Indies for the weekend

Average Day Cat Cafe

How about starting your weekend off with a cute and cozy cafe simulator?! That’s exactly what Average Day Cat Cafe is, or at least that’s what it starts out as. Use a simple control scheme to master a menu that consists of both simple and complex drinks to serve your animal customers! Things can get hectic when a customer requests a new drink, but the menu is always available for reference.

Everything is fuzzy and adorable until the… night visitors begin to show up. As you complete each day/night cycle at the cat cafe, you will have to serve increasingly sinister customers, from a knife-wielding cat robber, to a butt ghost that needs toilet paper, a mysterious shadow figure with glowing red eyes, and more! The shadow beings in particular will speak a language unknown to you, but the menu also has a trusty translator for those symbols floating over their heads. Most of the time, they just want a nasty drink. Yes, the grossest thing you can give them. Average Day Cat Cafe can be downloaded or played right in your browser, and it’s a great way to kill fifteen to twenty minutes of your time. Maybe even more if you want to really get those drinks down. I’m a sucker for a cozy aesthetic turned sinister, and I think others who enjoy that will find a lot to love about Average Day Cat Cafe.

Average Day Cat Cafe can be downloaded or played right in your browser, and it’s a great way to kill fifteen to twenty minutes of your time. Maybe even more if you want to really get those drinks down. I’m a sucker for a cozy aesthetic turned sinister, and I think others who enjoy that will find a lot to love about Average Day Cat Cafe.
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SokoChess White

SokoChess White is the sequel to Daisy Game’s innovative SokoChess puzzle game released in August of last year. As its title suggests, SokoChess is a game series that aims to unite the staple mechanics of Chess with the traditional Sokoban formula of pushing objects to their corresponding locations. SokoChess White aims to expand upon this peculiar genre combination by introducing not only 70 brand-new levels but also unique mechanics and systems. Examples of such additions include: freezing tiles that will trap your pieces, bombs that will destroy them, pressure plate-powered gates, and the quintessential pillar of any Sokoban game, boxes! The game also brings back smart mechanics that were fundamental to the original title such as crack tiles that will collapse after two moves, upgrade tiles that will turn your pawns into queens, or the lock and key system. But most importantly, SokoChess White removes one of its predecessor’s most prevalent design elements: enemy pieces (which explains the name White as the game only contains white pieces).

The system of enemy pieces was the aspect that I was most critical about in my review of the original SokoChess as I believed it was an addition that felt contrived and ultimately made the overall experience feel much more clunky and counterintuitive than it could have been. With the addition of innovative new mechanics, the removal of the enemy pieces system, the clever level design, and the major UI improvements, SokoChess White feels, not only fresh but also smoother and more focused than its predecessor. If you are there therefore on the lookout for a challenging and well-thought-out puzzle experience, then this game is absolutely worth a try.
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Uproot

We’re going to stick to our cute theme this week for our final indie. It’s called Uproot, and it stars an adorable little onion on a journey to see sunlight and meet up with its friend. Uproot is presented with an endearing 16-bit aesthetic, and features some pretty engaging and creative puzzles. Our onion hero is controlled with WASD for movement and the spacebar to jump, and you click and drag on roots to form paths and lifts to advance forward. These roots have a set number of blocks they can extend, which requires some thought and strategy as you progress.

Uproot is notable for being created entirely from scratch for Global Game Jam 2023. The three-person team behind the game should definitely be proud of their work, I had a great time playing Uproot. Whether you love retro graphics, puzzles, onions, or all of those things, you’ll probably like Uproot as well! It can be played within your web browser or downloaded, just like our previous entries this week.
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