Party with wizards and get stuck in a Medusa timeloop in Indiepocalypse's latest anthology of unusual games

(Image credit: Maisie and Alex)

For five years the indie designer known as Pizza Pranks has been publishing Indiepocalypse, a monthly "bundle-zine" of 10 experimental indie games by different developers. They're always a bit off-kilter, and they come with a helpful pdf zine where the creators of each one do a postmortem on their inspirations. It's also full of handy links to other places you'll find niche games, like the interactive fiction zine ChoiceBeat.

The latest issue of Indiepocalypse is #63, and as always it's a zip file full of surprises. Among them is Wizard Party, a point-and-click adventure where you navigate a house party where ideas manifest as interactable objects once they're mentioned in conversation, which you can then use to solve puzzles.

There's also Sarpedon, a first-person Groundhoglike where you wash up on an island full of Greek mythology with only the instructions SLAY THE BEAST and RETURN WITH HER HEAD. Should you die on this perilous quest, you awaken on the beach to try again. And again.

These strange delights and eight others make up the contents of Indiepocalypse #63. All the creators are paid for their inclusion, and earn royalties on subsequent sales. Which is nice. You can find the complete back catalogue of Indiepocalypse at itch.io and with 62 back issues to work through, the odds of finding something you like are pretty decent.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.