| Hi everyone. I hope you had an excellent Thanksgiving! It's time for some Pepto-Bismol and a cornucopia of indie games, but first... This week's top gaming news: In the coming weeks, countless holiday shoppers will hunt for video games to buy for fickle teenagers and spouses. They'll inevitably wind up with some of the fall's biggest releases, like Call of Duty or Dragon Ball. But there are smaller games also worth your attention. You probably won't find these indie games at big-box retailers or on the front page of the PlayStation Store. Many of them were made by tiny teams with little to no marketing budgets. But you and your loved ones might still get a lot out of them, and they might make for the perfect gift for your gamer buddy who already has all the big new hits. Here are some of my favorite indies this year. Balatro Balatro is perhaps this year's most popular indie game, outselling many of its big-budget peers and even scoring a nomination for Game of the Year from the annual Game Awards show. The game looks like poker, dealing you random cards and asking you to assemble the best possible hand (from High Card to Royal Flush), but bears little resemblance to the actual card game. Instead, it's about manipulating your deck and scoring as many points as possible to beat a series of thresholds that go up exponentially each round. Cards called Jokers offer powerful effects that can synergize in unexpected ways, and finding the best combinations is the appeal. Just don't download the phone version of Balatro or you might inadvertently ghost everyone you know for a few weeks. Animal Well The chill vibes of Animal Well, a game made by one person, bely the deviousness of its mysteries. On the surface, it's a fun puzzle-platformer with some cool mechanics, like a yo-yo that you can swing around to knock out enemies or hit distant buttons. But once you start realizing how deep the game's puzzles actually go, you'll never look at video-game backgrounds the same way. Tactical Breach Wizards The visual of wizards in Kevlar armor is delightful enough on its own, but Tactical Breach Wizards also happens to be an incredible game. Part XCOM and part Into the Breach, the game gives you a squad of mages with assault rifles and tells you to go to town. Across a series of isometric, grid-based rooms, your heroes must take out enemies, hack turrets and breach security doors, using their wizard powers to conjure lightning bolts and knock mercenaries out of windows. Loco Motive If you ever enjoyed point-and-click adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, you'll get a kick out of Loco Motive, a murder mystery set on a train full of intricate puzzles and shady characters. Everything to love and hate about those old-school adventures is in here. On the one hand, there are delightful puzzles, whimsical humor and charming animations; on the other, it can be infuriating when the game expects you to make a logical leap that just isn't clicking. Fortunately, those moments are rare. The Rise of the Golden Idol This sequel to 2022's brilliant The Case of the Golden Idol is bigger and trickier than its predecessor. Created by two Latvian brothers, this brilliant series offers you a cavalcade of tableau scenes, usually following a murder, and asks you to deduce what happened. It's such a good test of your logical skills that it'd probably make a good replacement for the SATs. UFO 50 The concept of UFO 50 is bafflingly ambitious: you, the player, have discovered a forgotten console from the 1980s along with 50 retro games. Not mini-games — full-fledged experiences that are easy to imagine being sold on NES cartridges. Some are frustrating, some are captivating and the whole project is more than a little mind-boggling. The Operator Some games put you in sprawling, fantastical worlds. The Operator unfolds entirely on a computer desktop. Playing as a computer whiz at the fictional Federal Department of Intelligence, your job is to gather information for other agents by sorting through folders, combing instruction manuals and reviewing video footage for contradictions. The ending is a little weak, but the game is short, fascinating and worth playing. Secrets of Grindea This elaborate, top-down action-adventure game was 13 years in the making, and it shows. The skill tree alone is so intricate it can take hours to understand. Secrets of Grindea is designed to replicate the feeling of Super Nintendo games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Living up to nostalgia can be a tough task, but Secrets of Grindea pulls it off. The dungeons are satisfying, and it feels great to play. Isles of Sea and Sky There's a genre called "sokoban," named after a Japanese video game from the 1980s, in which you must solve puzzles by pushing objects around a screen. One of the most popular, Chip's Challenge, was a common sight on school computers in the 1990s. Isles of Sea and Sky adds a dash of The Legend of Zelda to the formula, allowing you to sail around a non-linear world and solve these block-pushing puzzles — some of which can get fiendishly tough — in whatever order you please. Duck Detective: The Secret Salami There are a lot of mystery games on this list, but only one of them lets you play as a divorced, bread-addicted, private detective duck who must interrogate suspects and hunt for clues in order to unravel the mystery of a stolen salami. | 
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