Welcome to Hidden Nindies, a (no longer very) new feature where we put the spotlight on some of the lesser known indie games on current Nintendo platforms! We don’t have a strict line drawn for determining which games meet this criteria, but the spirit of the feature is to both expose Nintendo gamers to neat games that they may not have heard much about and to help indie game developers gain some attention for the quality games that they have built which may have fallen a bit under the radar on the Nintendo platforms (even if they were more successful elsewhere.) These are not reviews per se, and the writers may not even have finished the games, but something about them stood out enough to warrant a recommendation.Lovers in a Dangerous SpacetimeDeveloper: Asteroid Base
Nintendo Platform/s released on: Switch
Platform/s played on: Switch
Played by: Andrew NAlthough I rarely find the opportunity to play them nowadays, I’m a sucker for couch co-op games, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a fun little local co-op game for 2-4 players where you need to work together to navigate a spaceship through dangerous worlds.
The concept is pretty simple, everyone is inside of a large circular spaceship and needs to man different stations to control different parts of the ship: movement, weapons, shields, etc. What complicates things a bit is that there are more stations than players, and successfully navigating the worlds requires using all of them, so there is a bit of juggling tasks by everyone involved, and a lot of on-the-fly decision making required. Without some well-synced minds and coordination things can get pretty chaotic fast.
Still, it’s a pretty casual game that, with the right group of people, can be a lot of fun without being overly difficult. I don’t know of too many Switch games that support up to 4 players for local co-op, but even if there were a ton, this one is still well worth checking out.
Into the BreachDeveloper: Subset Games
Nintendo Platform/s released on: Switch
Platform/s played on: Switch
Played by: Andrew NAnyone who follows my forum posts knows that I have not historically been the biggest fan of the procedural generation roguelike trend in indie gaming, but a pair of games have come along lately that have changed my mind a bit, and Into the Breach is the first of the two. It’s a great little top-down turn-based procedurally-generated strategy roguelike that does a lot right.
I’m a huge turn-based strategy fan, but one of the things I don’t like about the genre is that battles can often turn into long drawn-out battle of attrition slogs. Into the Breach successfully sidesteps that issue completely. The maps are small, you only have 3 characters to control, and all you really need to do to complete a map is survive an alien invasion for a limited amount of turns. For a turn-based strategy game, everything is surprisingly tight and quick.
However, what also makes it work is that each map has alternative goals that, if met, give you rewards which can help power-up one of your characters, which, being a roguelike, is incredibly important. This sets up an ongoing risk / reward situation, where merely playing for survival might help you make it to the next map, but will damage your chances of successfully beating off the alien invasion in the long-run. A failed run will lose you most everything, but if any of your human pilots survive, you can bring them into the next run.
I won’t say I am totally sold on roguelikes yet, but this is the first one that I played that I actually finished a successful run in (after many failures), and can honestly say that I loved it start to finish.
But there has since been another. Maybe I will talk about that one in Hidden Nindies Vol. 5...
WandersongDeveloper: Greg Lobanov
Nintendo Platform/s released on: Switch
Platform/s played on: Switch
Played by: Andrew NI will open this in full disclosure by saying that the developer of Wandersong is a uh… acquaintance of an acquaintance of mine... I think? And my acquaintance did some audio work on the game in some fashion? But honestly, for one reason or another, I rarely ever get into the games of people I know (sorry!), but I did love Wandersong.
The thing that initially drew me to the game was the focus on song at the core of the gameplay. Aside from basic platforming, most of what you will be doing in this game is singing. Some of it is rhythm based, some of it is more freeform, but either way it works pretty well. Luckily the music is well done and the singing voice is great, which brought a lot of joy to me while playing the game. There are a lot of music games out there but few that use music in such a novel way.
The story is pretty solid too, with a lot of the key moments happening in, you guessed it, song. Beyond the music focus and some neat visuals, the core of the game is not anything unfamiliar. Platforming, puzzles, completing tasks for NPCs, it’s all well done but similar to stuff you have probably seen before. The singing element is the real standout, and that is the thing that gives this game it’s voice. Pun very much intended.
7 Billion HumansDeveloper: Tomorrow Corporation
Nintendo Platform/s released on: Switch
Platform/s played on: Switch
Played by: Andrew N7 Billion Humans is the follow-up to Human Resource Machine, a puzzle game made by programmers for programmers or anyone else who is interested in programming. While I was expecting a me too sequel of sorts, 7 Billion Humans really does a lot to distinguish itself from Human Resource Machine, in large part due to its focus on “parallel programming”. You no longer control just one worker at a time, but many, and this changes everything.
The basic gist of the game is you are given a group of workers and a certain task to complete, and you have to choose and order commands from a pool of commands to essentially write code that will tell the workers what to do. A lot of things familiar to programmers are present, like variables, gotos, pointers, etc. However, this is a puzzle game at its core, which means that often a task which would be easy enough to complete with a full programming language is difficult due to the limited amount of commands at your disposal. As a programmer, this is a very compelling game for me, but it is difficult to say how non-programmers would react to it. Whatever the case, I’d definitely say that of the two games this one is tougher to wrap your head around, so if you haven’t played it yet, you might want to start with Human Resource Machine, if possible. But if you liked Human Resource Machine, this is a great follow-up.
The presentation values are, again, spectacular. Tomorrow Corporation has a graphical and audio style all of their own, and the humor is pretty good as well. While I wasn’t expecting them to take another crack at the (very small) programming puzzle genre, I’m glad that they did.
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