are multiple exciting and crucial releases coming soon, I hope to see them highlighted more and more in upcoming events.

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Making a game is hard enough by itself, but it becomes infinitely harder when you try to sell it. Small indie teams or solo developers spend years working on a project inside a bubble, almost entirely devoid of outside input.

How do you know it is good? How do you figure out your target audience? Your platform(s)? Self-publishing is possible and can be a viable strategy, but it isn’t too dissimilar from playing the lottery if it is your first project. But how can you hope to get a publisher “in this economy”?

It was with this question in mind that Codfish Academy created Codfish Game Clinic with Dear Villagers. The first edition of what will become a recurring event was a success, and a rare opportunity for Portuguese videogame developers to pitch their game to an accomplished publisher in their home soil.

Here’s my coverage of the event, which took place at Óbidos Parque on Friday, April 24th.

A Unique Setup

Codfish Game Clinic was a peculiar event to cover because I didn’t actually attend the most enticing part of it. The pitches and the main conversations between developers/studios and Guillaume Ancelin, Senior Product Manager at Dear Villagers, happened 1-on-1.

All I could see were the representatives of the small studios or the solo developers pick up their bags and laptop and head out of the meeting room we were in at Óbidos Parque as we wished them luck.

I did have the chance to speak to all of them and get a general sense of what they thought of the experience. Most had interacted with publishers previously, but in a different context.

Portugal does not have traditional publishers. Portuguese studios are competing for the same publishers as the rest of the world, or most realistically, the rest of Europe. In most of those situations, they have between 15 to 30 minutes to cram an entire pitch deck to a group of people who had never previously heard of their game.

This Game Clinic with Dear Villagers gave them a different proposition. Six studios attended the event, five from Portugal, and one from Belgium. Each studio had one hour with Ancelin behind closed doors. Not only was that a lot more time than usually given for pitches, but Ancelin had already played all games that were selected to attend the event.

What The Studios Had To Say

I reached out to all six studios to get their direct quotes regarding Codfish Game Clinic. Here is who they are, what they’re working on, and what they had to say.

Barking Beagle Studios

Barking Beagle Studios (BBS) is a four-person team based in Lisbon. All their members were at the event:

• Diogo Mendonça

• Gonçalo Goulão

• Nuno Baptista

• Maria Gomes

They have two projects released on itch.io, P.I.G.E.O.N. and Foam Sweet Foam, but they brought a new game to Codfish Game Clinic: Buried Within Clay, a “Sumerian puzzle-adventure”.

Here is what the studio had to say about the event:

Because we're still a young indie studio, we're still very dependent on publishers to be able to fulfil our projects and grow. This is a closed-off industry, and opportunities to have direct contact with industry professionals are scarce.

We're grateful to have had the possibility to discuss the pitch for our newest project with Guillaume, not only because it increases our chance of success in this saturated industry, but [because it gave] us a valuable insight into the [point of view of] publishers and how they make their selection. We are sincerely grateful to Codfish Game Clinic for this opportunity.

Ground Control Studios

Ground Control Studios have been around for a while. Their first game release on Steam was Return Zero VR in September of 2016, almost 10 years ago. They’ve since released three more titles: Zhed - Puzzle Game in 2020, Hyper Gods in 2024, and Desert Race Adventures in 2025.

Eternity, a survival strategy game and their most ambitious title, was the project they brought to Codfish Game Clinic. I reached out to Rui Guedes, one of the studio’s founders and the representative who attended the event, and this is what he had to say:

(Translated From Portuguese)

I found the session with Guillaume interesting. Despite all the experience I have with pitching, each game is its own thing and he made interesting suggestions from the perspective of how to help the publisher understand and validate the work in general and Eternity in particular.

I think that, regardless of if you had positive or negative feedback, it was super valuable, especially following a session of exploring and improving the work’s presentation. It ended up being a consequential conversation, which is the best result a game dev can have.

Massive Galaxy Studios

Despite its name, Massive Galaxy Studios is (mostly) a one-man project from the mind of Gonçalo Monteiro, who founded it back in 2017. He is based in Lisbon and has already released multiple projects.

The studio kicked off with For The Warp in 2020, released LakeSide in 2022, ARC Seed in 2024, and has been working on the titular Massive Galaxy likely since the creation of the studio. What he brought to Codfish Game Clinic, though, was Mind The Dragon. Here are Monteiro’s thoughts on the event:

It was a great opportunity having a scout from a big international publisher give detailed feedback about our pitch and our game build. We were given a good level of depth in discussing game design, mechanics, UI and art direction about our projects. It’s not just a great learning experience to new developers but also important feedback for already seasoned [ones].

There was also a masterclass from Codfish [Academy] giving updated data about publishing your game on Steam, what works well in promoting your game, understanding how the Steam store algorithm works and what developers should focus on when promoting their game.

Nerd Monkeys

Nerd Monkeys were one of the most experienced studios present at Codfish Game Clinic. They’ve been developing, porting, and publishing games ever since 2013 with Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in the Hotel Lisbon.

Diogo Vasconcelos, owner of Nerd Monkeys, attended the event with the studio’s upcoming title: NOK. As someone with over a decade of experience interacting with publishers in a variety of settings, here are his thoughts on the event:

(Translated from Portuguese)

The experience itself was quite positive, not too different from what these meetings usually are, but with the distinction of a slower rhythm since these were selected projects which the publisher played previously, which made communicating much clearer and more efficient.

Everything points to this having been useful, we’ll know in the next few weeks if it was also successful, but it was useful regardless due to the informed feedback from a publisher who played the game’s build.

N-Zone

N-Zone were the only non-Portuguese studio at the event. Arthur Rogery, Head of Production at N-Zone flew directly from Belgium to attend Codfish Game Clinic.

The studio has been around for a while, but they mostly focused on mobile projects. Recently, though, they’ve split N—Zone in two, allowing them to have a dedicated team crafting PC and Console titles.

They released Chickenhare and the treasure of Spiking-Beard last year and brought the upcoming MegaGum to Codfish Game Clinic. Rogery was excited to share the game with everyone at the event and seemed to have a positive experience in Óbidos.

Red Pine Studios

This is the most secretive studio and project present at Codfish Game Clinic. Not for any specific reason beyond the game’s solo developer, Filipe Thomaz, not being quite ready to share the game with the world (yet).

He has previously released a game under his own name: Into A Dream. The project he brought to Óbidos was War Doctor, a narrative-focused experience. Here’s what he had to say about the Game Clinic:

Translated from Portuguese.

It isn’t common to be able to spend one hour with a key person from a big gaming publisher to discuss a project, let alone with someone who did their homework excellently, playing all the games and analysing all pitches in advance.

The depth of the advice, strategy, and discussion from someone with such knowledge of the industry internationally in publishing went above and beyond any other experiences I’ve had with more conventional pitches.

Codfish Academy Weighs In

Although it was hosted in partnership with Dear Villagers, the Game Clinic is a project created by Codfish Academy. Ricardo Flores Santos, a partner at the organisation— who also hosted a Masterclass about Steam Store trends and optimisation— shared his own thoughts about the event and why it exists:

(Translated from Portuguese)

Game Clinic’s objective is to “simply” attempt to change the Developer meets Publisher and Publisher meets Developer paradigm. The many years we’ve had of this industry shows us that the current “speed dating” approach in events and the sending of pitches or demos is poorly adjusted, so it ends up being less than ideal for both Devs and Publishers.

We need more time, quality time. After all, the relationship between Dev and Publisher is like a marriage which can and should last beyond a single game. It is a relationship built on trust between people. The Game Clinic is exactly that: a networking space where people can know each other, play and talk about their games and the business opportunities.

Regarding future editions, Santos told me that Codfish Academy “plans to host more Clinics and other meets between industry professionals with the help of Óbidos Parque and the municipality”. If everything goes according to plan, there should be a Clinic “at the start of Summer and another around September” of this year.

Santos believes that these events can work as a way of displaying Portuguese creators while also attracting international studios, like N-Zone in this first Clinic.

All conversations I had with people at the event were positive, as were the testimonies you read above. Let’s see if this can kickstart more events of its kind in Portugal, hopefully bringing more international studios and publishers to our sunny lands, while taking our games beyond the border.

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There will be no “regular” edition of Portugal Makes Games? tomorrow as I was busy working on this for most of the week. I’ll be back with updates next weekend.

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Welcome to the second edition of Portugal Makes Games?, my weekly newsletter bringing you the most relevant events happening in the Portuguese videogame industry, paired with a story to give you a peek behind the curtain.

SINFO 33

SINFO, “the biggest free tech conference in Portugal”, took place this week, between the 20th and the 24th of April 2026. It unfolded in the beautiful Técnico Innovation Center in the heart of Lisbon.

While SINFO is an event mainly focused on tech in a more general sense, it always features a today entirely dedicated to videogames. This year we had a crew of heavy hitters in the keynote speakers:

• Zoë Sams, 2XKO’s Engineering Lead at RIOT Games, spoke about “Empathy in Game Development”, a topic that keeps getting more relevant as time goes on.

• Grant Jackson, Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog. brought us a curiously titled conversation “Four Coins: Lessons in Contradiction from a Career in Game Design.”

• Jonathan Ye, Lead Level Designer at Infinity Ward, closed the Main Stage on Wednesday by talking about “How to Break Into The Game Industry as a Level Designer”.

This free event is always an excellent opportunity for networking and to have a chat with accomplished people in the gaming industry.

Codfish Game Clinic

As I covered in the previous edition of Portugal Makes Games?, Codfish Game Clinic took place on the 24th of April 2026, yesterday at the time of writing. This event, (hopefully) the first of many, was organized by Codfish Academy with the help of Dear Villagers.

Guillaume Ancelin, Senior Product Manager at the publisher, came to Óbidos, a beautiful medieval town, to have 1-on-1 chats with 5 indie studios looking for guidance with their pitches.

The solo developers and small studios had one hour each to pitch their game to Ancelin, a much longer time-window than is usually given at events. I attended Codfish Game Clinic and I’ll be back with deep coverage of this event this week, so stay tuned.

Comic-Con Portugal

After some changes to the brand, Comic-Con Portugal also followed up to some alterations to the event itself. One of those was the addition of Innovation Lab, a small area dedicated to Portuguese videogames.

A selection of videogames made in Portugal was made by Associação de Produtores de Videojogos Portugueses (Association of Portuguese Videogame Producers) and ended up being stacked:

• Aerowave OS, by ByBelka Studios.

• Bobo And The Chest Of Nightmares, by Polycast Labs.

• Desiree: Eyes On You, by Strangeberry Games.

• Hell Maiden, by Astral Shift.

• InfiniSpace, by Magnificent Ocean.

• Little Goody Two Shoes, by Astral Shift.

• MIRAI #167, by Orangenap Studio.

• Spectron, by Strawberry Fox Studios.

• Timepunk, by Aden Interactive.

• Twin Stick Checkers, by Mindera Gaming.

• Vroomity Loops, by Happy Chimkens.

There is no story in this edition of the newsletter because I’ll be doing a separate article dedicated to my coverage of Codfish Game Clinic. Stay tuned!

Welcome to the second edition of Portugal Makes Games?, my weekly newsletter bringing you the most relevant events happening in the Portuguese videogame industry, paired with a story to give you a peek behind the curtain.

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A Videogame Wins A Prize For Innovation In Culture At ARRISCA C

We have a long road ahead of us in Portugal when it comes to recognizing videogames as one of the cultural pillars of entertainment, but the latest edition of ARRISCA C showed us that we’re already making progress.

ARRISCA C is an initiative that aims to promote the creation of companies and startups focusing in innovation, especially in technological spaces. The winners were announced last week and an upcoming videogame took second place in the “Inovação em Cultura, Turismo e Património” (Innovation in Culture, Tourism, and Heritage) category.

#31 Luzyahdas: The Botafogo Odyssey is the next game from Loading Studios, the minds behind multiple titles that focus on highlighting Portuguese culture. The studio describes their next game as:

A fresh take on ‘Os Lusíadas’ by Luiz Vaz de Camões. A project that blends Portugal's cultural legacy with Cli-Fi, bringing classic literature into the entertainment and edutainment market in our unique way.

There aren’t enough videogames focusing on the hundreds of years of rich Portuguese history, I’m extremely excited to see what Loading C does with one of Portugal’s seminal works of literature.

RTP Arena Spoke To EIRAS About Employee 925 And His Journey Through The Videogame Industry

João Antunes, also known as EIRAS, is one of many examples of the talented and accomplished Portuguese people we have in the gaming industry. He’s worked on some heavy hitters like AGAR.IO, Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, and Star Wars: Outlaws, among others. He’s been at Studio Ellipsis since 2024 and is the Senior Gameplay Developer on Nightholme, a game we highlighted in the first edition of Portugal Makes Games?.

Portugal Makes Games? The First Edition

In the midst of building his fantastic CV, though, Antunes somehow found the time to develop Employee 925 by himself, a short indie title that’s sure to stick with you for a while.

RTP Arena, the gaming vertical of the Portuguese public broadcasting organization , interviewed Antunes on his eclectic journey through the videogame industry. The entire article is in Portuguese, but your browser can probably translate it well enough. I’d like to highlight a quote that will likely resonate with a lot of creators in the industry:

Digo sempre mais ou menos o mesmo a alguém que quer começar: faz os teus próprios jogos (pequenos e rápidos), vai ao máximo de eventos que conseguires e tenta falar com o máximo de pessoas nesses eventos (para perceberes como as coisas funcionam e para que saibam que existes) e não desanimes se tiveres de te adaptar às oportunidades ou falta delas.

My translation:

I always say a similar thing to someone who wants to get started [in the videogame industry]: make your own games (short and quick), attend as many events as you can and try to talk to as many people as possible in those events (so you can understand how things work and to let them know you exist) and don’t feel disheartened if you need to adapt to the opportunities or lack thereof.

Camel 101 Wanted Their First Game To Be A Massive Shooter RPG

There are few videogame studios as tenured in Portugal as Camel 101. They’ve existed since 2009 and are still publishing games to this day. Their upcoming release is Dead Stop: No Vacancy, the first of a series of short, episodic horror games.

Camel 101 have been successful at doing exactly that: shorter games focusing on immersion, that don’t waste your time and don’t cost you a fortune. But when I spoke to Ricardo Cesteiro, the studio’s co-founder, a few weeks ago, he told me that their first project was meant to be an entirely different experience.

The first project we started doing was a shooter/RPG which was something gigantic and which we obviously weren’t able to do, but it was an experience.

Cesteiro described this fondly, while gesturing with his arms open to reinforce the notion that their initial project really was massive. This is now a funny anecdote, but I believe it has a lesson behind it.

Cesteiro loves RPGs, as many of us do, but that doesn’t mean that RPGs should be the starting point for the games he makes. If you love reading high fantasy books spanning multiple entries in a series, you still probably shouldn’t start off your writing journey with a 300k word tome.

Looping back to what Antunes said in his interview with RTP Arena: start with small and quick projects to learn the ropes, and see where you go from there. In Camel 101’s case, they’ve honed their craft of creating short horror experiences to near perfection.

That doesn’t mean that initial ambition isn’t entirely gone, though. When I asked Cesteiro what kind of game he would make if time and money weren’t a part of the equation, he smiled, looked out his window, and said: “maybe I’d like to one day make an RPG, but at the same”, he laughed, “I would find it quite scary to do.”

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I was raised on Playstation. Nintendo and Xbox never got the same reach that Sony did here in Portugal, so my first videogame memories are on the original Playstation console.

Most of those are a blur and I can barely remember specific games. I do remember my time with the Playstation 2, though, and with its furry mascots (miss you, Sly Cooper!). One of them was Ratchet and his metallic friend, Clank.

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When Insomniac returned to the franchise with Rift Apart I was excited to try it, but I did not own a Playstation 5 at the time. So I patiently waited for it to come to PC, bought it on release, and did not find the time to play it… Until now.

I’m not sure what motivated me to play this now, but it might’ve subconsciously been the Jason Schreier rumour about Playstation pulling back from PC ports, directly naming Insomniac’s Wolverine.

Whatever the case, I’ve played over 5h of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and most of those have been spent in awe. The few in which I do come back down to earth are spent fearing for Nixxes, hoping that their talents won’t be wasted on live-service games that rarely push the technical limitations of the medium.

Rift Apart is a technical marvel. I am fortunate enough to own a beefy computer— luckily acquired right before the “RAMpocalypse”— and, consequently, to be able to run the latest Ratchet & Clank at maximum settings. I also recently acquired an HDR OLED Ultrawide monitor and have been consistently disappointed with how sparse adequate support is for this kind of technology.

Luckily, Nixxes are the best at way they do, and Rift Apart is the perfect stage for them to demonstrate it. The game is running at around 140fps with flawless ultrawide support and with genuinely mind-blowing HDR. I find myself frequently picking my chin up from my lap when I’m greeted with an absurd wide shot upon arriving at a new planet.

I constantly feel like I am playing a Pixar movie. The animations are phenomenal, the lighting and colours are pristine, and there isn’t a single solitary stutter around. The loading times are blazingly fast and all of the fancy DualSense features are enabled on PC. There isn’t a single blemish I can find on this port.

This is one of those rare occasions in which I’m playing a AAA game without tinkering with settings for hours or giving up and just accepting that stutters are par for the course. And even though Ratch & Clank: Rift Apart is a title from 2021 ported to PC in 2023, it looks as good as anything else I’ve seen to this day.

I am thoroughly enjoying myself and often giggling like a child, but I can’t help but feel sad when I put the controller down.

The last project that Nixxes worked on was the recent PC port of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. As usual, they knocked it out of the park. But when will they have another chance to do so?

We’re living in an age when excellent PC ports are few and far between. More often than not games are deeply unoptimised or, at best, plagued with the occasional stutter, the bane of most UE5 titles.

A company like Nixxes, specialising in the unique art of correctly optimising a game for PC is worth their weight in gold. Imagine playing a FromSoftware title ported to PC by Nixxes. An hypothetical Elden Ring 2 with native ultrawide support, an uncapped framerate, stutter-free and supporting all upscaling techniques available on the market.

Sony acquired Nixxes back in 2021, so they’re stuck with Playstation projects. But with the studio supposedly pulling back from porting their games to PC, what will be left for them to do? I genuinely hope we don’t see them heading the same way that Bluepoint did, but the timeline is uncomfortably similar.

To end this on a positive note, bask in the glory of some (of way too many) screenshots I’ve taken so far. If you have the budget, a good PC and do not own a PS5, play all of Nixxes ports. They’re by far the best way to experience those games.

• Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered

• Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered

• Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

• Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition

• Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR’S CUT

• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

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With that being said, we’re only here to talk about one aspect of the country: our videogame industry. So let’s get into the first edition of the newsletter.

Portugal Makes Games? is my weekly newsletter bringing you the most relevant events happening in the Portuguese videogame industry, paired with a story giving you a peek behind the curtain.

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This Week In Portugal

Nightholme: The First Crossing Event Experience

This past weekend Studio Ellipsis shared a gameplay overview video for their debut title, Nightholme, which looks great, but what truly surprised me was how they went about sharing it.

The studio picked one journalist (Polygon’s Ford James), alongside five content creators (berleezy, early-tv, SmokeeBeeButMore, ToastedShoes, DieHardDiva), and took them to an abandoned convent in Lisbon for an immersive and terrifying experience.

The six participants had to survive the trials and tribulations of an escape-room challenge packed with screeching creatures until they finally reached the only safe space inside the (possibly haunted) convent: a room where they could have a hands-on preview with Nightholme. Take a look:

Codfish Game Clinic

Codfish Academy, a hub which helps aspiring game developers find more opportunities, is partnering up with Dear Villagers, the publisher behind The Forgotten City, to create the Codfish Game Clinic.

Developers and studios from all over the country could apply until April 10th for a chance to be one of the five selected to participated in the event, which includes:

• Pitch mentorship, with Codfish Academy helping teams prepare their pitch decks.

• Publisher Masterclass going over strategies, KPIs, and more.

• Networking dinner.

• One-on-one conversation with Guillaume Ancelin, Senior Product Manager at Dear Villagers.

The event will take place in the beautiful city of Óbidos during the weekend of April 23 and 24th. I’m looking forward to see what comes of it.

A Glimpse Into My Conversation With AstralShift

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking with three of the five co-founders at AstralShift about their craft. We spoke for over two hours (they were too kind) about a panoply of topics— some of which you might see published elsewhere, stay tuned. One of those was focused on the Portuguese industry and how the team feels about their impact in it.

AstralShift is one of the most successful studios in Portugal. They started off as volunteers working on a game they published for free on Itch.io back in 2016. Only seven years later, Square Enix published their second game, Little Goody Two Shoes, via the now defunct Square Enix Collective.

The studio is also one of the few examples of a Portuguese team that is working exclusively with original IPs and doing so successfully. Speaking on their influence in the Portuguese videogame industry, they told me they feel flattered and proud every time they get emails or messages from fans pointing to them as an inspiration.

Having a real success story happen in their own country gives aspiring Portuguese developers and creators something to look towards when pursuing their own objectives, which fills the AstralShift team with joy. They frequently answer back and try to help as many people as they can, hoping that more and more Portuguese studios can succeed internationally.

Besides 2023’s Little Goody Two Shoes, they’ve released Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, a remastered version of the beautiful RPG Maker gothic horror game they published for free back in 2016. They’re now working on Hell Maiden (which has a demo available), a horde survival bullet heaven inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the narrative and artistic flair that are AstralShift’s defining features.

See you next Saturday, Xau! (colloquial way of saying bye in Portuguese, similar to the Italian ciao. Check back next week for a new Portuguese word).

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After speaking with a few game developers here I’ve noticed a quote pop up time and time again. It goes something like this:

“We’ve been doing this for years now, but every time we are at an event or a video goes viral on TikTok there are people surprised that we’re making games in Portugal!”

If even a lot of Portuguese people do not know about Portuguese-made games, I bet a lot of you are wondering: Portugal Makes Games?

Hence why I chose it as the title for this newsletter that will be arriving in your inboxes or Substack app every week. I’m aiming to publish it every Saturday, but don’t quote me on it.

The purpose of this newsletter is simple: I want to ensure that as many people as possible know the correct answer to the question (hint: it is yes!). To do that, I will be bringing you tidbits and interesting stories from interviews with Portuguese developers and keep you up to date on the most relevant things that happen in our little corner of the gaming industry.

Let me know if you there is anything in specific you’d like to know about how videogames are made in Portugal!

Lastly, I’d like to extend a huge thanks to , who was kind enough to bring good weather to Lisbon, and who reminded me that the best way to get something done is to just start it!

Hope to see you Saturday for the inaugural edition of Portugal Makes Games?!

A few years ago seemingly everyone pulled out a tape measure and frantically typed “howlongtobeat X game” while it awkwardly sat in their Steam cart. “60$ for a 12h campaign? That is 5$ per hour!” said John Doe. “I’ve clocked over 500h on Skyrim for the same money, that is much better value”, he added. The discourse could be positive, too. Hollow Knight was universally praised for, among many other reasons, offering almost unmatched value when it came to $ per hour.

But I am squarely in the opposite side of this argument. Should videogame size matter when bigger is often worse in this industry? The open world era ushered by Bethesda, Ubisoft, and Rockstar back in the early 2010s filled many titles with enough bloat to make my Crohn’s flare-ups feel mild. I’m here in defence of the two to twelve-hour experiences, be they polished or janky (complimentary). Here’s why.

Why I’m Writing About This Now

While I do think about this every time any sort of quantity versus quality argument comes into the fray (like it has with Crimson Desert), the reason why I’m finally putting this in writing is because of Ricardo Cesteiro. Ricardo is one of the co-owners of Camel101, alongside his brother, Bruno. They’re a three-person indie studio based in Portugal who’ve published six games on Steam, an average of one every three years.

I interviewed Ricardo this week and questioned him about their small development cycles in comparison to the industry average, and the reason behind them. Ricardo laughed and said that Beneath, their latest release, took five years to develop and “that’s too much”, he told me. There are financial and business incentives behind smaller development cycles, but Ricardo wanted to highlight that it was also a decision based on Camel101’s personal preferences.

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Like you, like me, and like the average global videogame player, Ricardo is an adult with a job and with personal responsibilities. This means that he simply doesn’t have as much time to play games as he used to. While he has always loved RPGs, he confesses that the last one he’s finished is Dragon Age: Inquisition (released in 2014), a feat that took him an entire year to accomplish.

You can probably relate to this, as can I. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been sitting on my Steam library (shameful, I know...) for almost three years now because I simply cannot fathom devoting over 100h to a videogame outside of work. Instead, I’ve been cherishing smaller, contained experiences that end quickly, but stick around even after the credits roll.

Ricardo and Bruno at Camel101 excel at just that, short but intense horror experiences that immerse you into a terrifying world that you’ll remember for a while. Syndrome took me around 6h to complete and Those Who Remain can be finished in under 5h. Their next game, Dead Stop: No Vacancy, will be the first of a collection of episodic horror stories, even shorter than their previous titles.

Put The Measuring Tape Back In Your Pocket

As players buy fewer and fewer full price games, F2P and legacy titles eat the majority of the cake, but a door opens for smaller, cheaper experiences. While expensive and extensive games still dominated leaderboards and The Game Awards, 2025 was a year of successes for titles that were either short, cheap, or both.

Hades II, Blue Prince, Hollow Knight: Silksong are squarely in the impossible category of being both cheap and massive, but they’re also accompanied by some short kings and queens as some of the best games released last year.

• Despelote- 13,99€ on Steam, takes around 2h to finish.

• Rhythm Doctor- 19,50€, 4h to 8h.

• Sword Of The Sea- 28,99€, around 3h.

• Lumines Arise- 39,99€, 4h to 7h.

• Dispatch- 28,99€, around 9h.

Players want value, but that doesn’t just equal playtime. Most players will wince if you ask 69,99€ for a game with less than 10h of playtime, but even Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 was well received despite its 49,99€ asking price.

This isn’t new, mind you. Some of the most legendary and revered games of all time took less than 10h to complete: Portal 1 and 2, Silent Hill 1 and 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Uncharted 1. And when you compare videogames to other mediums, as you so often do, the whole argument seems dumb.

Do you measure a book by the thickness of its spine? Do you judge a movie by its runtime? A series by how many episodes it has? Do you refuse to listen to music albums that fail to reach 1h of playtime? Then stop pulling out the measuring tape as you prepare to buy your next videogame. Enjoy the hundred-hour behemoths as much as you want, but give the short kings and queens the opportunities they deserve.

You might bump into a What Remains of Edith Finch, play it for 2.5 hours, and think about it for the next 25 years. How’s that for value?

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Reviewed on PC

Roguelike Deckbuilders are a dime a dozen right now. Pressing the tag on Steam brings me to a page with 1119 matches. So why did South Korean developer I M GAME take the risk of betting on such an overcrowded genre with their first PC game?

Likely because Master of Piece is genuinely unique. It is, at its core, a Roguelike Deckbuilder, but it is wrapped with enough novelty to give players a fresh experience. Here is how the first PC game from an experienced mobile game developer succeeds where a lot of others fail.

What Is Master Of Piece, Exactly?

According to Steam tags, it is a:

• Roguelike Deckbuilder

• Auto Battler

• Turn-Based Strategy

If I had to describe it via comparison, I would call it a mix between Darkest Dungeon and Into the Breach. Describing it as an Auto Battler feels wrong because you are making decisions every turn, and if you don’t, you won’t succeed.

The comparisons to Darkest Dungeon are the most obvious. Master of Piece kicks off in a sort of town area called “Departure Ground”. This is where you prepare for your Journey. In the Hall of Fame, you can check your achievements and, in a lovely touch, they manifest as actual objects inside the building.

On the opposite side of the Grounds, you’ll find the Archive. Here’s where you can learn more about Master of Piece’s lore and how the Black Fog took over the world. Additionally, you can evaluate your previous journeys and check your overall stats.

The left side of the Grounds hides the Garrison, the game’s main form of meta-progression. You can construct four buildings out of the five possible ones here. Your options are:

• Barracks: The piece your receive as reward after battles will be upgraded for 1/2/3 encounters.

• Command Center: Obtain the Pioneer’s Compass relic, which can be used 1/2 times during the journey.

• Warehouse: Obtain +1/2 additional item slots. Obtain 1 random item upon entering a different region when fully upgraded.

• Windmill: Obtain 2/4/6/8/ additional dice at the start of the journey.

• Workshop: Your will recover your flag durability by +3/4/5/6 upon defeating the boss.

All buildings can be constructed and upgraded using the same currency, Resources, which you get at the end of the journey. The farther you go, the more Resources you get.

With all those explanations out of the way (we’ll explain the Garrison system bonuses later), let’s get into a journey and brave the black fog.

The Journey

You start your first journey as Sigmund, the knight. Master of Piece kicks you off with a tutorial battle, which brings us to the Into the Breach comparisons.

This is an Auto-Battler in the most general sense. All pieces do the same actions, with very few exceptions: they attack what is directly in front of them.

Similar to a classic Auto-Battler, they have differing stats and passives. But unlike most games in the genre, the battles don’t play out automatically after initial positioning. You get to place new pieces or move the ones already placed every turn. Additionally, you also get Relics, powerful passives for your character, and a main ability that can turn the tide of a battle.

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Your objective is the same in every single battle: destroy the enemy’s flag before they destroy yours. In boss fights, which take place at the end of each region, the enemy flag is the boss. Losing your flag means that your journey comes to an end, and you need to start from the beginning.

You’ll also lose if you run out of pieces, aka Mercenaries, before you destroy the enemy. After winning a battle, you’ll get to choose your next destination, and there are a ton of options:

• Bookstore: Obtain items.

• Bootcamp: Randomly change a mercenary’s base stats and grants and Upgrade or Rumor.

• Boss Battle: Obligatory challenge at the end of each region. Defeating them rewards you with an upgrade to a Trait of one Mercenary.

• Card Event: Random events which allow you to trade Flag durability for higher rewards, or recover Flag Durability for no rewards.

• Elite Battle: Tougher fight which reward you with a Relic.

• Enemy Battle: Normal encounters which reward you with one Mercenary.

• Gallows: Execute a Mercenary to pass their Trait to another.

• Relic Shop: Choose one out of two Relics.

• Shaman’s Hut: Upgrade a Mercenary’s stats out of two options.

• Trait Shop: Choose one trait from two options.

More options show up in later regions, but I’m not going to spoil the surprises. Your strategy is as important in the actual battles as it is in planning your journey. Making the wrong choices will often lead to impossible battles, no matter how well you play in the battle itself.

Like any good roguelike, Master Of Piece excels in its variety. There are 28 Mercenaries to find for each Commander. For now, you unlock Livius after playing with Sigmund. They have very different playstyles and Mercenary pools to choose from.

There are four regions with 15 enemy types per region, so a total of 60 enemy units to find. On top of all this, there 32 relics, 9 items, and 22 card events. If that isn’t enough variety for you, the possibilities become nearly endless when you take into account the possible trait combinations alongside the Rumor and Upgrade systems.

The Mercenaries

Your units in Master of Piece are your Mercenaries. They all have three main stats:

• Attack Power: How much damage they deal.

• Health: How much damage they can take.

• Speed: Faster units attack before slower ones. If two units with the same speed clash, a dice is rolled to decide who attacks first.

These base stats can be upgraded twice, in any combination. You can invest in two Attack Power upgrades, or a mix between Health and Speed, for example. After two upgrades, a Mercenary’s stats can only be changed by gambling in the Bootcamp.

Furthermore, Mercenaries can have up to two Traits and one Rumor. Traits are powerful passives and are your most important system to keep in mind. Rumors are weaker passives that can nonetheless improve a Mercenary.

While there is a lot of randomness in the kind of composition you end up with on a journey, you have some control. As you progress with each Commander, you’ll be able to use the Guild at the Departure Grounds to change the pair of Mercenaries you start with, your starting Relic, and your Ability.

In most scenarios, your strongest Mercenaries at the end of a journey will be the two you choose in your Guild, or at least they’ll be based on the Traits those initial Mercenaries brought.

But the key in Master of Piece is striking a balance between a bloated deck with a ton of weak Mercenaries and one that has a few powerful units but can be whittled down, especially in boss fights.

Your most successful runs will be the ones in which you manage to create powerful Mercenaries with strong Trait synergies that are improved by both your Relics and Abilities. You’ll likely make great use of Shaman Huts, Trait Shops, and the occasional execution at the Gallows.

Taking down the final boss at the fourth region ends a Journey, but that is where the real game begins.

Replayability And Issues

Master of Piece is an enthralling experience. You’ll be spamming journey after journey and, once you bump the battle speed to 3x (which I recommend you do as soon as you feel comfortable), you’ll be in a trance just experimenting with different combinations.

Taking down the final boss for the first time will unlock Ordeals with the Commander who cleared the journey. These are extra difficulty modifiers that improve how many Resources and how much XP you get at the end of a journey. There are seven Ordeals in total, and, so you can have an idea, here are the first three:

• Enemy pieces are upgraded.

• Enemy flag durability and boss HP are increased.

• The number of pieces in a battle is increased.

These stack, so starting Journeys on higher Ordeals raises difficulty considerably. This is where the real challenge and replayability of Master Of Piece comes out, but also when the problems creep in.
The biggest issue I had with Master of Piece comes down to balancing. First of all, clearing a Journey with Sigmund is considerably easier than with Livius. This is mostly due to Sigmund being able to create extremely tank compositions, which allow you to whittle down opponents.

Livius, on the other hand, benefits from aggressive compositions that excel at demolishing enemies quickly. While this can be fun and give you journeys in which you blast through your opposition, it can also lead you to frustrating defeats in which you run out of units.

This is especially frustrating because you lose when you run out of Mercenaries, but your enemies don’t. So you can run into a situation, one which happened to me a few times, in which you make the boss run out of pieces to play, but they destroy the couple of units you have left before you can defeat them.

I enjoy challenges, so the problem I have with the balancing isn’t that it makes the game too hard, but that it doesn’t play into Master of Pieces’ strength. This game excels when you are swimming in options and basting in its variety.

A successful run with Livius, at least in my case, is one in which I am engaging with as few choices as possible and am instead focusing on turning my two starting Mercenaries into absolute raid bosses.

With all that being said, the issues I have with Master Of Pieces are not only minor but easily fixed. The more people play the game and the more feedback I receive, the faster they’ll nail the balancing, especially in higher Ordeals.

In my view, the developers have nailed the hardest part already: crafting an addictive loop that didn’t get old for me, even after 12h in. They’re promising a third Commander named Serila in the full version, which will bring even more variety to an already sprawling experience.
As it stands, Master of Piece is a bargain at its 15$ asking price, and will only get better from here on out.

Review code provided for free by the developer.

Except there is nothing cynical about StarRupture, and while there certainly was some financial impetus behind choosing successful genres to mix, Creepy Jar combined them because they’re simply fun to experience. In StarRupture, you’re a child filled with wonder and Arcadia-7 is your playground.

What exactly are the ingredients that make up this smorgasbord, though? The tags present in the game’s Steam page are:

• Early Access

• Base Building

• Survival

• Co-op

• Open World

And the ones which I would add:

• Automation

• FPS

• Tower Defense

So you can probably tell why a first glance gives such a cynical impression. How does all of this work together to form a functioning videogame?

Let’s imagine StarRupture as a pyramid built using multiple blocks of differing sizes. Despite the tutorial kicking you off with base building and automation, these aren’t what I would consider the blocks which serve as the game’s— and the pyramid’s— base. The first block sustaining the entire Creepy Jar construction is exploration.

Block One- Exploration

You, the player, are dropped into Arcadia-7, an alien yet familiar world, in a similar way to the character you choose to embody. Whichever convict you end up choosing (Biologist, Engineer, Scientist, or Soldier), you’ll always be someone who’s dropped into a location with very limited information regarding it.

Both of you know that every few real life minutes and in-game hours, the star illuminating this planet goes into some sort of solar eruption completely erasing all life from Arcadia-7’s surface. Soon after, though, the planet regenerates completely.

The Exploration gameplay loop is directly limited by the recurring solar eruptions. While the planet isn’t being incinerated, you’re free to explore the many wonders spread throughout Arcadia-7.

You’ll encounter abandoned bases overtaken by aliens, half-destroyed, or completely infected. You’ll bump into caves which can only be explored during the time following a rupture event, before the vines that block its entrance regrow. Dead bodies of previous explorers lie sprinkled through the landscape hiding precious resources.

But the most valuable treasures are always found in the aforementioned decrepit bases, which also house the only real sources of information that you— the player and the character— get, via written and audio entries from previous colonizers. Every time a ruptura is about to happen, your AI companion warns you, giving you a couple minutes to run back to your base, which brings us to the two next blocks in our pyramid.

Blocks Two And Three- Base Building And Automation

Most of the goodies you’ll find in your explorations of Arcadia-7 serve to feed the blocks present in our pyramid’s second floor. Your base is where you build your habitat, the only building able to protect you from the inferno that is the ruptura.

Inside that same habitat, you’ll build multiple structures directly fed by the exploration loop. Items found throughout the planet can be consumed at the Analysis Station for some Data Points. These can then be used to learn new recipes at the Recipe Station, or to further progress the trust level of the five corporations investing resources into Arcadia-7.

Recipes allow you to craft new buildings and new items produced by those same buildings. But unlike in Creepy Jar’s previous title, Green Hell, you’re not actively crafting these items. Instead, you’re building your base with automation in mind.

When building an efficient base, you’ll create a system which automatically feeds five different Orbital Cargo Dispatchers, one per corporation. These will export the items which the corporations demand, netting you Data Points per item sent. The Data Points automatically level your trust factor with that corporation, eventually taking you to the next level.

Doing so gets you new items, recipes, building, and serves as the game’s main progression. Your character does get stronger depending on your action, akin to an RPG system, but that isn’t nearly as impactful as the unlocks you receive from the corps.

The thing is, every time you level a corporation up, it will demand new items. The only ways to get access to these items are to progress with the other corporations or, more often than not, finding blueprints while exploring.

But your exploration of the planet isn’t only impacted by the cyclical ruptura. You’ll have to fight off the hostile lifeforms that call Arcadia-7 their home, which brings us to the pyramid’s third floor.

Block Four- Combat

Hostile lifeforms are present everywhere in Arcadia-7, but even more so in points of interest. Every time you get into an abandoned base, hordes of aliens will pop out of the soil.

You can carry two of the following:

• UPP 7 “Reaper” Pistol

• Mar-9 “Phantom” Assault Rifle (AR)

• SLAMS-12 Shotgun

• M175 “Grim” Light Machine Gun (LMG)

They play as you expect them to, but you can invest into weapon mods to change their playstyles. The AR works well as an all-rounder and is the best long-range weapon in the game. The Shotgun excels at close range, especially when dealing with hordes of squishy aliens. The LMG also works at close range, but more-so when mowing down tankier aliens, like the Slashers.

While you can deal with the majority of the aliens by standing your ground and shooting, there is one pesky enemy that doesn’t go down so easily: the Goliath. These massive Vermin have two heavily-armored claws which protect them from almost all incoming damage, so the only way to effectively kill them is to hit them from behind.

So even in this beginning phase of the Early Access, StarRupture already boasts decent enemy variety and a good combat system featuring grenades, a dodge button, a medpack which is charged by killing enemies, and a stamina bar.

You’ll also have to deal with these Vermin attacking your base in the aforementioned Tower Defense sections of the game, which will happen every once in a while after you upgrade your Base Core. In addition to the core combat loop, you get access to automated turrets to help you keep the aliens at bay.

This fourth block of the pyramid serves its purpose by bringing some sense of danger and variety to the exploration, but also by showing that not even the Vermin are safe from the cyclical ruptura. If you venture out into Arcadia-7 before it is finished regenerating, you won’t find a single Vermin around.

Even if you head into an abandoned base or activate a Geo-Scanner— a device which reveals a large portion of the map but summons a horde of Vermin—, you won’t encounter a single alien. This is a great example of “show, don’t tell”, regarding how the entire ecosystem of Arcadia-7 revolves around this cyclical cataclysmic event. But how do we learn more about this bizarre planet?

Block Five- Story

As expected for an Early Access title, StarRupture’s story isn’t complete. I won’t go into it here since I want to keep this review as spoiler-free as I can, and because you can’t exactly gauge a story until it is finished.

But what we have so far is intriguing enough, and it serves as an extra incentive to keep us exploring. Crucially, it also fleshes out an already interesting world, leaving us with a lot of questions.

What it proves above all else, though, is the genius behind StarRupture, and what makes Creepy Jar a uniquely capable studio to make this ambitious project work. StarRupture can indeed be viewed as a four-storied pyramid made up of five blocks. It looks more or less like this:

But like the optimized automation base, every component connects to another, creating a genuinely addictive gameplay experience.

Loop Within A Loop

If you’re as lazy about optimization and visual fluidity as me, your StarRupture base will look like a spaghetti monster. Any Italian would be proud of the lengths you go to just to avoid breaking a single spaghetti rail.

Funnily enough, these spaghetti monster bases represent quite well what makes StarRupture such an intoxicating experience. No matter how messy it might look on its surface, everything connects and works into a cohesive whole.

At the base of the pyramid, exploration keeps everything alive. But that exploration only exists because there is a purpose to it: to collect resources that improve your base and further optimize the automation system. To keep that exploration engaging and stressful, you have the top blocks of combat and story, bringing variety to the experience. But these also only work because they directly feed the blocks below them.

Every block of this pyramid has been done better by another game out there. Reddit will be quick to tell you that Satisfactory did 3D automation much better. Most FPS out there feature better combat. The story, by itself, is serviceable when compared to narrative-focused linear experiences. The open world is fun to explore, but doesn’t remotely reach the heights of giants like Skyrim. Base building is fine, but much clunkier and more limited than something like Dune: Awakening.

But no other game has built a pyramid with such tightly connected diverse blocks like StarRupture. There is no part of this game that jumps out as uniquely awesome, but the experience as a whole really turns Arcadia-7 into an unrivalled playground.

So if any of the pyramid blocks caught your attention, give this one a try. You might be surprised to find that you actually like base building, or automation, or FPS combat. And the best part? If you really can’t jive with one of the blocks, just bring a friend, two, or three, and have them do that part for you, while you enjoy focusing on the ones that cater to your preferences.

You are Blue, a mediocre Wizard who doesn’t particularly stand-out in a magical academy filled with Wizard as or more capable than you. That is until you are defenestrated— I coincidentally learned this word while playing Scrabdackle, pure magic in itself. It means being thrown out of a window.

Your journey begins post-defenestration in a world wholly unfamiliar to you, and to Blue, who’d never left the Academy before. Explore the world, learn what happened, and enjoy your time in the best metroidvania you’ve never heard of.

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What The Hell Is A Scrabdackle!?

I heard about Scrabdackle on November 12, 2025, courtesy of Jasmine James, an excellent PR person working with Double Jump. I was late to the party, but not late to the release, thankfully. The game came out in Early Access December 2, 2025, but its story begins considerably earlier.

March 16, 2021. Scrabdackle’s Kickstarter campaign goes live. An ambitious jakefriend is asking for CA$ 24,000 to make their first game into reality. Here is how Jake describe it then:

Explore a curious world worth getting lost in, armed with wizardly skill and unwizardly empathy.

Not a lot has changed since then, even though Jake wildly underestimated how much time it would him to get the game released, even in early access. Back in 2021, he was hoping to get Scrabdackle out sometime during 2022. Here we are, at the end of 2025, and the game’s first act just came out.

But before we get into that, what the hell is a Scrabdackle, after all? Jake explains:

Every name I tried to think of for the game sounded very generic, like “Wizard Adventure” and things like that. It seemed like a better approach to come up with something that had the right mood and build around that. I made up “Scrabdackle” because it made me laugh and it’s fun to say, and nothing better ever came to mind - and that was pretty much that.

What The Hell Is Scrabdackle, Though?

Besides a word that’s fun to say, Scrabdackle is a scribbly, hand-drawn, unexpectedly deep metroidvania. At the time of writing, Jake has only released the first act of three, but that already comes with 12 to 15 hours of gameplay. These include:

• 6 spells to learn,

• 9 bosses to challenge,

• 10 11 regions to explore,

• 60 unique stickers and stars to find,

• 90 minutes of music to nod to,

• 122 130 notebook entries to scry,

• and about 70,000 80,000 words to read!

The two final acts promise a similar amount of content as free updates. That would put Scrabdackle in a price-to-scope ratio similar to the likes of Hollow Knight, with both games costing around 15€ while offering dozens of hours of play. But there’s more to this comparison.

Jake names Team Cherry’s masterpiece as one of his main inspirations, and it shows. Scrabdackle looks simplistic with its scribbly artstyle and limited moveset, but that is a cute facade. This is a complex game which will humble you in its highest difficulty, all while keeping count of your deaths in each encounter as a mini-map pop-up.

You begin your journey with a single spell, Scry. It serves no purpose other than letting you scan creatures or objects to learn more about them. During the first few minutes of your foray into the wilderness, you’ll encounter your second spell, the Strata Blast. Simply press left click to throw a bundle of geometric shapes with a wave of your wand. This is your basic attack, and your first Primary spell.

This category of spell is your main combat arsenal. Scry is a Tertiary spell, a category which encompasses situational magic. A few hours into your journey, you’ll be able to invest some Magic Bits— the only currency you own— to buy a pair of Dashing Boots, allowing you to dash. This is considered a Secondary Spell, a category reserved for mobility-focused abilities.

For the majority of your time in Scrabdackle’s first act, you are limited to the following actions:

• Left-click to attack enemies or objects with Strata Blast.

• Hold Right-Click to Scry, scanning enemies or objects for information.

• Press Spacebar to Dash. Dashing does not have invincibility frames.

• WASD to walk.

Despite featuring so few mechanical tools, Scrabdackle uses these four simple ingredients to cook a cake that is packed with flavor and, crucially, variety.

Although it is tagged as a Soulslike on Steam, Scrabdackle shares few similarities with FromSoftware’s creations. At its heart, Jake’s passion project feels like a modernized, yet classic take on the original Metroid games, but with an isometric perspective, and with a focus on dialogue and lore that puts it closer to Hollow Knight.

Swashbuckling In Scrabdackle

My biggest problem with Scrabdackle is with one of its best systems: the combat. Not because it is bad, but because it is so close to greatness yet keeps stumbling an inch from the finish line, which ends up being frustrating.

I played Scrabdackle in its highest difficulty, Dramaturge. It is likely that Poet, the second highest, is Jake’s intended experience. I would argue that Scrabdackle is best experienced with a considerable challenge, but the higher difficulty does exacerbate the issues I had with its combat.

As previously mentioned, Scrabdackle does a lot with few and simple ingredients, and that includes common combat encounters and bossfights. But the problem with cooking with few ingredients, is that if you overdo or underdo with any of them, it will stand out.

Scrabdackle underdoes it with the way it implements its parry system. As you progress through the game, you will unlock a second Primary Spell, Witchbrand. It is a melee attack in which Blue materializes a sword. It can destroy projectiles and parry melee enemy attacks if you attack as you’re getting hit.

In another happy coincidence, I bumped into this great piece written by Khehoon Khan for Game Developer titled “What goes into a good parry system?”. In it, Khan speaks to a few developers about what makes parrying good in video games, and there is a key detail that keeps popping up that isn’t present in Scrabdackle: risk versus reward.

Parrying in Scrabdackle is incredibly risky, especially when you are playing in a high difficulty. Missing your timing means you lose one and a half Vial Brews (out of four total), and you only recover half a Vial per boss phase. It isn’t rewarding, though. At best you get one hit more than you would if you dodged, and that’s it.

In general, Scrabdackle consistently nails risky, but tends to feel lackluster on the reward. You don’t heal in the game unless you find vial blobs or a Place of Power (save-point). During boss fights, you get a vial blob per phase change (which recovers half a Vial in Dramaturge difficulty). This sounds fine on paper, and it is in most scenarios. The longer the bossfights and the tougher they are, though, the more this system crumbles.

In most games, namely in Soulslikes, you own some sort of healing item, Estus Flask, whatever it may be. You have control over using it, and the reward you get for not taking damage is that you have more uses of it left in the future. This makes it a perfect system in multi-phase boss fights that you bash your head against multiple times. The better you get at the early phases, the less potions you’ll use, the more you’ll have available for the phases you haven’t yet mastered.

In Scrabdackle, though, you get a half-vial blob regardless of your current HP. There is a boss in the game with six phases. If you get through the first three without getting a single hit, you die in four hits in the fourth phase. If you got hit twice in the first phase and didn’t get damaged in phase two and three, you still die in four hits in the fourth phase. You played better in the first occasion, but the end result is the same.

You are not rewarded for mastering an early phase in Scrabdackle, which can turn the hardest fights in the game into a chore when you’ve died a couple dozen times— I finished my Act 1 playthrough with 148 deaths. In the aforementioned six phase boss fight, I ended up breezing through the first two phases by the time I got to attempts 20-25. I beat the boss at attempt 49.

I was not being rewarded for reaching phase four without getting touched, I was simply being punished with having to do phases one-to-three over and over again, even though I had already mastered them. A game with would potions would minimise this issue by rewarding me with a surplus of healing which I didn’t use in the first three boss phases. Scrabdackle’s system does not function like that.

This can be fixed by giving the player a shield blob instead of a health blob, or even by just dropping Magic Bits upon phase changing instead of health that they don’t need. Alternatively, the healing blobs could remain indefinitely in the boss room instead of de-spawning after a few seconds, so the player could still have use for them if he made it through the first phases unscathed.

The six phase boss also exacerbated my biggest issue with Scrabdackle’s combat: randomness, the ingredient which this game overdoes the most, giving the entire cake a funny taste. The most tried-and-true method of raising complexity is stacking mechanics. You start a boss fight off with a simple attack pattern which the player has to dodge. Second phase brings in an extra attack, an AOE, for example. Third phase combines those two together, forcing the player to come up with a new solution.

The last boss you fight before rolling credits in Scrabdackle’s first act is a masterclass in mechanic stacking and was my favorite encounter in the game. Six phase boss is the one I wanted to love the most though, and it takes all my boxes: thematically interesting, extremely challenging, a marathon of a fight, forces you to use most mechanics in the game. Yet it all falls short due to an over-indexing on randomness.

In the pre-credits boss, you’re fighting three enemies, each with a different attack pattern. During the first phase, you fight one at a time. Phase two has them fighting you interspersed. Enemy 1 comes in for an attack, and retreats when enemy 2 shows up. The third and last phase throws them all at you at the same time. Perfect boss design.

Six phase boss has the makings of being the best fight in the game, but it squanders the mechanic-layering design due to how random it feels. I beat it on my 49th attempt, but that wasn’t my best one. Instead, it was an attempt in which I happened to play decently at the same time as the mechanics didn’t stack in a nearly-impossible way.

While pre-credits boss layered mechanics like clockwork every time I tried to kill it, six-phase boss seemed to do it entirely at random. I had runs in which mechanic B and C didn’t overlap once. In other attempts, mechanic B and C overlapped together with D all in the same phase, multiple times. This led to frustration, felt unfair and, worst of all, made my victory feel unearned. Partially, I beat the boss because I got lucky and, after 49 attempts, that sucks.

I might be sounding too negative here, but that is not my intention. Scrabdackle’s combat doesn’t infuriate me because it is bad, it infuriates me because it is so close to perfect. With that out of the way, let’s get into what truly makes this the best metroidvania you’ve never heard of.

Scrabdackle’s Scribbly Spell

There was one spell inside Scrabdackle which I didn’t learn in Act 1: Whimsical Sense of Wonder.

Besides Hollow Knight, Scrabdackle’s Kickstarter page mentions Link’s Awakening and An Untitled Story as two other inspirations. It shares with the 1993 and 2007 classics the sense of wonder brought by a lack of handholding that is sorely missing from games released in the past decade. While Blue is literally thrown onto the outside world through a window, you are defenestrated alongside her, on this side of the monitor. You’re both dropped into Junk Heap, given mild directions by a fishing Peanut (don’t ask), and the rest is up to you.

You’ll find NPCs willing to give tips— for a price, of course—, but if you don’t pay for these minor instances of hand-holding, the game will never volunteer its hand to you. You’ll miss entire areas and boss fights if you’re not paying attention, but if you are, you will be rewarded time and time again as you explore the whimsical scribbly world of Scrabdackle.

While there are some ingredients in excess and a lack of others, the one ingredient that Scrabdackle perfectly nails is “show, don’t tell”. There is a wonderfully illustrated journal full of lore, backstory, and information, but you can play through the entirety of Scrabdackle without ever opening it. Not only that, you can play through the majority of Scrabdackle without opening your map. You’ll still be able to follow the intriguing story and understand what is going on in the world, as long as you’re willing to pay attention.

Despite the scribbly minimalistic veneer, this flawless execution makes Scrabdackle one of the most immersive open-worlds I’ve played in recent memory, and cements it as the best metroidvania you’ve never heard of. Wizard hats off to you, Jake and co., and thank you for casting Whimsical Sense Of Wonder on me.

Scrabdackle is available to purchase on Steam for 13,49€ until December 16, when it will go to its MSRP of 14,99€. For either of these two prices, it is a steal. Support indie devs and, in this case, the maddeningly ambitious project being done by mostly one maniac— Jake does most things in the game, including “world and concept, design, art and animations, music, writing, programming, UI/UX, some sound design”, but is supported by a small team.

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How does a studio follow up a first-try success story? Moi rai games is one of the rare cases of an indie studio debuting with a game— which was started as a free-time project, no less— published by a renowned indie publisher (Team17) and instantly striking gold. At the time of writing, Monster Sanctuary has nearly 5000 Steam reviews with a 97% Overwhelmingly Positive rating.

Seven years after the €100k Kickstarter campaign, and five years after Monster Sanctuary hit 1.0, moi rai games has returned with a different iteration of what has come to define the studio: monster taming. While Monster Sanctuary mixed it with a metroidvania, Aethermancer is mixing monster taming with roguelite. Here’s how the studio found the balance between innovation and staying true to their loyal fanbase.

If the moniker monster taming isn’t ringing a bell, what about Pokémon? Nintendo’s megalithic giant is the most famous example of the genre, and the main reason why most have never even heard about monster taming or creature collecting. While Minecraft kickstarted the survival sandbox genre and spawned an endless supply of games following in its footsteps, Pokémon has had such a stranglehold on the genre that its footsteps are the only ones around.

Or, at least, that was the case when Monster Sanctuary came out. Speaking to Button Musher on the matter, the moi rai team gave their perspective:

We definitely feel like [monster taming] has been an under-served genre for a long time. When we released Monster Sanctuary there were so [few] monster taming games, especially [indies], and [we] do think that the big footsteps of Pokémon and the expectations players might already bring to the table played a role in that.

Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. We’ve now seen Palworld, the glorious return of Digimon with Time Stranger, and many more join the fray. For moi rai, the previous vacuum was an opportunity for “offering the players something they have been missing”. For better and for worse, Pokémon has remained mostly the same for nearly three decades.

Mixing monster taming with genres like Metroidvania and creating games “that are challenging and for a more mature audience” allowed moi rai to stand out and to land a hit with Monster Sanctuary. Following it up meant taking some risks while building on the studio’s sturdy foundation.

”Having had a first project like Monster Sanctuary (…) certainly helped in many ways. (…) We managed to build and nurture a very engaged community [which] trusted us as a development team and were interested to see what we do next.”

Aethermancer, mixing monster taming with roguelite, surpassed the first game’s peak CCU (concurrent users) on Steam during its launch week. A couple months after release, it is about to reach 2000 Steam reviews while maintaining a 90% Very Positive rating. While moi rai agrees that being a Roguelite helped, they attribute most of this success to the community they built with Monster Sanctuary, to which they appealed when they transferred their core strengths (“like the deep skill system for each monster”) from that game to Aethermancer.

And that loyal community is what was at the forefront of moi rai games’ worries when they decided to mix monster taming with Roguelite instead of Metroidvania. When I asked if they were concerned about how ubiquitous the Roguelite genre had become, especially on Steam, they weren’t thinking about it at all, but were instead worried about “how our existing community from Monster Sanctuary would react to the change in genre”.

So far, it seems they’ve received it quite well, which shouldn’t be too surprising. What made moi rai games stand out with Monster Sanctuary was how deep they went with the skill system for each monster. While the Metroidvania genre worked well in giving players a glimpse into it, Aethermancer’s 3v3 Roguelite system excels at showcasing how dynamic and versatile it truly is.

Players are already concocting some devilish builds, and moi rai are all for it. “Making every monster useful and viable in some way was certainly a focus of ours.” The love and effort put into every single creation is evident, and they acknowledge that “broken builds are part of good roguelite games”. Their focus when balancing the monster isn’t to prevent these builds from existing, but instead to make them challenging to reach so the game doesn’t become too easy.

Given the success of Monster Sanctuary and the invaluable support moi rai games got from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action through a public application, Aethermancer is being developed by a considerably bigger team and came out in Early Access in a much more polished state.

The plan is to have Aethermancer in this state for only around one year, so we might see 1.0 come out as early as Q4 2026, but as moi rai games proudly state in their website, they develop games in a “it’s done when it’s done” way. Aethermancer is available now on Steam and is Deck Verified. It is 10% off until December 4th, so if you have any monster taming itch you’d like to scratch, what are you waiting for? The fantastical world of Terastae awaits.

• What I’ve been playing

• Where I’ve been playing it (platform, not actual physical place)

• When I’ll be posting next

• Who I’ve been reading

This past week I got funkier than usual by playing through Alpha Nomos’ demo twice, learning a new language through Morse’s demo, and getting a lot of reading done.

What?

This past week was quite slow for game releases, so I stuck with demos instead. I’m still playing through Dishonored— and enjoying it—, I dabbled a bit into League of Legends (my forever game) with some friends, and I played two demos.

The first one was Alpha Nomos, an exciting action rhythm game that is sure to scratch the Hi-Fi Rush itch. I had the pleasure of speaking with one of the developers, Emil Lager, at DevGAMM Lisbon and had been looking forward to playing through the demo when it reached Steam.

While it still has some bugs and a few things to iron out, it is already a great experience and the demo’s constantly being updated by RibCage Games. I’m writing a review that will be published sometime soon at James Francis’ Adventures in Indie Gaming.

Keeping with the rhythm theme but in as different of a setting as possible, I played through MORSE’s demo and absolutely loved it. This is a “minimalist strategy game”, essentially a tower defense title that grows in complexity by increasing the number of attacking enemies and paths they can take.

As the title implies, though, its main draw is that you control everything in the game through Morse code. Using the default one-button telegraph control the only two buttons I had to press where spacebar and enter. Spacebar typed the Morse code in dots and dashes, Enter shot the missiles at the attacking ships.

Even though I only spent around an hour with the demo, I won’t forget how to type 1 (.————), 2 (..———), 3 (…——), and I (..) in Morse code. A truly unique experience.

Where?

This week was very PC-centric (as most weeks tend to be for me). Everything I played I did so at my desktop computer with the exception of Dishonored, my upcoming Steaming The Deck review.

I’d love to try Alpha Nomos on my Steam Deck, though, and I know for a fact that you can play MORSE on it because Alex Johansson, the game’s developer, posted a recent video doing so with a very interesting setup…

When?

I’m still working on my Steaming The Deck Dishonored review and I’m on track to release it during the first week of December. This week I’ll be posting an article based on an interview I did with moi rai studios, and probably a MORSE review.

Who?

This week I’m highlighting 5 articles again, so you have something to ready every day of the week:

• Mirror, Mirror: AiliA, by Christena Maurer for AIIG- Christena Maurer, a fellow video game Substacker who writes the excellent Tunesday articles, pens another AIIG guest piece, this time reviewing AiliA, an enchanting puzzle game.

• How the games industry sees the decline of traditional reviews, by Harrison Polites for Infinite Lives- Harrison keeps proving his chops as one of the best videogame reporters on Substack with this piece covering how traditional reviews have mostly turned into “scores and pull quotes”.

• My new surprise obsession: A game about running a 1930s newspaper, by Stephen Totilo for Game File- Totilo reviews News Tower, a small indie game which, despite its arcadey tycoon look, creates an unexpectedly realistic simulation of running a US paper in the 1930s.

• Renowned indie studio Inkle announces something quite different: a found-footage World War 2 code-breaking mystery, by Robert Purchese for Eurogamer- Robert covers the announcement of Inkle’s upcoming game, one of the most unique-looking titles we’ve seen in recent years.

• Tavern Keeper: It’s Good, by Luke Plunkett for Aftermath- A loving review of the self-published indie title Tavern Keeper, a “cosy-chaotic management sim” where you’re building your own fantasy taverns worthy of hosting any first session of a DnD campaign.

See you next week!

• What I’ve been playing

• Where I’ve been playing it (platform, not actual physical place)

• Who I’ve been reading

• When I’ll be posting next

• Why you should care

I’ll not always answer the last W successfully, but I’ll always try.

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This week I’m writing about Anno 117, ARC Raiders, and Dishonored, three completely different games, variety, yay! The amount of time I spent playing ate into the part of the pie that’s meant for reading, but we still have a few article recommendations. I do have a clear plan in my mind of what I’ll be writing about next, so stay tuned for that later in the article.

What?

As part of my main job as a freelance journalist I’ve been covering two of the biggest recent releases: Anno 117 and ARC Raiders. Two games whose titles start with A, and that’s where the similarities end.

Anno 117 was a new experience for me. RTS, 4X, Grand Strategy, City Builders, these are all genres that I am woefully educated in. I’ve tried time and time again to get into them, but I haven’t quite managed. So outside of what I was required to do for work, I didn’t play much of it.

ARC Raiders, though… I’ve now clocked nearly 47h into the game, a little over two weeks post-launch. Most of those were spent alone in the Rust Belt making friendships with strangers. Some of them were with my own friends, but that usually ended up in constant bloodbaths.

Not only am I more used to games like ARC Raiders, Embark Studios has done an excellent job trimming the fat and giving us a truly juicy experience without the endless list of unpleasantries that come attached to a title like Escape From Tarkov— take a look at Steam reviews for that game, if you need an explanation.

Besides this two, I’m finally back to my Steaming The Deck series with Dishonored. It is my first time playing it (I know) and I’ve been enjoying my time so far, although I am only a couple of hours in. If you also own Dishonored, Steam Deck is an excellent way to play it. It runs at a locked 60 with great visual quality, I highly recommend it.

Where?

Got a bit ahead of myself in the last paragraph, but that’s alright, it is only the first edition of Monday Mushings, after all. Both Anno and ARC Raiders have been played on my PC, while Dishonored as been walking with me inside my Steam Deck.

No complaints regarding performance of any game, except some issues with Anno 117, but you can fix those easily by toning down the graphics a bit and capping FPS to avoid massive dips when zooming in and out.

When?

I have a few pieces planned. A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing the team at moi rai, the studio behind games like Monster Sanctuary and Aethermancer. Expect a piece on that conversation soon.

I interviewed a few more individuals in the gaming sphere but I’m still shopping those pitches around to a few outlets, if none take it, they’ll end up here!

A Steaming The Deck piece for Dishonored is already in the works, I’ll have it published sometime in December, if all goes well. Got a review key for an indie game in my mail today, so I’ll start working on that review, too (it’s a surprise!).

Why?

I didn’t think how difficult this one would be to answer. As Margot pointed out in her small yet brilliant piece— which I’ll link below, don’t worry—, you shouldn’t really care about any of this.

BUT if you are interested in video games, reading and/or writing about them, I’m fairly confident you’ll get something useful out of these weekly Mushings. If not, voice your frustrations below and tell me what I could do to make it better (these will be more effective as pleasant constructive criticism than harsh, mean words)!

Who?

I didn’t read nearly as much as I should’ve this week, but I still managed to find some excellent articles in the wild. Here are five I’d like to highlight, one for each day of the (work) week:

• Metroid Prime 4: Beyond preview – “A surprisingly magical return to Nintendo’s legendary metroidvania series”, by Ashley Bardhan for Gamesradar+- A whimsical yet informative preview of Metroid Prime 4 Through Ashley’s Looking Glass.

• These Developers Are Bringing Canceled Game Concord Back To Life, by Nicole Carpenter for Aftermath- An enlightening interview of the people who’re bringing back the most infamous release of 2024.

• Elevating Canadian video games industry, one MIGS at a time, by Katya Ryabova for Playing This Week- Katya’s thoughts on the Canadian video game industry based on her time spent at a recent conference.

• Thoughts: Do I actually WANT to play that game?, by Margot for Margot Plays Video Games- The aforementioned piece where friend of the Substack, Margot, covers the crucial difference between wanting to play a game and feeling like you should play it.

• A word of warning from the Steam Machine’s ‘ideal’ customer, by Harrison Polites for Infinite Lives- Harrison clues us into what would make the console-PC hybrid ideal for customers like him.

See you next Monday!

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What do you mean I’m meant to go alone into a place full of people I don’t know and just talk to them?

Thankfully, I actually knew most of those people. They’re geeks and gamers like me. People who love to play and create video games, and who do it for passion first, money second. That might be the reason why a magical optimism seemed ever-present inside the Myriad Cristal Center.

DevGAMM was filled with business people— it is B2B focused, after all— but these weren’t the suits that you’re used to hearing about on gaming podcasts. They weren’t CEOs of megacompanies dealing in billions and trillions. They’re interacting with small teams who can make greatness out of a few thousand dollars, not 250 million bucks.

Here’s how DevGAMM Lisbon 2025 gave me hope about the future of the industry, and how it reminded me of why so many people keep making games.

Day One

My first hour inside the Myriad Cristal Center was a microcosm of what was happen to happen for two entire days. I got my Media badge, looked at the map, check the talks I wanted to attend later, and then ventured into the first showcase area, filled with computers and developers.

I was looking curiously at the monitors and bumped into a friendly guy who was showing a cool game. I looked down at his badge looking for his name, Rafael Mogas, an unmistakably Portuguese name.

We talked for an hour or so about Arctic Awakening, a first person narrative adventure game with minor survival mechanics made by GoldFire Studios. Despite living in Santarém, Portugal, Rafael is the 3D artist for the studio and did a lot of work on the game. The studio was founded in Oklahoma City, but it works fully remote now.

After speaking with Rafael I realized how easy my job at DevGAMM Lisbon would be. I love talking to people about video games, and I love playing video games. Doing both simultaneously was just the easiest work I’ve done in my life.

I spent the remainder of the first day bouncing from desk to desk and meeting wonderful people. Yelyzaveta Lemeshko talked me through her team’s ambitious plans for Delusion Out of Space (and beyond). She was paying close attention to how people were playing her demo and asking for feedback afterwards.

Eva Manuilovich, the co-founder and artist at Nozomu Games, was humble in describing Burn With Me, the Devil’s Deckburner she is creating with her husband, Ivan. Her incredible art was catching the eye of most people that looked towards her desk, and the fact that she turned some of the card designs into Nozomu’s business cards was a stroke of genius.

Emil Lager, Tech lead and Co-Founder of RibCage Games is one of those enthusiastic artists you could talk to for hours, his love for Alpha Nomos was contagious. He enjoyed seeing people figure out advanced mechanics on their own, or nudging them towards those exact tricks if they were having issues with the game.

Angela Wu, Game Artist, Designer, and Developer at Ada Eden games, was one of the two developers showing 1001 Nights, one of the most intriguing projects shown at DevGAMM. Since the game uses an LLM (large-language-model AI) as the core mechanic, the two developers were ready to answer all AI-related questions.

I finished the day playing Crabby Fishes, an adorable tower defense game where you play as crabs, fishes, and other aquatic beings protecting their land from pesky chemicals. Unfortunately, I did not note down the developer’s name, but she was incredibly kind and a true master of marketing: her business card is made out of biodegradable paper filled with seeds, so you can plant it in a vase to grow some flowers instead of throwing it in the trash— she also had shark gummies so I might’ve been bribed.

Day Two

I entered day two knowing that I would not be attending any talks. There were too many news games to try out on top of the list of games that I hadn’t been able to try the day prior. The DevGAMM awards were happening at 6PM though, so I arrived at the Myriad Cristal Center even earlier, around 9:30AM.

Given my day one experience, I decided to do a sort of two-part plan. I would make a full round of the two showcase areas and make a mental list of the games I’d like to try.

My morning started with me playing Hell Clock and speaking to the Brazilian developers about the real-life disaster which inspired the unexpectedly serious narrative at the core of their roguelite ARPG, the War of Canudos (Massacre de Canudos).

I then played Deka Duck, yet another game by a Brazilian studio, and had a blast. It is a colorful Megaman-like. The team is also working on another game Toada Brava, inspired by Chrono Trigger.

Before heading off to lunch, I bumped into what I will call the Portuguese wall. There were three desks side-by-side with three games made by Portuguese studios: Beyond The Board, Hell Maiden, and Mirai #167.

I managed to play Beyond The Board first and was entranced by it. You can read more about it on my previous DevGAMM piece.

The last game I played before lunch was Mirai #167, a runner game that tests your reactions and your ability to pay attention to two things at once. I somehow bumped into a constant bug that was new to Diogo Sousa, the main programmer, so I had the pleasure of watching him work around it live— he did manage to get me to the next stage so I played the entire demo.

Only after lunch did I get the chance to play Hell Maiden, the last member of the “Portuguese wall”. But first, I spent maybe half an hour speaking with João Caetano, AstralShift’s CEO and co-founder.

His love for the project is undeniable and he was thankful that I praised the fact that, despite featuring gender-bent anime-inspired takes on famous characters, they weren’t sexualized. Apparently, I was in the minority because most people were asking if there were any plans for alternate, more revealing outfits. He prefers to leave such options in the ever-imaginative hands of the internet.

The fantastic artwork inspired by classic 90s anime is the studio’s defining trait and was displayed in their beautiful business cards.

After passing by their desk dozens of times— it was always packed— I got my hands on The Negative Edge, a Returnal-inspired third-person shooter made by a small studio out of Italy. Most of them were around the table watching people play their game and taking on feedback. It is a snappy shooter with great sound design which I can see myself playing for hours.

Although my second day came to an end with the Awards, I managed to steal another fantastic conversation from the ever-charismatic Emil Lager before playing two more games.

What drew me to Oniria wasn’t the game— which looks great, don’t get me wrong—, but the fantastic desk setup. I’m still regretting not taking a picture of it, but imagine a double-desk setup covered with a pitch-black tablecloth filled with creepy red eyes. How could you not get seduced by this setup? The entire dev team was there and they were as talkative as they are talented. Follow this project if you’re into horror games.

Lastly, but certainly no leastly, I had the pleasure of playing through Money Waste’s demo. Developed by a team of two Italian stallions, this project hides an incredibly ambitious videogame— part complex tycoon, part top-down GTA with functioning traffic and NPC interactions— behind a blocky aesthetic. If I hadn’t been sold on the game after the demo, I would’ve become a fan anyway when I asked for a business card and one of the devs discreetly placed a small plastic bag in my hand with a QR code while saying “Don’t snitch, alright?”.

The Humans Behind The Games

What made DevGAMM such a positive experience was the fact that it was focused on the humans behind the games and on the games themselves. It was not about advertisements or broadcasting deals or small updates to gigantic games.

A lot of the games I played haven’t gotten funding yet, some of them started as student projects, most of them were participating in the public pitches that happened on Day One. Some of them, inevitably, will never be completed. But you wouldn’t know that by interacting with the games and the developers.

All of them are doing this work out of passion. Most of them have full-time jobs and are using what free time they have left to work on their creative baby. Yet all of them are talented people doing what they love best, and it shows.

If you ever get tired of the encroaching wave of pessimism spreading throughout the video game industry, the constant news of mass-layoffs, of bloated games made under bloated budgets, look to what started the entire industry: small teams making small games.

You’ll be amazed by the treasures you’ll find and by the magical optimism surrounding the people who make those gems.

At around 10AM on Thursday, November 6, I arrived at the Myriad Cristal Center in Lisbon to attend DevGAMM Portugal 2025. Armed with a plan to help fight the pesky social anxiety trying to take over, I had multiple talks scheduled that I wanted to attend. After all, there were a ton of speakers and various interesting topics happening in three different halls.

When I left the center around 7PM, I hadn’t attended a single talk. Despite arriving even earlier the next day, the only time I got inside one of the halls was to attend the DevGAMM Awards at the end of the event. And the culprits behind my absence from those talks were the seemingly endless supply of exciting games spread throughout the Cristal Center.

Here are 8 DevGAMM Portugal 2025 games to add to your wishlist, and the main reasons why I did not attend a single talk throughout the entire event.

This list is in alphabetical order, I’m not ranking these games.

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1001 Nights

What first caught my eye when I looked towards Ada Eden’s booth was that there was a laptop on top of the desktop computer with a written disclaimer.

Since AI is so frowned upon in game development, Ada Eden decided to be as transparent as possible with how they’re using it in their game. They went so far as to make two different published papers— and had printed copies of them at the event— which you can check here and here.

1001 Nights is such a unique game that when I asked one of the programmers to describe it to me in a succinct pitch he kind of blocked and we both laughed it of. You play as Scheherazade, the legendary storyteller in Persian folklore, and you are trying to please and trick a King with your stories in order to defeat him.

What makes 1001 Nights unique is the fact that King is an LLM who reads the text you write— there are basically no restrictions, you can write whatever and however you want— and who reacts accordingly. You want to trick the King, and the LLM, to say specific words that can then become cards which you can use in your final battle against him. A truly interesting use of AI in games.

As highlighted in their disclaimer, the wonderful pixel art seen in 1001 Nights is all done by humans. The “generative AI is only applied to gameplay for real-time generated content”. There is a demo available on Steam now, so give it a shot.

Alpha Nomos

Despite the game looking fantastic, Alpha Nomos wasn’t what pulled me into the booth. Emil Lager, RibCage Games’ Tech lead and Co-Founder is the one who did that. Every time I passed by I could see and hear Emil’s excitement. He would yelp in response to something a player did, or enthusiastically tell a story about music, sound, or game animations.

I played Alpha Nomos for half an hour and then passed my seat to someone else. I already decided that this would be a day-one purchase for me, but I did return to the booth the next day simply to talk to Emil again. He told me some amazing stories about the game (I might reveal those if I ever get the pleasure of officially interviewing him) and we had a blast.

Alpha Nomos is a rhythm action game inspired by the likes of Hi-Fi Rush. Although it is a title made by a much smaller studio and with a minor scope, the attention to detail, the polish, and the level of quality of life features is beyond what I could ever expect.

There are metronome settings, HUD customization, audio settings, and all this in a demo playable at an event, not even one that is live on Steam (yet). Alpha Nomos mixes the rhythm-based 3D action combat with roguelite elements with meta-progression. It takes place in a world entirely inhabited by living dolls trying to find out why they’re alive, which are animated so well that they would fit right into a high-budget animation short.

Beyond The Board

I’ll preface this paragraph by saying that I am biased towards all games listed in this article, but I am even more so for this game (and one other). Beyond The Board is made by Fragile Shapes Studio, a two-person team based in Portugal. Bruno and Guilherme, the two developers, were at the booth seeing the player reactions and openly interacting with everyone.

They’re both men of few words, but, much like their game, their work speaks for itself. Beyond The Board is (NOT) a chess game. You control and interact with chess pieces, but this is a surrealist puzzle game which tries to break your brain through clever mechanic-stacking and perspective tricks.

It looks unique, it teaches you everything you need to know in as few words as possible, and scales the puzzle complexity in a smooth curve that keeps testing your abilities. The demo experience culminated in a boss fight— yep, there is a boss fight in this puzzle game in which all you can do is press the mouse button on the tile you want to move onto— which expertly combined most of the mechanics you previously encountered.

Play the demo which is available now on Steam, and put it on your wishlist if you enjoy it.

Burn With Me

Deckbuilders are a dime a dozen, especially if they happen to also be a roguelite (which appears to always be the case), but have you ever heard of a Deckburner? Burn With Me caught my eye as soon as I looked at the screen. When this happened there was someone playing the game already, so I started talking to Eva Manuilovich instead, the co-founder and artist of Nozomu Games, and one half of the studio. The other half is her husband, Ivan Bushmin.

Eva’s art is what will get Burn With Me into your hands, but Ivan’s addictive systems will keep it there for a long time. And speaking of hands, there is an incredibly well animated and well drawn hand on screen for the majority of your time spent in Burn With Me, and I love it, not sure why.

As the name implies, Burn With Me has you burning cards more often than building your deck. You can never have more than six cards on the table at once, so not only is there no point in having a lot of cards, having too many will actually hurt you. Plan your moves carefully and burn away all the fat from your deck so you can reach each chapter’s bossfight powerful enough to take it down with just half a dozen plays.

You can join the Burn With Me playtest now on Steam.

Delusion Out Of Space

There is no developer to whom I spoke more than Yelyzaveta Lemeshko, Have A Dream’s Studio Representative, and for good reason. Every time someone approached the booth where Delusion Out Of Space was being shown, Yelyzaveta showed immediate interest. She was eager to speak about the game, a project she and the rest of the small studio have been working on for years.

Delusion Out Of Space isn’t breaking any boundaries. It is a relatively simple sci-fi horror shooter heavily inspired by Dead Space and Lovecraft, but it comes with enough ambition to feel the entire Myriad Cristal Center. This game is the first of a possible franchise with multiple genres that Have a Dream and Two Cakes Studio want to make. The bizarre world was built with that in mind, but Yelyzaveta assured me that Delusion Out of Space would be a self-contained experience with an open-ending, giving players a conclusion while leaving the door open for possible future projects.

I saw multiple people play the game before I had the chance of sitting down to try it myself. When I did, I had already been speaking with Yelyzaveta for close to an hour, which only made the experience better. While it is still at a very early stage with a few bugs and unavoidable clunkiness, it already looks phenomenal with excellent art direction. The narrative setup is also excellent, albeit as ambitious as everything else in the project.

I truly hope to see Delusion Out of Space coming out sometime in the next couple of years, the passion that Yelyzaveta and the rest of the team have for this game and universe was palpable. The demo I played isn’t available on Steam yet, but it should go live once it is more polished. In the mean time, you can add it to your wishlist.

Hell Maiden

The second and final Portuguese-made game in this list is Hell Maiden, the winner of the Best Game From Portugal prize at the DevGamm Awards 2025. While you might not have known their country of origin, you might’ve heard of AstralShift, the studio behind Hell Maiden. They also developed two other games, including Little Goddy Two Shoes, which was published by Square Enix in 2023.

I had the enormous pleasure of playing Hell Maiden after spending quite a while speaking about it with João Batista, AstralShift’s CEO and Software Developer. Hell Maiden is, in most ways, a departure from the studio’s previous works, but it is also a doubling-down on what they do best. AstralShift excels at making excellent artwork inspired by classic 90s anime— which is on display throughout every aspect of Hell Maiden— and at crafting narrative experiences.

Despite being a Bullet-Heaven game à lá Vampire Survivors, Hell Maiden does not settle for second-monitor material. There is a dash button, a core narrative with a beginning and end, and with expertly crafted cutscenes and fantastic hand drawn characters to know better through dialogue. There are also bossfights.

You’re not waiting for the clock to hit 30 mins and to be killed by a nigh-on unbeatable enemy, your build will be put to the test at the end of each run in a boss fight that forces you to use your brain (and fingers) if you want to come out victorious. You can try Hell Maiden out for yourself through the demo available on Steam, and you really should.

Money WASTE

Changing gears and tone harshly enough to give you whiplash, we move onto Money WASTE, a weird looking game inspired by early GTA titles like Chinatown and Vice City. At first glance, Money WASTE seems like a cool-looking edgy game where you drive cars and sell drugs, but that is just a shiny veneer. There is an entire combat system once you step out of the vehicle, and an entirely second game when you pull out your phone.

Money WASTE is being made by a two-person studio that goes by the name of From Void (previously known as 7Games). Hailing from Italy, these guys have their work cut out for them. Not only are they making a game inspired by one of the biggest franchises in the history of videogames, they’re also hiding some absurdly deep systems behind the low polygon aesthetic.

The game features a complex and realistic traffic system, some incredibly satisfying driving, NPCs that move so fluidly and erratically that they look like other players, and an entire tycoon maxigame (as opposed to minigame) in which you can expand your drug dealing business, get into real estate, hire people, check the crypto market, and more. Money WASTE’s demo got me excited to see what’s coming, and it will surely get you hooked once it goes live on Steam.

Oniria

Finishing the trifecta of Latin languages comes Oniria from Frog Team, hailing from Spain. This small studio made up of young people between 20 and 26 years old is crafting a beautiful first person psychological horror. Oniria takes place in a fictional village of the same name, inspired by real parts of Northern Spain.

The demo kicked off extremely well with a sort of PSX take on Resident Evil. You’re dropped into a creepy hotel that is much too dark and much too empty. Through puzzle-solving and item descriptions you being to piece together what is happening and who you are, until you are cornered by a terrifying monster and… transported into an entirely different game?

Frog Team do not have the budget to make character animations and cutscenes the way they wanted to, so instead of doing it poorly, they decided to create an entire second game inside Oniria, a 2D horror-narrative experience. In it, you will uncover what happened to the protagonist (Angy), her father, and her hometown. If Oniria’s fantastic art style and atmosphere isn’t enough to convince you, the demo is available to play now on Steam, so go ahead and try it out for yourself.

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Expect a piece covering the event as a whole in the next few days, but I want to start by highlighting the event’s grand finale: the DevGamm Awards.

This is a competition split in two: $35k USD from various sponsors, and a whopping $100k USD from Scorewarrior, the event’s main sponsor. The awards are split into a ton of categories with a boatload of nominees— this year there were 610 game submissions.

Winners are selected by a panel of 150 jury members, ranging from developers to voice actors and other gaming-related talent. Let’s get into the nominees and winners, which are sure give you some new additions to your wishlists.

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Sponsored Awards

The show kicked off with the various sponsored awards distributing a $35k USD prize-pool. We’ll go one award at a time, highlighting the nominees, the winner, and the prize.

Best Indie Game- Sponsored by TinyBuild

• Acts of Blood- “Beat ‘em up, Action, 3rd person game which focuses on fast-paced, brutal hand-to-hand combat. Set in dystopian city of Bandung, Indonesia.” Demo available now.

• Cosmic Race: Galactic Showdown- “Sci-fi Combat Racing game inspired by retro arcade racers. Race across vibrant alien worlds, defeat opponents in destruction-rich environments, and become the Cosmic Champion.” Demo available now.

• DDOD- “Single-player and co-op tactical roguelite shooter set in the near future, deep inside an abandoned industrial zone. Explore, fight, and mutate your way to the source of a semi-sentient biological AI anomaly.” The devs told me that the demo I played at DevGamm would go live on Steam soon.

• Glintseeker Island- “Descend into mysterious caves with countless treasures to excavate in a mining exploration adventure. Upgrade your gear, fight bosses, uncover secrets and save the island from an ancient threat below!”

• Lost in the Roots- “A 2D adventure with psychological thriller elements exploring guilt and fear. A young girl wakes in a stranger’s attic, lost in the middle of nowhere. Who took her—and why? With no way out and something lurking in the shadows, escape may be just an illusion.” Playtest available now.

DDOD won this award, getting $2000 USD and “extensive consultation” directly from TinyBuild.

Best System And Strategy Indie Game- Sponsored by Astra Logical

• Crowded: A Crow Citybuilder- “Strategically design a nest-city to support and shelter your flock. Engineer, scavenge and explore your way to a self-sustaining society in the sky!”

• Dead In Antares- “A turn-based survival management game with RPG elements, set on an alien planet. Lead a crew of survivors sent on a mission to save humanity. Manage their needs, strengthen their teamwork, and explore this mysterious world to find a way back home.” Demo available now.

• Die In The Dungeon- “Fight your way through a mysterious dungeon in this deck-building, turn-based roguelike game where you don’t use cards, but dice! Deal with enemies by combining powerful dice on your board, boost their effects with magical relics, and risk it all hoping for a good roll on unexpected encounters.” Early Access available now.

• Drop Duchy- “Build your duchy piece by piece in this refreshing hybrid rogue-lite game. Use block-dropping mechanics to collect resources, recruit troops to fight against belligerent armies, and let every block shape your realm, leading your path to victory!” Full game out now.

• Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure- “A blend of automation and real-time strategy for both the die-hard fans of the automation genre and the automation-curious. Explore a strange fantasy world, uncover the mysteries of the past, automate your workshops, and go on adventures with your odd & adorable Sparks!” Full game out now.

Crowded: A Crow Citybuilder took this crown and got $2000 USD home. This title is the studio’s first game and actually started off as a student project!

Game Changer Award- Sponsored By Aptoide

• Battle Cars: Nitro PvP Shooter- “This is more than just a racing or fighting game. It’s Battle Cars, a car realtime competitive multiplayer shooter where your skills behind the wheel and in combat are put to the ultimate test in a cyberpunk post-apocalyptic MOBA action game with a unique 3D graphic style.” Mobile game out now.

• Greak: Memories Of Azur- “A single-player puzzle platformer adventure. Azur is under threat from an enemy attack who have control of strange creatures infecting the land. Take on the role of three siblings: Greak, Adara and Raydel and utilize their unique abilities to escape the invasion together.” Available on Steam and mobile.

• MicroMacro: Downtown Detective- “Investigate crimes on a huge city map, jam-packed with hidden details, challenging puzzles, weird folks—and lots of crimes. Search for clues, follow suspects and make clever deductions to solve twisted, yet witty criminal cases.” Available on mobile platforms now.

• Rail Rescue: Puzzle Lines- “Draw tracks, dodge crashes, and rescue lost buddies in Rail Rescue: Puzzle Lines—a colorful brain‑teasing railroad builder with 100+ handcrafted levels.” Available now on mobile platforms.

• Realms of Conquest: Rapture- “Choose your Champion, summon your Companions, and unleash Crests of power—only the smartest, fastest, and boldest will ascend.” Available now on mobile platforms.

The winner of this award was Battle Cars: Nitro PVP Shooter, taking home $5000 USD and becoming featured in the Aptoide App Store.

Epic Games Store Indie Spotlight- Sponsored By Epic

• Go Home Annie- “A twisted psychological thriller and an original story set in the SCP universe. As an employee of the SCP Foundation, test artificially created paranormal events, solve puzzles, interact with anomalies, and uncover the secrets of the Replication Division.” Available now.

• Mark of The Deep- “An epic pirate-themed adventure with a strong narrative and a thrilling mix of Metroidvania and Souls-Like elements. Embark on this journey, explore the mysteries of a cursed island and find your missing pirate crew!” Availalbe now.

• Kletka- “A co-op (up to 6 players) horror game about going down in an elevator that is trying to eat you. Feed the elevator, explore deadly floors and descend deeper.” Available now in Early Access.

• VisceraFest- “A Sci-Fi Fantasy Singleplayer Arena FPS with minor Collectathon elements. Fight through hordes of aliens and eldritch monstrosities wielding a slew of powerful weapons, juggling your resources, and exploring over 23 intricately designed hand-crafted levels.” Available now.

• Promise Mascot Agency- “Explore a cursed Japanese town! Recruit mascot friends and come to the rescue when disaster strikes! Solve the mystery of your exile! Help a living finger work through her many anger issues! Turn Promise Mascot Agency into the best agency in Japan in this open-world narrative adventure!” Available now.

The biggest single prize of the night, $25k USD, went to the wonderfully silly Promise Mascot Agency.

Scorewarrior DevGamm Awards

The remainder of the awards were all sponsored by Scorewarrior, DevGamm’s main sponsor. There were 11 categories in total, but before we get into those, let’s highlight the Hidden Gems, the most interesting games that barely missed being nominees.

Hidden Gems

• Goeland- “You’re a seagull. The island is your playground. Adventure awaits, if you’re not too busy being a menace.” Demo available now.

• Mexican Ninja- “A frantic fast-paced beat ‘em up roguelike full of crass, brass and incredibly badass. Become THE Mexican Ninja as you slice your way through the streets of Nuevo Tokyo in this retro 2.5D arcade throwback. So what’chu waiting for? Show me your skills pinche ninja!” Demo available now.

• Tokyo’s Neon Monsters- “Embark on an electrifying journey through the neon-lit streets of Tokyo– an adrenaline-pumping fusion of real-time strategy and tower defence like you’ve never experienced before!”

• Lost In Art: a Mniniature Realm- “Explore the miniature universe filled with Eastern mythology, forgotten folk tales and surprising historical events in this puzzle adventure game. Step into real artworks, reveal mysteries by solving unique puzzles, and be the hero of the miniature folk.” Demo available now.

• Retro Gadgets- “A sandbox where you build, code, and customize gadgets inspired by old-school electronics.” Out in Early Access.

Community Vote- 5 Most Voted Online By Fans

• Dungeon Rampage- “Battle your way to victory in this 1-4 player co-op hack-n-slash dungeon crawler. Play as a dynamic cast of heroes slicing their way through dungeons, earning weapons and loot. Rampage past a gauntlet of enemies and destruction to end the evil Lord Dinglepus’ reign!”

• Misery- “A 1–5 player co-op survival game set in a nuclear disaster zone. Here, every day is a struggle: search radioactive ruins for resources.” The Steam page is gone due to a GSC DMCA complaint. There seem to be a lot of problematic content in the game’s Discord related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so don’t take hasty conclusion on this one.

• Outbond- “Build your own home on wheels and live sustainably off-grid. Craft workstations and power supplies, source energy from the sun, wind, or water, upgrade and customize your vehicle, grow crops, and explore a colorful world with up to 4 players.”

• Heroes Of Might And Magic: Olden Era- “The official prequel hailing back to the origins of the genre-defining, critically acclaimed series of turn-based strategy games. Raise grand armies and wield devastating spells to overcome your foes in both solo and multiplayer.” Demo available now.

• Popucom- “Venture together with your friends on an unknown planet. Use color switching, match-3 shooting, and artifact powers to overcome challenges and keep advancing. What lies ahead of you is an adventure filled with wonder, hope, and much more to discover!”

Misery was the most voted game with close to 2000 votes. It won $2000 USD.

Developer’s Choice- Devs voted for each others’ games

• #Drive Rally- “An arcade-inspired rally-driving experience set in the golden racing era of the ‘90s. Grab your co-driver and burn some rubber on iconic race-winning cars across a variety of terrains in some of the most iconic rallying locations in the world!” Out now.

• Light Odyssey- “A soulslike boss rush where every battle is a test of mastery. Play as Bandi and fight to restore light to a world consumed by shadows. Face off against towering colossi in three deadly phases that demand precision, patience, and adaptation.” Demo available.

• Monowave- “A whimsical puzzle-adventure platformer about the humane power of emotions. Explore beautiful landscapes and empathize with their quirky denizens to restore harmony in an emotionally turbulent universe.” Demo available.

• Glasshouse- “Feudalpunk Turn-Based-CRPG set in a lockdown apartment block at the dawn of a world war. Investigate the mysterious triple murder next door, fight the Political Conspiracy, and make terrible choices before the flatmates do it for you!”

• Map Map: A Game About Maps- “In this game YOU make the maps! Embark on a treasure hunt as cartographer of an adventure crew. Orientate yourself on uncharted islands and measure distances to mark locations as accurately as possible.” Demo available.

Glasshouse won $3000 USD. The game does not have a release date yet, but it had a playable demo available at DevGamm that looked quite polished already. Unfortunately, I did not have time to test it.

Best Innovation

• A Webbing Journey- “Adorable spider chaos! Swing around the house, weave crazy structures, play with physics-based objects, and pull off chores with nothing but your webs and your wits in this madcap sandbox adventure.” Available in Early Access.

• Stretchmancer- “STRETCH THE WORLD! In this comedic first-person puzzle adventure, you are The Stretchmancer. Squash and stretch everything around you to solve fiendish puzzles, defeat the Claustro Empire, and save the galaxy!”

• 9 Kings- “A fast-paced roguelike kingdom builder. Grow your empire and fight massive battles against powerful rival kings. Break the game with thousands of insane builds to become the King of Kings.” Demo available.

• Compress(space)- “A mind and space-bending puzzle game where you fold space to cheat your way through puzzles. Master space manipulation and reach beyond the stars to uncover the mystery at the end of the universe.”

• Xenopurge- “A tactical auto-battler where you are a Commander tasked with purging the Xenos threat. Operate from a remote command center, issuing indirect orders via multi-screen interfaces. Plan routes, set priorities, and adapt as missions escalate and feel the true weight of being in command.” Demo available.

Stretchmancer, the game in which you complete puzzles by stretching the world, took home the prize of $5000 USD. The wonderfully bizarre concept of the game apparently came to one of the creator’s when he dropped an apple and though “what if I could pull the world toward me to catch it?”. It must’ve been a pretty special apple.

Best Game From Portugal

• Beyond The Board- “THIS IS (NOT) A CHESS GAME - A single-player puzzle game that transforms traditional chess into a minimal, immersive journey. Every move is a step deeper into the world Beyond the Board, where shifting tiles and puzzles reveal the hidden fractures within the game’s very foundations.” Demo available.

• Rail Rescue: Puzzle Lines- “Draw tracks, dodge crashes, and rescue lost buddies in Rail Rescue: Puzzle Lines—a colorful brain‑teasing railroad builder with 100+ handcrafted levels.” Available now on mobile platforms.

• Hell Maiden- “Traverse the depths of Hell and beat its toughest demons on your way to Heaven in this horde survival deck-building game inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy.” Demo available.

• Mirai #167- “A 2D pixel-art runner where you control two characters at once, rewinding time and jumping through portals. Embark on a frantic adventure to save humanity in a world where AI surpasses human control - upgrade your characters, break records and rewrite history before it’s too late!” Demo will be live later this year.

Despite being such a small country in the south-western corner of Europe, Portugal is creating excellent pieces of art in the gaming space— reminder that as a Portuguese person, I am completely biased, but try them if you don’t trust me! Hell Maiden was crowned the winner of this award, earning the small studio the massive sum of $10k USD.

Best Mobile Game

• Is This Seat Taken?- “A logic puzzle game where you play matchmaker for groups of hilariously particular people. Each character has pet peeves that make seating them a delightful challenge. Find the perfect spot for each person to unlock new levels in this cozy, silly, and relatable experience.” Available now on Steam and mobile.

• Greak: Memories Of Azur- “A single-player puzzle platformer adventure. Azur is under threat from an enemy attack who have control of strange creatures infecting the land. Take on the role of three siblings: Greak, Adara and Raydel and utilize their unique abilities to escape the invasion together.” Available on Steam and mobile.

• MicroMacro: Downtown Detective- “Investigate crimes on a huge city map, jam-packed with hidden details, challenging puzzles, weird folks—and lots of crimes. Search for clues, follow suspects and make clever deductions to solve twisted, yet witty criminal cases.” Available on mobile platforms now.

• The Storyteller- “A fire in the hearth, cozy armchairs, a window to the world and little creatures that seem to be waiting for something... All the conditions are there for a gentle evening story. Welcome to Omu’s hut and the interactive storytelling game The Storyteller.”

• What The Clash?- “Play solo or challenge friends to on-on-one battles in this hilarious party game! Hundreds of silly mini games through endless absurd (and very stupid) card combos!” Available now as an Apple Arcade exclusive.

Best Mobile Game and the $10K USD prize went to What The Clash?.

Most Anticipated Game

• 13Z: The Zodiac Trials- “Fight through shifting realms in this solo and co-op roguelike hack-and-slash inspired by Eastern mythology. Experiment with divine powers, overcome deadly trials, and rise again after each fall to become the 13th Zodiac Guardian.” Demo available now.

• Sacrifire- “RPG boasting a unique combat system, elaborate pixel art, and music by genre legend Motoi Sakuraba. Ezekiel Ridan, a young priest, struggles to keep his faith as the world he loves is threatened by a war between gods and demons. The adventure begins!”

• BreathEdge 2- “Sent on a reckless mission, you find yourself in outer space filled with numerous dangers and things to explore. Build, craft, manage your crew, look after the chicken, and defeat the evil space corporation in this new breathtaking survival game.” Demo available now.

• Lou’s Lagoon- “Traverse the vibrant Limbo Archipelago in search of your Uncle Lou, who mysteriously disappeared and left you his seaplane delivery service. Explore the islands, harvest resources, and hone your crafting skills to complete jobs and grow your business!”

• Berlin Apartment- “One apartment, many stories: Witness turning points in the lives of the inhabitants of an apartment in Berlin over the course of a whole century.” Demo available now.

BreathEdge 2 took home the $10k USD and the coveted crown of Most Anticipated Game with a promise of bringing a sequel that aims to be better than the original in as many ways as possible.

Excellence In Narrative

• Arctic Awakening- “A first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.” Full game available now.

• Despelote- “A slice-of-life adventure about childhood and the magical grip soccer held over the people of Quito, Ecuador in 2001.” Full game available now.

• New Arc Line- “Take a stand in the eternal conflict between Arcane Magic and Steampunk Revolution and tip the uneasy balance between sorcery, elves, dwarves and mysterious monsters on one side and steampunk gadgets, zeppelins, and tesla guns on the other in this single-player, party-based, story-rich RPG.” Available now in Early Access.

• Davy X Jones- “Ascend to the highest fathom of a pirate underworld with the infamous Davy Jones on this action-adventure, revenge-driven journey. Control the captain’s headless body, stay on pace with his autonomous skull and keep his legend alive.” Available now in Early Access.

• Hell is Us- “If war is the closest we get to hell on earth, it’s because Earth harbours the worst of demons: humankind. In an isolated country ravaged by infighting, discover the secrets of your past and deal with the repercussions of a mysterious calamity.” Full game available now.

Although Julián Cordero, Despelote’s main creator, couldn’t attend the event in person, his cousin accepted the award and the $10k USD prize with some heartfelt words, highlighting how they were proud to have won an award for the country of Ecuador.

Excellence In Audio

• JDM: Japanese Drift Master- “Discover Japan’s legendary car culture in JDM! Take on challenging mountain roads, visit Japanese legendary drifting spots in licensed JDM cars and immerse in the story about second chances told through manga pages. Explore an open world where every turn invites you to master the art of drift.” Full game available now.

• Koira- “Save a puppy and embark on a heartwarming, hand-drawn adventure together. Journey to the heart of an enchanted forest, solving puzzles and avoiding hunters to protect your newfound friend.” Full game available now.

• Rockbeasts- “Lead a band of misfits on a roller-coaster ride to stardom in the age of MTV, rock anthems, and bad haircuts. ROCKBEASTS is a story-driven, role-playing management game that puts you in the shoes of a manager of an up-and-coming rock band. Your job – take them to the top.”

• Keep Driving- “An atmospheric management RPG about life on the open road. Pick up hitchhikers, work odd jobs, customize and repair your car, and map your route across the country. Use upgrades, skills and items to overcome challenges. And remember to take it easy. You’re young. You have time.” Full game available now.

• PBJ: The Musical- “Imagine Romeo and Juliet… but it’s Peanut Butter and Jelly? This handcrafted musical game tells the badly research story of the iconic sandwich’s tragic origins.” Available now on App Store.

Rockbeasts, the only unreleased game in the nominees, won the award and the $10k USD prize. There was a demo playable at DevGamm, but the game does not have a release date yet.

Excellence In Visual Art

• Truckful- “Drive your pickup truck through seemingly peaceful countryside valleys, deliver much-needed goods to local townsfolk and unravel the small town mystery. Beware, the old forest is watching.” Demo available now.

• Hotel Galactic- “Combines cozy management with a heartfelt tale. Build and decorate your dream tourist getaway, aid Gustav in his search for redemption, and explore a nostalgic world where bonds with creatures and serene gardens sustain a thriving colony.” Available now in Early Access.

• Sacrifire- “RPG boasting a unique combat system, elaborate pixel art, and music by genre legend Motoi Sakuraba. Ezekiel Ridan, a young priest, struggles to keep his faith as the world he loves is threatened by a war between gods and demons. The adventure begins!”

• Tukoni: Forest Keepers- “A cute & cozy puzzle adventure. Play as the forest spirit Tukoni as you meet unique characters, solve captivating puzzles, brew fragrant tea and explore a magical world filled with kindness.” Demo available now.

• Winter Burrow- “A cozy woodland survival game about a mouse returning home to restore their childhood burrow. Explore, gather resources, craft, knit warm sweaters, bake pies and meet the locals.” Demo available now.

With its fantastic children storybook aesthetic, Tukoni: Forest Keepers took the $10k USD prize and the award home. The game is coming out sometime in 2026.

Excellence In Game Design

• Compress(space)- “A mind and space-bending puzzle game where you fold space to cheat your way through puzzles. Master space manipulation and reach beyond the stars to uncover the mystery at the end of the universe.”

• Drop Duchy- “Build your duchy piece by piece in this refreshing hybrid rogue-lite game. Use block-dropping mechanics to collect resources, recruit troops to fight against belligerent armies, and let every block shape your realm, leading your path to victory!” Full game out now.

• Stretchmancer- “STRETCH THE WORLD! In this comedic first-person puzzle adventure, you are The Stretchmancer. Squash and stretch everything around you to solve fiendish puzzles, defeat the Claustro Empire, and save the galaxy!”

• Is This Seat Taken?- “A logic puzzle game where you play matchmaker for groups of hilariously particular people. Each character has pet peeves that make seating them a delightful challenge. Find the perfect spot for each person to unlock new levels in this cozy, silly, and relatable experience.” Available now on Steam and mobile.

• Jump Space- “A mission based co-op PvE for 1-4 players, where you are the crew of a spaceship. Transition seamlessly from crewing the ship to on-foot exploration and space walks. Explore, upgrade, and survive intense encounters in deep space together.” Available now in Early Access.

Despite being one of the smallest projects in the nominee list, Drop Duchy won the award and the $10k USD prize with its unique take on the roguelite genre.

Grand Prize

• Hell is Us- “If war is the closest we get to hell on earth, it’s because Earth harbours the worst of demons: humankind. In an isolated country ravaged by infighting, discover the secrets of your past and deal with the repercussions of a mysterious calamity.” Full game available now.

• Rockbeasts- “Lead a band of misfits on a roller-coaster ride to stardom in the age of MTV, rock anthems, and bad haircuts. ROCKBEASTS is a story-driven, role-playing management game that puts you in the shoes of a manager of an up-and-coming rock band. Your job – take them to the top.”

• Despelote- “A slice-of-life adventure about childhood and the magical grip soccer held over the people of Quito, Ecuador in 2001.” Full game available now.

• Keep Driving- “An atmospheric management RPG about life on the open road. Pick up hitchhikers, work odd jobs, customize and repair your car, and map your route across the country. Use upgrades, skills and items to overcome challenges. And remember to take it easy. You’re young. You have time.” Full game available now.

• Stretchmancer- “STRETCH THE WORLD! In this comedic first-person puzzle adventure, you are The Stretchmancer. Squash and stretch everything around you to solve fiendish puzzles, defeat the Claustro Empire, and save the galaxy!”

The second biggest check of the night ($20k USD) and the most important award of DevGamm Lisbon 2025 went to Keep Driving. Looking like a fusion between a young Liam Gallagher and games critic Tim Rogers, Y/CJ/Y’s Josef Martinosvky took the stage alongside Christopher Andreasson ecstatic.

This wonderful game was born like a lot of artworks are: reminiscing of times well spent, in this case driving through Norway with his dog and his best friend— alongside the influence of some hypothetical drugs and the classic Oregon Trail.

As Scorewarrior’s Adam Sibson so eloquently put it, Josef already is a “gaming rockstar” and “is going to be a massive legend in the industry”. I can’t wait to see what Y/CJ/Y puts out next, and neither should you.

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Videogame difficulty has been a discourse for as long as videogames have existed. Unlike most other forms of art, videogames are malleable and ever-changing. They can be patched, settings can be changed by players searching for their preferred experience, so it is only logical that we expect the same when it comes to difficulty. Should we, though?

Here’s why difficulty settings should never become mandatory in videogames, and why it is okay to not be able to appreciate everything.

This article was inspired by and is a direct response to this wonderful piece published by Cat on her Controller Corner: What Does Difficulty Accessibility Really Mean?

Read it now if you haven’t yet, and come back to this one after.

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Complex tasks make our brain react differently than simple ones do. While you might’ve not known this, you have previously experienced it. Doing something new and difficult is extremely engaging. Doing it again after you’ve completely mastered it will come with diminishing returns in most cases, even if the engagement isn’t entirely gone.

The tricky part about it is that there is a fine line between “extremely engaging” and “frustrating”. When we do something difficult successfully, our brain can literally change in reaction to it. Attempting too difficult of a task, though, will lead to frustration and, eventually, quitting. So the ideal piece of art is one that challenges us enough to keep us engaged, ideally more than we’re used to being, but not so complex to understand that we get frustrated and give up on it.

Videogames are in the enviable position of giving players some leeway when it comes to finding the right balance. Historically, games have often shipped with three difficulty settings: easy, medium, hard. Sometimes, medium was instead described as Normal, implying that this was the “correct” difficulty.

While choice is excellent, it is not inherently good. The reasoning for this is two-fold: we do not always know what we want. If you give players a sandbox game with no specific task, most of them will bounce off of it because they will not be able to make a decision on what to do.

While we tend to assume that more choice is a good thing, research has shown that, in many cases, we have a harder time choosing from a larger array of options.

Three choices is not exactly a “large array of options”, but it is a lot more than none.

The second reason is that it is impossible to perfectly tailor three different experiences, let alone the nearly infinite possibilities brought by games with slide bars allowing you to customise most aspects of their difficulty. When creating a videogame, developers obviously have an intended experience in mind. I argue that all games have a difficulty in which they’re “meant to be played”, even if not all of them spell it out.

Of course, the intended experience will not be a perfect fit for everyone. The developers making that decision are human, and humans are inherently subjective when making such decisions. The intended difficult will be perfect for the developers, too easy for player X, and way too hard for player Y. Yet that is the nature of how humans work.

With that in mind, difficulty settings still seem to be the obvious choice. Why not let players tailor their own experience, even if it doesn’t end up being the “intended” one? Difficulty choices are not inherently bad, but they aren’t inherently good, either.

Avoiding the memefied Dark Souls example, let’s take a look at the Super Mario franchise. Nintendo is famous for following the “art is for everyone” take that Cat highlights in her article. Their games appeal to kids and adults, hardcore and casual gamers, they’re for nearly everyone. Super Mario, Nintendo’s most successful franchise, is incredibly easy to get into. Yet, it does not have difficulty settings.

Super Mario Wonder, the latest game in the franchise, is rated PEGI 3, so it is meant to be played by anyone over 3 years old. Yet it does not have difficulty settings. It does feature characters which make parts of the game easier, but so does every game in existence, including the ones most criticised for not having them:

• Souls games have builds which are overpowered and make the game easier and players can be summoned.

• Hollow Knight also has inherently stronger builds which can make the game considerably less challenging.

What decisions like this one allow games like Super Mario Wonder to do is to polish an experience to perfection. Most levels will be trivial for the majority of gamers, but they become harder if you try to grab all the collectibles. Super Mario 3D World has the infamous Champion’s Road level which is incredibly difficult to complete, yet most levels are, like in every other Mario game, trivial to complete.

My argument boils down to seeing the game industry as you see Super Mario games. Champion’s Road is there to tackle, but it isn’t mandatory. If you find it so hard that it becomes frustrating, don’t play it. In that same vein, if you find Elden Ring offensively difficult, there are thousands of games released every year. Why do all of them have to fit to your personal preferences?

We argue that making art accessible for everyone is inherently good, but is it? Would James Joyce’s Ulysses remain a masterpiece if it was as accessible to read as a YA novel? Would we talk about Lynch’s movies decades after they released if they were as easily interpreted as the latest Marvel movie?

There is nothing wrong with accessible art, neither is there anything wrong with art that is hard to access. Our lives are not long enough to experience everything that was made with people like us in mind, so why do we waste time complaining about the few things aren’t made accessible to us?

James Joyce wrote Ulysses the way he did for a reason. David Lynch’s movies are structured the way they are for a reason. FromSoftware games lack difficulty settings for a reason. You might not understand or agree with it, but it is not up to the artist to change that. It is up to you to decide: will you accept it and engage with the art they created, or will you move on to one with which you can engage?

Expecting a third option in which all art pieces in the world have to be adapted to fit everyone’s demands is preposterous. So why does it stop being so when it comes to videogames?

The Unique Magic Of The Difficult

My personal take is the one which gave me the title: the unique magic of the difficult. I do not have a problem with casual gamers at all, they are the majority of the industry’s audience and, therefore, its life and blood. Yet I am one of those masochists who enjoys difficult games. I also enjoy trying to watch movies I don’t understand, or failing to read James Joyce’s Ulysses—I’ll get back to it, eventually.

Some of my most cherished memories in games come after overcoming a difficult challenge. I’ll never forget the moment I managed to progress through the start of Dark Souls II after I found it impossible. I yelped in joy after completing the Champion’s Road with a powerless Mario after two weeks of failures. I love when games make my palms sweat, when my breath is caught in my throat, when I’m convinced that something is impossible to do right before finally being able to do it.

You would argue that I can still get this experience if I crank a game’s difficult to the maximum, but the problem is that difficulty settings are rarely done correctly. Cranking damage dealt and taken or enemy health up is easy to do, but is rarely fun or engaging, Yet it remains as one of the most universal descriptions of difficult modes in videogames.

The best experiences I’ve had with difficult moments in games happened in ones with no difficulty settings. That could be a coincidence, of course, but I’ll selfishly attribute it to the fact that I was playing something which was polished to perfection because the developers weren’t thinking about how to adjust it to be easier or harder.

You don’t have to appreciate Modern Art, read Joyce, watch Lynch, or play FromSoftware, neither do you have to enjoy the unique magic of the difficult. They’re there for those of us who want it.

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