Happy Friday friends!

This week I have been rather busy getting ready for a family trip back to Australia in a few weeks, along with my son’s upcoming 2nd birthday. Time flies, and there never seems to be enough of it. But I did manage to play some games this week, and I even got a review out for one of them which is linked below.

Patrick has been banging on about how much he has been enjoying The Blood of Dawnwalker, which inspired me to finally check out 2018’s Vampyr. Released to limited critical fanfare, this story-heavy RPG from Dontnod has a lot of really interesting ideas that really sell the idea of being a conscientious vampire. You’re a doctor during the plague times in London, who recently became a vampyr, which puts you in this interesting place of trying to cure and save people from the deadly virus, but also needing to feed in order to stay alive. You also have to avoid sunlight, which I mean should be pretty easy considering how dark and gloomy London always is.

I have only made it a few hours in, and maybe it’s just how well it runs on the Steam Deck coupled with literally ZERO expectations, but it’s a fun little game. A little basic, a little jank, but I will take those things in stride for the pay off of a game that dares to be INTERESTING, even if it doesn’t always land its punches.

If you want to check it out too, it’s currently 90% off Steam which puts it at ¥648 here in Japan, so chances are it’s the price of a coffee wherever you are reading this from.

Anyways, let’s get to those tasty recommendos!

What came out this week?

Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists

Developer: A Sharp
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store link

If you’re a fan of Tabletop RPGs like Blades in the Dark, you might want to check out Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists this week. Described as a systemic storybook that blends mythology and surrealism, you form a party of four heroes who are descending in the underworld. You will build your party with unique professions and skills, and then make tactical narrative choices that will bring many consequences as you fight and scrape your way through the encounters. Much like Blades in the Dark, Thousand Hells looks like the odds will always be stacked against you, and the plan is to try and make the most of your unique situation to get through to the next interesting encounter.

This one came onto my radar via a Bluesky post from Citizen Sleeper creator Gareth Damian Martin, so if he signs off on it, I definitely think this will be good for narrative folks like myself.

Cosmic Fear

Developer: Alessandro Guzzo
Steam rating: Mostly Positive
Store link

Solo dev Alessandro Guzzo dropped Cosmic Fear this week, a first-person exploration game where you will face the Lovecraftian horrors that are behind a forgotten chapter of humanity’s past. In terms of gameplay, Cosmic Fear looks like you’ll be doing a lot of skulking around in the forest, uncovering puzzles to solve, and finding hidden statues that help unravel the tale. You’ll also be forced to face some horrific and deadly encounters, and will need to survive if you want to uncover the truth.

These type of games are pretty common these days on Steam, the old “explore-em-up with a spooky story in the background”, but Cosmic Fear comes from two well received prequels, The Land of Pain and The Alien Cube, so it seems like Guzzo has the sauce and people are here for it.

Shroom and Gloom (Early Access)

Developer: Team Lazerbeam
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store link

Would it be an Indie Dispatch without a Deckbuilder? This week it’s the very interesting Shroom and Gloom from Team Lazerbeam and the cool kids over at Devolver Digital. The spin on the genre here is that you are building an two decks - an explore deck and a combat deck. You use the explore deck to move your way through the dungeon, power up your cards, and find new weapons. You use the combat deck for, well, you guessed it, smacking baddies in the face.

While the two deck thing is not completely new - the very awesome Griftlands did this and everyone should go play the ultimate narrative Deckbuilder - but Shroom and Gloom does shake things up by throwing the entire game into First-Person. Oh, and it has a really rad art style, so that’s a boon too.

Acceptable Losses

Developer: Zann Archive
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store link

Acceptable Losses is a grim World War I command and management game. The first line in the Steam description sells the concept perfectly - You are not the hero. You are in charge. As an officer behind the front, you need to manage your squads, assign orders, and make sure that the business of war is being done while your soldiers are bleeding out in the trenches.

During the day you are assigning the missions and various other needs out to the front, and at night you are combing the incident reports to see how you did, and to prepare for it to happen all over again the next day. You need to survive twenty days. Easier said than done. A brutal concept, but one that I really think has some legs. I really want to check this one out.

Valheim

Developer: Iron Gate AB
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store link

After five years of Early Access, viking survival adventure Valheim has finally hit 1.0. If you have somehow missed this phenomenon, Valheim is a collaborative survival adventure game where you are thrown into a viking-inspired world, and are set on a journey to build and explore. Unlike most survival games at the time, Valheim featured a number of interesting boss encounters that needed to be overcome to progress and unlock exciting new areas. It basically paved the way for other survival greats like Enshrouded, and on top of having a dedicated fanbase, the mod community for Valheim has been hard at work bringing more to the fold.

Now is the perfect time to dive in for the first time, or perhaps return with a group of friends to explore the realms. I honestly haven’t touched the game since the first month of release when all my friends “no-lifed” it, and pulled way further ahead than I could ever hope to be. I might convince some of my other dad friends with limited time to do a concentrated one night a week kinda deal so I can finally explore it myself.

Blood Dungeon shows that Bullet Heaven can be active

I mentioned last week that I was deeply interested in Blood Dungeon, the latest game from the Nidhogg developers. I am not a fan of the Survivors-like / Bullet Heaven genre, and I really feel that is overdone at this point, with many games just trying to claw at a successful fad (and I don’t blame them in this economy). They just typically are not that interesting to me personally. Blood Dungeon is different however.

Blood Dungeon takes an oversaturated genre, blends in the weirdness that Messhof is known for, and delivers an actively challenging action platformer. Taking the good parts of Bullet Heaven build crafting and meshing it with the precsion platforming of a Spelunky, Blood Dungeon delivers the quintessential “just one more run” game of the year. I hope it gets the support it deserves, because it feels like it is ripe for expansions and updates to keep us running for a long while yet.

You can check out my full review over on Pixels for Breakfast.

Indie Dispatch and Pixels for Breakfast launched on Pckt!

After the Pixels for Breakfast YouTube was deleted with no warning, and we lost 11+ years of video essays and content, I have been looking for smaller places to host content, that also allow us to own what we make. Pckt is a new blog service that uses the AT Protocol, the same protocol that powers Bluesky. This means anyone who is reading Indie Dispatch or Pixels for Breakfast can log in with their Bluesky account (or any other AT Protocol account) and comment, subscribe, talk to us directly, and we as the creators own all of our content. If Pckt decides to close up shop, all out content comes with us and we can simply plug it in somewhere else. No worries about losing it all.

Pckt has been really great and open with me as I set this up last week. They have turned on early experiemental features just for us, like bulk-importing posts from our previous host, and turning on the newsletter subscription. So if you’re reading this on Substack (I know many of you do), please consider following us directly over on Pckt. It’s pretty great!

That’s a wrap!

Thanks so much for reading. If you like what you see, please share it with a friend. If you want to help support me to grab some indie games to get some reviews, please consider dropping some money in the [ko-fi cup](https://ko-fi.com/pixelsforbreakfast).

See you next week

Steve