Indies for the weekend

Bonnie’s Bakery

To kick off your weekend, how about a cute little game about baking?! And absolutely nothing else. There’s NOTHING else happening in Bonnie’s Bakery. ESPECIALLY not after the lunch rush when she has to go out and get new ingredients…

Bonnie’s Bakery will feel pretty familiar to you if you’ve played any cooking or restaurant management game. There are recipes to follow, ingredients to use, and hungry customers who need to be served. Treat your assortment of bears and other cuddly creature patrons with things like red velvet cake, donuts, and meat pies. Be careful though, because these animals don’t like to be kept waiting! If you take too long to serve them when things get hectic, they’ll just get up and leave. How rude!

The game has simple controls and a bright, cheery aesthetic that is wholesome and welcoming. Well, at least the first half does. Play through it to see what I mean, but I was pretty dumbfounded by what the game morphs into. Bonnie’s Bakery can be found at the link below, if you dare! It can be played within your browser, but the developers recommend you download it for a better experience.
Game Link

Gourdlets

When your blood pressure has come back down after playing Bonnie’s Bakery, maybe you’d like to REALLY relax. Like, no objectives, no timers, just vibes. That’s exactly what you’ll get from Gourdlets, a peaceful city-building sandbox game from developer/publisher AuntyGames.

In Gourdlets, you’re given a tiny piece of land with a train station attached to it. Then, with the array of tools, buildings, and accessories at your fingertips, you’ll expand that tiny island into a warm community, filled with as many houses, shrubs, and campfires as your heart desires. There’s a surprising depth of choice in this game considering it's free, and doubly so since you can wishlist it for its eventual release on Steam!

As a city-building sandbox game, your only real controls are camera movement, which is assigned to WASD, and camera zoom, which is assigned to the scroll wheel. Again, the game is very simple, but the art style is suitably cozy and the Gourdlets themselves are adorable. Just look at them play chess! Gourdlets is playable from your browser, but you can also download the demo from Steam. Don’t forget to wishlist it if you liked it!
Game Link

PicoHot

PICO. HOT. PICO. HOT.

If you’ve ever played SUPERHOT, then you know that immense feeling of hype and satisfaction when you finally nail a level that was testing your last nerve. Well, have you ever thought about playing a retro demake of SUPERHOT, with chunky pixelated graphics and accompanying crunchy sound effects?

Well, your time has come.

Developed by three members of the actual SUPERHOT development team, PICOHOT is a demake/homage to SUPERHOT created in Pico-8, an 8-bit game engine designed to bring back the 80s and the glory days of gaming

PICOHOT itself is pretty simple, and it plays exactly like SUPERHOT. Time moves when you move, and you move by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. The Z key grabs items, and the X key attacks, which seemed to work pretty well for me. The challenge gets progressively more intense as you progress, and even a seasoned SUPERHOT player like myself ran into some difficulty in later levels.

Anyways, it’s fun, it’s free, and it’s made by some people who played a part in the original game’s creation, so there’s not much that can go wrong with PICOHOT. It can be played in your browser, and there are several different versions available for download as well.

PICO. HOT. PICO. HOT.
Game Link