It’s a lovely day in the library, and you are a horrible goose. Wait… something about that doesn’t seem quite right. Ah! It’s the redundancy of ‘horrible goose’ that’s bothering me. Goose alone would get the point across just fine. For anyone wondering what I’m on about, way back in the before-times of 2019, Aussie indie game developer, House House, released a silly little game about a goose. A goose that terrorizes a small English village with slapstick antics, copious honking, and, occasionally, a butter knife. The butter knife image (and the game in general) went on to become a bit of an internet sensation, so you’ve probably seen that goose on the left before. Likely combined with the ‘peace was never an option‘ meme. If you haven’t played the game, it’s a simplistic puzzler with a great premise and a soundtrack that reacts to your antics in real-time, using piano music —specifically, rearranged versions of Debussy’s Preludes. Here’s a trailer to hear it in action. We’ve got the Switch and PlayStation 4 versions on our shelves.
But wait, if that was the first paragraph, what’s this blog post actually about? Make your guess, then click ‘Read More’ below to find out.
If you guessed horrible goose teeth1, that means you know my warped sense of humour by now, but sadly(?), you’re incorrect. We don’t have many options for goose-related items in our catalogue, so I can’t make a whole post out of it. What we do have, though, are lots of indie games. For those of you who don’t play video games, don’t run off just yet – there are some non-games on the list, including something that could fit into one of my nerdy cookbook posts. So what makes a game an independent game? There’s no definitive answer to that, sadly. Dave the Diver received a nomination for Best Indie Game at the Game Awards 2023, but the dev studio, Mintrocket, has all but said, “We’re not indie.” On the other hand, No Man’s Sky by Hello Games, which sells for the standard retail price of a AAA game, is considered an indie game by its devs because they’re a small team and they took creative freedoms that they wouldn’t have had if working with a AAA budget. You can read more in the Wikipedia link, or jump down the Reddit rabbit hole if you wish, but this is one of those posts where I’ll have to define what I’m talking about for myself if we’re going to move forward.
So what’s an indie game for this post? It’s a game not funded by a large publisher, and there’s a consensus that the studio behind it is an indie one. A single-person dev team is also an automatic pass, unless that single person’s game was funded by a large studio. I don’t think that’s a thing that’s ever happened, though. Additionally, we need to have a copy of it on our shelves. There are many more indie games out there than those that receive physical releases, and I want you to be able to play what I’m talking about by borrowing it with your library card. Enough stalling, on with the games!
Do you like farming? If you do, and you know about gaming, you know exactly where I’m going with this one. Stardew Valley by Eric “CondernedApe” Barone has become something of a phenomenon in the gaming world. The game’s popularity is aided by ConcernedApe’s ongoing updates, with the most recent patch released in December 2024. Considering the game came out in 2016, that’s an incredibly long time for ConcernedApe to be supporting his game. Is this support delaying his new project, Haunted Chocolatier? Probably, but considering the number of people still playing Stardew Valley, I don’t think there’s a lot of concern about that. So, what is Stardew Valley? You start the game by inheriting a run-down farm from your grandpa in the titular Stardew Valley. You slowly bring it back to working condition as you make friends with and/or romance the inhabitants of nearby Pelican Town, and help to build up the town itself. The game draws heavy inspiration from the Story of Seasons (also known as Harvest Moon) series of games, but is also very much its own beast. And since cooking is something you can do in the game, and gamers love taking their obsessions into the real world, The Official Stardew Valley Cookbook exists. I haven’t cooked anything from this, but it’s on my list. Even though I’ve only played a few hours of the game it’s based on, I’m still interested.
Let’s move away from a laid-back farming sim and get those thumbs moving to the rhythm with a series that caught the attention of a big publisher, who greenlit a tiny studio to use one of the biggest names in gaming. Meet Crypt of the NecroDancer by Brace Yourself Games. A procedurally generated dungeon crawler where you have to move on the beats of the music to accomplish anything. The original game released to generally favourable reviews, and when it came time for the devs to port it to the Nintendo Switch, they had an idea: a Legend of Zelda DLC pack. LoZ has a strong tie to musical themes, but Nintendo isn’t usually a company that lets small studios take on their big names. So, imagine the Brace Yourself team’s surprise when, instead of simply creating some extra DLC for their existing game, they got the green light to develop a whole new game, a Zelda game. Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda is a mouthful of a title, but it blends the gameplay and a character of Crypt with the looks, music, and gameplay of the isometric Zelda games. And it worked. If this one flew under your radar, I highly recommend checking it out.
So, we’ve covered being a menace to a small town, farming and forming relationships at your own pace, and dancing to the beat – what’s next? A game I, and many other people, have sunk entirely too many hours into: Slay the Spire. As with Stardew Valley, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this one, it’s been around since 2017, and it’s one that sparked a whole slew of imitators in the roguelight deck-builder2 space and is still one I’ll boot up on my Switch from time to time because it’s just an incredibly satisfying gameplay loop and I also adore deckbuilding mechanics in games. To give this one more of an intro: you pick your character, get a boost from a whale with too many eyes, and start climbing a tower filled with denizens both helpful and harmful, mostly harmful, refining your deck full of attacks and actions along the way, to get to the top to, well, slay the spire. Then you do it all over again because every run turns out different. A full clear can take anywhere from about 45 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the difficulty and how much analysis you put into every little action, but that analysis is part of the fun of the game, so it’s not a bad thing.
Before I conclude, I mentioned earlier that there would be some non-gaming items in here, and I’ve included a cookbook and linked to some board game resources. However, I’m going to bring us back to where we started: a small English village with an ornery anatidae. Sumayyah has mentioned Hot Fuzz before, but given where we started with Untitled Goose Game and the fact that there’s crossover art, I think it deserves a mention. It’s a swan causing havoc in the movie, but there are enough similarities that people wonder if the film inspired the game. Of course, the movie follows the human characters, and the swan is just a thing that happens in it, as opposed to the game about the glorious antics of a mayhem-loving goose.
There are a lot more great indie games on our shelves. But I only have so much space in the blog to talk about them, and I’ve already gone on for too long.
For those of you who have read this far, I’d like to say thanks for reading my posts over the years. I know my interests may not always align with those of our readers, so I hope I’ve introduced you to something new. This is my final post as a regular contributor to Hot Off the Shelf. I’ll still be around, just not as frequently, and my posts will be a little different from here on out. So, once more, thank you.
- Click at your own risk. If you have already clicked, sorry for the nightmares. Also, they’re not really teeth; they’re called tomia, but just look at them and tell me they don’t resemble teeth. Or don’t look at them. That’s wiser. ↩︎
- If you’re not a gamer, here’s a quick breakdown of the impenetrable terms: Roguelight: a game where if you lose, you start right back at the beginning from (almost) nothing, but there are some things you can unlock to make future runs easier. Deck-Builder: A game where you’re building a deck of cards as you play, and that deck gets continuously reshuffled and used as your pool of actions. ↩︎