INDONESIA

Ellen wants to make players uncertain of every step they take in a dangerous mansion, playing as an eager detective looking to find the truth behind a years-old murder that left a lone survivor. Solve puzzles and keep your head on straight as your sanity is tested against some spooky sequences!

Your job, as a detective, is to solve the mystery of the Smiths' Murder, which killed everyone in the family except for a single survivor: the daughter. Could she have something to do with their death? Could you still save her from the monsters that lurk in the depths of the mansion? If you're good at your sleuthing, you'll be able to find clues throughout the halls through exploration, unveiling the truth of what happened that fateful day. You just have to live to tell the tale, and some presences don't aim to make that easy as players wander.

Fans of The Last Door may jump at Ellen with a single glance at the art style and themes. Ellen features a minimalistic pixel art style that can make some truly terrifying creatures come to life. To help drive the atmosphere, the game also places a heavy emphasis on music and sound, creating some truly bone-chilling effects that will leave the player nervously laughing while mentally reassuring themselves that "This isn't scary!".

You can try the demo of Ellen on Itch.io, GameJolt, or Newgrounds. You can also check out the official website, Twitter, and Facebook!

Beckett is a detective game about a missing persons investigator on the lookout for someone who's suffering from a "reality-altering illness". This will lead the detective, Beckett, into a world where reality is falling apart and life is consumed by the surreal, forcing players to grasp at meaning and imagination to fill in the gaps in this unsettling, yet compelling, journey.

Players will work through the narration of the game's storyline, forcing players to reconstruct events from the fragments, visions, and interactions they find within Beckett's world. As they do so, a story may emerge in their own minds, making them take part in the quagmire of reality that the game offers, leaving a part of themselves in the narrative along the way. It is the player's take on the meaning of events, shaped by their own lives mingling with that of the game itself, that shape it, after all, the two shifting as they move in tandem.

Beckett is designed to respond to how you interact with it, drawing the player into its absurdist nightmare, pulling them ever forward through their curiosity. It's an intriguing game that pulls the participant in through their curiosity, but what secrets and meanings will you find that are specific to you? As you play Beckett, what will it play back through your presence within it?

Beckett is available for $9.99 on Steam. For more information on the game and developer The Secret Experiment, you can head to the game's site, the developer's site, or follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Flazm's Train Valley 2 has you building a railway network in order to transport materials through picturesque landscapes. It looks like a quaint, casual game that might just evoke some childhood memories if trains are your thing. However, this little puzzle tycoon game can be quite challenging - if you want it to be.

You start off with your main station, which has certain demands that need to be met. "Bring us four units of wood and six units of cows!" And off you go, connecting your station to resource-producing buildings scattered all over the landscape with some fancy rails. Once you got a route set up, you can manually order your trains to and from these buildings.

If this sounds too easy, fret not: it gets complicated quite fast, with multiple production steps necessary before you can haul the goods back to your station. You'll need to extend your rail network and delegate your little trains - all of this without causing an accident.

Depending on how efficient you're trying to be, this is either a relaxing or a horribly stressful experience. You see, there's a scoring system attached to each level. If you want to earn the highest amount of stars, you need to play extremely efficient and execute your planning without any hiccups. Some of the target times are incredibly hard to achieve and require perfect planning and impeccable micromanagement.

Currently, this is purely intrinsic, without your progress being tied to performing well. Just finish a level and you can play the next one, no "you need X stars to advance." This makes Train Valley 2 incredibly accessible and at the same time offers a high challenge for players who strive for perfection.

The game just entered early access, so all of this might change quite a bit, but I'm hoping the way it handles difficulty stays just the way it is right now. There's also a level editor and more levels, trains, and other stuff planned for the near future.

You can purchase Train Valley 2 from Steam Early Access for $9.99. For more information, visit the game's website and follow developer Flazm on Twitter.

Are random facts from old cartoons and games embedded in your skull? Worried that this knowledge is now useless and you'll never help anyone with it? Fret not, for Majotori will let you flaunt your useless facts, using them to help characters attain their wishes by aiding them in trivia battles where you may need to remember Simba's mom's name.

Ava wants to be a princess. She WISHES it. You can help her with Majotori. You'll just have to recall detailed facts from video games, anime, cartoons and movies, as the game is riddled with trivia that may put even the most die-hard fans to shame. Should you know enough about each of these subjects, Ava just might get her wish. However, Ava's story progresses regardless of whether you get the questions right or wrong, going in a much darker direction should you not know enough niche game factoids.

With over twenty-five characters to help over more than fifty story scenarios, players will work through plenty of different narratives with their knowledge. So, get ready to test your trivia skills and grant some wishes (or see what happens when you fall short)!

You can find Majotori on Steam, Itch.io, Google Play, and the App Store. You can also check out the official website and Twitter!

Oedipus marrying his mother wasn't exactly a great move on his part, but Oedipus Dating Sim asks us if we could maybe change that for him and turn his life around. Trouble is, the only way around it is to romance one of six eligible bachelorettes when you don't know who they are, meaning players could just as easily end up marrying him to Jocasta (his mother) all over again. Although things are still possibly salvageable in that situation in this silly take on Greek tragedy.

In Oedpius Dating Sim, players gain the help from three fates and Dionysus, an Olympian god with a TV show, who will assist them in finding a date for Oedipus. There are six possibilities of match-ups, including the three fates themselves and Oedipus' mother, but the player is not told who they are speaking with, tasking them with figuring out who they're romancing before they accidentally stick Oedipus with his mother again. However, these characters shift around the Casino Hotel where the game takes place on each run at the game, and their choice of drink changes as well, making it a challenge to nail down who you're chatting up as a potential date.

Players are given fifteen in-game days to get a date lined up, choosing the right drinks, dialogues, and gifts to sway the six possible dates while also trying to figure out if a mother/son date is coming together. It's not a disaster if it does, though, as players can take steps to make this a less ruinous (but no less discomforting) relationship as they work towards the game's ten endings.

Oedipus Dating Sim is available for $2.99 on Steam. For more information on the game and Wholetone Games, you can head to the developer's site or follow them on YouTube and Twitter.

Congratulations, you're an idiot. Running from debt collectors, you snuck onto a spaceship and hid in the cryo pod of all things. And now it's two years later, the ship is floating through space and the crew is nowhere to be seen. Good job, space idiot.

Tardy is an adventure game about pushing buttons. It is very much in love with old computer devices - if it has knobs, you can probably find it in the game, and figuring out how the various terminals, levers, switches and other controls work is how you'll spend most of your time. Whoever designed this space ship you're trying to escape from had a weird sense of humor, putting all these old-school interfaces in there...

It's pretty satisfying to tinker about, and you even encounter a very good doggie to help you with some puzzles along the way. The game's story, on the other hand, is a bit of a letdown, mostly due to a lot of translation issues (the developer is from Belarus), but also because it doesn't always quite know if it wants to be funny or very serious. In the end, it doesn't quite manage to pull of either tone convincingly.

Nevertheless, its puzzles carry Tardy and make this short game worth a look for puzzle fiends and people who appreciate the feeling of pushing some good buttons (and patting a very good dog).

You can purchase Tardy from Steam for $6.99. For more information, visit the game's website and follow developer One Wing Cicada on Twitter.