Urban Jungle - ★★★☆☆
Urban Jungle is the debut game from three-person studio Kylyk Games. In it, players take the role of Ayta Borisova during snapshots over almost thirty years of her life, between the years 1996 and 2024. As with many cosy games, it opens with Ayta during a fairly miserable moment in her life, worn down by corporate life and being yet another cog in an unappreciative system.
What she’s really passionate about is her plants, with the core gameplay coming from players placing plants to make each of those snapshots a cosy — and green — environment.
Spilled! - ★★★✮☆
Spilled! is the debut game from Dutch solo-developer Lente, in which players control a small boat cleaning up various environmental hazards. It starts with oil spills, which remain the prevalent issue throughout the game, but expands to patches of plastic bottles, oil barrels at the bottom of the seabed, forest fires, and more.
My Little Life - ★★★☆☆
My Little Life from 9FingerGames is - to quote - “a life simulator that lives on the bottom of your screen, allowing you to focus on other tasks while periodically checking on your own little person.” Those tasks can be anything, from watching football to working, from writing reviews for My Little Life to fueling your crippling SuperTaxCity addiction… you get the idea. If you’re familiar with Rusty’s Retirement, it’s that, but with the Sims instead of Stardew Valley…
Pocket Lint - ★✮☆☆☆
Follow the Fun are probably best known for their - at time of writing - 66-game ‘I commissioned some…’ series. It’s a hidden-object smorgasbord which sees players finding bees, or finding cats, or finding frogs, or finding dogs, or finding bunnies, or finding abstract bunnies… you get the idea. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s a nice little series that executes the concept very well. Pocket Lint is a brief deviation from those games, offering a code-breaking puzzler where players attempt to get the correct combination of items in the right order.
Digseum - ★★★☆☆
For someone who has played a fair few incremental games over the years, I have a confession to make: I somewhat despise the genre. What starts as a dopamine-inducing rush to hit each fresh milestone quickly descends into a part-time job that demands your attention for quarter of an hour each evening, until you question what it is you’re actually doing, fight against the sunk cost fallacy, and abandon it altogether. That is, until a shiny new idler turns your head, and the process starts all over again. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to enjoy that initial rush, without having to commit to it for the foreseeable future, all in the name of incremental progress?