Remote work as a worm, colorful platformers and other new indie games worth checking out

Plus, shipbuilding, I Am Your Beast DLC and a cat trying to stop an AI office takeover.

Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. Along with a look at some of this week's news, we'll run through some new games you can play this weekend as well as others that are a bit further out.

It's been a busy week for Double Fine Productions, which recently left Microsoft to become independent again. The studio is running an already successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a game jam, with backers getting to vote on their favorite ideas. Four of the 26 pitches will go into further development and become playable prototypes. After another round of voting, one will become a full, small-scale game.

2 Player Productions (the team behind Double Fine PsychOdyssey and other terrific documentaries) will film the process and the studio is streaming the project on Twitch to give folks an insight into development. The Kickstarter has a hell of a stretch goal too. In the unlikely event that Double Fine raises $100 million, it has promised to make Brütal Legend 2 . In addition, the studio brought its previous Xbox exclusive Keeper to PS5 and dropped the price of its most recent game, Kiln , to $8.

Elsewhere, Aggro Crab is following in the footsteps of Innersloth by using much of the money it brought in from Peak to fund and publish other developers' games . It wants to help bring "intense, stylized games with an attitude" to market without being tied to any specific genres. As if I didn't like Aggro Crab enough already, developers that use generative AI slop need not apply. "I'm serious. We'll get your ass," it said.

Aggro Crab, which is only signing a couple of games per year to make sure its publishing label remains sustainable, is not demanding to recoup its entire investment from each project before developers start earning anything. "We see a lot of publishers that insist on making their money back before the developers start seeing a cent, and that just doesn't make sense to us," it said. "Revenue needs to be flowing back towards the developers so they can continue to support themselves and the games after launch."

One title that Aggro Crab has signed is Rebounder , a precision platformer from ThirtyThree. I remember seeing a trailer for this last year and digging the hand-crafted comic book art direction — I even added it to my wishlist at the time. So, I'm glad the studio is getting extra support to see this through. Aggro Crab is also the publisher of Subway Midnight , a trippy horror game that came out a few years ago.

For our last news item before we dig into the games, Eric Barrone took some time away from his many commitments (including the much anticipated Stardew Valley 1.7 patch) to give fans an update on Haunted Chocolatier . Although he didn't offer an indication of when his next game — which he announced in 2021 — will be ready, Barrone wrote that he's still making progress and it's the project he's "most eager and driven" to work on.