Happy New Year, Indieventurers! We are back on the postcards train, updating you with all the cool stuff we’ve been enjoying outside the realm of indie games, but also indie games because, well, it’s us.
Happy reading!
I replayed The Case of the Golden Idol + Rise of the Golden Idol + Golden Idol Investigations over Christmas because jfc I love this series so much, also I’m tired
Toward the end of last year, I started compiling my annual list of indies I wanted to play over the holiday break when I had the time and energy to give them my full attention. But as I floated in the weird limbo soup of time between Christmas and New Years, I took one long, dead-eyed look at the list, then proceeded to boot up The Case of the Golden Idol instead. I then played both the DLCs of the first game, decided to keep riding the Idol wave and play the second game, AND also all four of that game’s DLCs.
God, I love those games, but I’m also just tired, gang! I mentioned this on the pod, but I’m struggling to keep up with every notable indie that releases. Playing (almost) every notable indie release is something I’ve done for years (partly for my job, partly for myself, could even be an ego thing??), but in 2025 there were just too many, and I just can’t keep up. So it’s time! The grind stops now! A big thing for me in 2026 is to just play the games I…want to? Could you imagine! Like, I want to stop chasing this thing I’ve put on myself. So if that means playing all the Golden Idol games again instead of Hades 2 and Silksong, then so be it. Let’s see how long this lasts.
Rachel
Literally the day after I got to thinking about Life is Strange for the first time in like a year a new game got leaked, am I spooky or what?
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about Life is Strange too much lately – probably because 2025 was the first year in a nearly a decade with no new LiS media for me to obsess over (unless you count Don’t Nod’s spiritual successor Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, or I guess the confirmation that the glacially-progressing TV series adaptation has inched closer to reality).
But on Wednesday night, out of nowhere, I was struck with a sudden urge to indulge in some toxic yuri shipping with Max and Safi from Double Exposure, to re-download the audio book version of Steph’s Story, and generally to fangirl it up over LiS like I hadn’t done in months.
And then – would you believe it – mere hours later on Thursday morning, I found out that a new LiS game has allegedly but credibly been leaked?! Look, it’s all speculation right now, so there’s no need to go into detail about how I think that it’s kinda funny-sad to see Squeenix making Deck Nine constantly chase the dragon of fandom approval that they’re never going to win, or how I already strongly suspect that, as always, I’ll personally enjoy the next LiS game a lot but just slightly less than the last one. (History has been very consistent on that point.)
There’ll be plenty of time to make proper predictions if and when this turns out to be real, but for now can we just take a moment to appreciate that even after taking a year off, I’m still so obsessed with this series that I now have a verified psychic link to it? With powers like this, I predict I’ll be heading up my own instalment of the LiS franchise any day now.
Rebecca
After finishing Pokémon Legends: Z-A, I feel like I’ve been beaten up
Spoilers for Pokémon Legends: Z-A, a game I’m comfortable in assuming very few of you reading this have played, or have any interest in playing.
Based on the marketing, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Pokémon Legends: Z-A was a game about fighting your way up the ranks of the preposterously named Z-A tournament. Indeed, this is precisely what I thought the game was about when I picked up two copies just before Christmas for my wife and I to play during our break.
For the first few hours, that’s exactly what Z-A is! Alongside a new real-time battle system that transforms fights into frenetic (and exciting!) skirmishes against various café workers and small children, you gain points and increase your rank. It’s fun!
But fairly early on, the game gets bored with this concept and decides it wants to tell a story instead. A story, I’m keen to stress immediately, that is communicated purely through text with no vocal performances at all. Not even a Persona-style bark at the start of every line. It feels dull and painfully outdated.
And the story itself? Well. Let’s get into it.
In the first hour, you meet an enormous man named (I wish I was joking about this) AZ. He owns a hotel and hangs around with a Floette, a flimsy-looking Pokémon that looks like it has an average life span of about 4 days.
It’s revealed later that AZ and his Floette are both 3,000 years old. Also, AZ (the former king of the Kalos region where Z-A takes place, not that this is ever mentioned or important in any way), is a really, really bad dude.
You see, AZ is well known for committing genocide. He did this 3,000 years before the events of Z-A after his Floette was killed in the front line of a war (which raises more questions that I don’t have the time or energy to try and answer). Distraught, he created a machine designed to slaughter Pokémon and absorb their life energy, with the intention of using it to resurrect Floette. Although the machine worked, and Floette was brought back from the dead, it had the unintended side effect of making both it and AZ immortal. Also, it made AZ 12 feet tall because of… reasons.
Anyway! AZ then decided to turn the machine – now referred to as the Ultimate Weapon (lol) – against the opposing forces, slaughtering them all instantly and ending the war. Cool! Floette, disgusted by his actions, leaves him for 3,000 years. “Leaves” is the wording they use in the game, which implies that they were “together” and… again, I’m not going to unpack that.
A lot of this was included in X & Y, the first games to be released for the 3DS, in which AZ helps the player stop another character who is attempting to use the ultimate weapon to – and I quote – “eradicate all humans and Pokémon who don’t support his ideals”. Remember: these are games made and marketed to six-year-olds.
Cut to Z-A. You are now helping the 3,000-year-old Pokéhitler stop a second Ultimate Weapon he developed (called “Ange”, for some reason) from killing all life on earth. Where is Ange? Why, it’s in the Eiffel Tower, of course! You idiot! You buffoon!
So, the game ends with you fighting the Eiffel Tower before it explodes and kills everyone. Then, at the end, AZ dies for reasons that are never explained. An odd move, considering it kept repeating that he was immortal.
6/10.
Liam
Rachel’s YouTube video dump (some good shit I watched over Christmas)
I wanted a bunch of great YouTube videos over the holidays, so here they are. Up first is Mike’s Mic’s video, Appropriately Unhinged Recap of Gossip Girl (Season 5) which is incredible. Mike’s Mic is my absolute favourite creator on YT, and the combination of how baffling Gossip Girl is and his humour is so fucking funny. Next up is Why does everyone hate the new Bratz games? by Cute Games Club, a channel that friend of the podcast Chay recommended to me. I love the topic of this video, but the AESTHETICS are god-tier. The crispy CRT monitor vibes with the sparkly pink hue is so girly pop.
This one is kinda super specific to me, but I did not understand why the women of Real Housewives paraded their Hermès handbags around like they had won an Olympic gold medal in the high dive or some shit. But now I get it because of this video: luxury shopping is INSANE… (let’s discuss the “Hermès Game”). It’s a deep dive into the gross process of getting a Hermès Birkin handbag, which is wild?? Rich people are fucked. Next is my girl Mina Le with You Don’t Need To Be Productive. I will watch any video Mina makes, and this one is another banger. I loved the bit about ‘productive hobbies’, which I felt was a personal read from Miss Mina, and I think will clock many of us.
Liam recommended i found the most hardcore barbie games ever made by Memoria, which was super funny and a cosy watch. Memoria’s deadpan delivery will always get me, jfc. (Also, if you’ve not seen her Steam dumpster diving videos on day-old Steam games WATCH.THEM.) And finally, the video that so many of us had been waiting for, part 2 of Defunctland’s animatronic deep dive: Disney’s Living Characters: A Broken Promise. I’m still not over the terrifyingly gigantic dinosaur animatronic that, if let loose, would have absolutely fallen over and crushed a child.
Rachel
My new hottest Love & Deepspace take? Two years in, there’s still not enough reason to care about Rafayel if you’re not romancing him, and they know it
I have thoughts about LaDS 5.0 and now that’s everyone’s problem, sorry. The new version launched on New Year’s Eve with various bells and whistles for the game’s upcoming 2nd anniversary, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that with the sheer volume of content it’s been a bit hit-or-miss for me. Largely the hits (those new ASMR dates oh my god, I hope those VAs got trucks full of money driven to their houses for doing that on mic) make up for the misses (you’ll never get me excited for player housing in a live service game, sorry).
But I have some really weird feelings about the new main story chapter. Namely the fact that it seems to have (perhaps inadvertently?) made Rafayel out to be the canon love interest – which is a really odd move for an otome game which has so far done a very good job of keeping its player base pretty evenly split across all five LIs. It’s maybe not quite 20% audience share apiece for all the lads, but from what I can tell, it’s surprisingly close.
The thing is though… I think it comes across this way because the main story has never presented us with a particularly strong reason to think much about Rafayel at all if we’re not romancing him. The other four all have reasons to hang around at various degrees of plausibly platonic affection; but even though I don’t think Rafayel is the worst-behaved of the bunch, I’ve never been able to see many reasons for the heroine to keep in touch with him unless they were literally dating, just because the circumstances of their acquaintance are much weaker than with the others (and thus his particular brand of bullshit is way less worth putting up with compared to everyone else’s, admittedly also often-bullshitty, behaviour).
So yes, I’m a little deflated to have to reconcile my choices in this game with my character i.e. claiming to have pined for a solid month over the absence of a guy she’s actually barely met in my playthrough and didn’t seem to much like when she did. But I actually feel like this bullet-graze of an attempted character assassination applies to Rafayel as much as to my poor autonomy-shedding MC. Sure, I’m not interested in following his romance route, but he’s not awful. I care about his situation, and I was actually excited to see what reasons the story was going to give to keep him in the loop of the main narrative outside of his romance arc. It’s kind of a shame, honestly, that Infold doesn’t seem to have enough faith in their work when it comes to this one specific character to just… trust us to be on board for all the high-drama space opera bits, regardless of who we’re wanting to smooch.
Rebecca
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