Pretty Metroidvanias, free Bomberman-style chaos and other new indie games worth checking out

Ndev Games/Com2us Holdings Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. It's Gamescom week, so there have been tons of game announcements . We'll dig into several of those as well as a few new games you can jump into this weekend.

You may recall a long-running saga about a guy who tried to gain access to a landfill site because he was convinced it contained a hard drive he accidentally threw away in 2013 . The hard drive is said to house a private key for 8,000 Bitcoin, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. James Howells' efforts to recover the hard drive (which is likely ruined anyway) have thus far been in vain , but he seems to have inspired a new game.

I'm making a game that you are trying to find your Bitcoin hard drive in a landfill.

An X user who goes by the name Paiden said they were working on a game in which you "try to find your Bitcoin hard drive in a landfill." This is one of several "needle in a haystack" games that have popped up in recent days. Those include an actual needle in a haystack game , with one needle to find amid 5 million strands of hay.

the catch is there are 5,000,000 pieces of hay and only 1 needle pic.twitter.com/q2TehY53iJ

My favorite example I've seen so far is one in which you have to figure out the location of a single missing semicolon in 187,421 lines of code . These are printed on sheets of paper that are stuck to the walls of a virtual office. The only way to pinpoint the missing punctuation (which the game removes at random) is by scouring the code manually.

i made a game where you literally have to find a missing semicolon in a codebase of 187,421 lines

the catch is the entire codebase is printed out and taped to the walls of an office and you have to inspect it line by line

I spent about five minutes with the semicolon game before giving up. I understand why people want to play these kinds of games — they can be meditative for some —but they're not for me. My brain just doesn't engage with them.

That said, I frittered away more time than I care to admit this week by claiming unique cards representing wiki entries in a fact-or-fiction game that Wikipedia made . My rapidly expanding collection includes the original Xbox, the Super Mario franchise, Suda51 and the 16:9 aspect ratio.

Developer: Ndev Games Publisher: Com2us Holdings Platform: Steam (Windows; Steam Deck Verified) Price: Usually $25, with a 20 percent discount until September 9

Fans of Metroidvanias have been eating well for a long time. There's been a steady stream of them for ages, and this week is no different. Two new releases caught my eye including Fatal Claw, which just left early access on Steam with its 1.0 release.

As a cat named Kisha, you'll explore an ancient kingdom that's been revived using modern tech. It's full of infected creatures from which you can absorb abilities after vanquishing them. There are multiple endings as well. Kisha appears to have electrical powers, so I think he should have the nickname "Pikacat."

The animations in the trailer are slick and the Steam reviews are generally positive.