Legend of Grimrock has a heavy focus on challenging puzzles.
Legend of Grimrock has a heavy focus on challenging puzzles.
The middle of the year is always quiet for gaming, but there's still fun to be had. Siobhan Keogh finds four of the best indie games you may have missed.
Rocket League
A scene from the video game Rocket League.
Into sports games? What about driving games? I'm not really into either of those things, but I still loved Rocket League.
Rocket League is football - the soccer kind, not the American kind - but you're in cars. A giant ball bounces around and you force your rocket-fuelled vehicle to flip and boost and jump to hit the ball into the goal. You play online in two teams of three or four, trying to hit the ball into the opposite team's goal by any means necessary. You regularly crash into your own team-mates, explode, and drive up walls. Everyone is terrible at it. It is exactly as much fun as it sounds. What's more, it's free with PlayStation Plus this month - if you've got an account, you should grab it while you can.
Her Story is as much an interactive movie as it is a video game. In it, you play detective by sorting through a set of police interviews about a missing person. These interviews are all with one woman - the missing guy's wife - and they're all you have. You make notes and search through databases to find the right clips, then have to put it all together in a way that makes sense. Is she guilty? Watch closely. The game was created by Sam Barlow, who previously designed 2009's Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. While Shattered Memories was received pretty well critically, it didn't sell very well. Then Barlow's next big-budget project was canned, and he left to work on his own game. Lucky us, or Her Story wouldn't have happened. If you love mysteries and thrillers, this game was made for you. It's available on PC, Mac, and iOS.
Legend of Grimrock
A scene from the video game Legend of Grimrock.
Dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock is Finnish developer Almost Human's first game, but the developers on board have some pretty hefty credentials, like Max Payne and Alan Wake. Grimrock is a throwback to old-school dungeon crawlers like Dungeon Master - there's even a function called "old-school mode", where you can disable the map and make your way through the dungeon from memory. It also has a heavy focus on challenging puzzles, which have fallen by the wayside in recent years. If you're in the middle of a Venn diagram labelled "RPGs", "puzzles", and "retro", Legend of Grimrock should be right up your alley. Like Her Story, you can grab Grimrock on PC, Mac, and iOS - and there's even a Linux version.
Vainglory
A scene from the video game Vainglory.
Vainglory is the only game on this list that's exclusively mobile - but it definitely deserves to be on here. It has a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) where teams fight it out online - like a simplified League of Legends. It's a surprisingly beautiful game, and a lot of fun too.
Developer Super Evil Megacorp is also made up of a bunch of industry veterans, who'd previously worked at companies like Rockstar and Blizzard, so it's no wonder the game is so good. Unlike other MOBAs, Vainglory is made to be accessible and to play well on a touchscreen. It's available to download for free on both iOS and Android. Yes, of course it runs on microtransactions - but you can play it quite thoroughly without spending your real-world money.
And if you're going to download a game designed for mobile, it's way better than most of the ones you've already heard of. Fallout Shelter? Bah.
