Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. Even though it's a truncated week in the US with the long holiday weekend, there's still been a spate of new releases and news on upcoming games. There'll be plenty more over the next couple of weeks too, with The Game Awards, Day of the Devs and several other showcases in the pipeline. 

In the spirit of the season, one thing I'm thankful for is indie studios being able to make the games they want despite external pressures. We've seen both extremes of that in recent months. This week, the team at Santa Ragione said it respects players enough to release its latest game, Horses, as intended. However, Valve has blocked the horror title from Steam in what seems to be quite a messy case. As a result of not being able to sell Horses on the biggest PC games storefront, Santa Ragione said it's at risk of closure.

On the other end of the scale, Team Cherry was able to take all the time in the world to make Hollow Knight: Silksong because of the success of its previous game, which has sold more than 15 million copies. Although Hollow Knight fans spent years clamoring for updates on Silksong, the small team had the financial freedom to spend as long as it wanted crafting and polishing the sequel. The devs were able to just keep their heads down and do that until Team Cherry announced a release date just two weeks in advance.

Those are two very different stories. Still, they both resulted in fully realized games based on seemingly uncompromised visions. 

New releases

A.I.L.A — from Pulsatrix Studios and publisher Fireshine Games — has a decent-enough concept. It's a first-person horror title in which you take on the role of a VR game tester. The games that the protagonist plays are crafted by an AI (which, by itself, is a horrifying prospect) and adjusted based on your feedback. In a stunning development, the AI begins to tap into your character's deepest fears and blur the virtual and real worlds. It sounds like a blurb for an airport novel, but it's a solid-enough foundation on which to base a game.

The structure of A.I.L.A allows for Pulsatrix to craft a few distinct experiences in various horror subgenres within a larger game. You'll encounter a cult, zombies, aliens, creepy mannequins, puzzles and more as you play through chapters rooted in the likes of psychological horror and survival horror. There are a lot of ideas packaged together here. I’ve played a chunk A.I.L.A and it’s okay so far, even if it does feel a bit like a tribute band playing the hits of yesteryear. A.I.L.A is out now on Steam (usually $30, but there's a 20 percent discount until December 9), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

If you can't get enough of fairly lengthy open-world action RPGs, Of Ash And Steel might be one for you to sink your teeth into. Fire & Frost and publisher tinyBuild claim there's over 45 hours worth of main story material to dig into here.

One interesting thing about Of Ash And Steel is that there are no quest markers. Exploration is a major factor and you can mark locations on your map. Otherwise, you'll need to pay attention to things like what other characters are saying to figure out where to go. Also, the trailer's final shot shows a pair of titans that seem ready to battle, and that has me intrigued too.

Of Ash And Steel typically costs $30. There's a 20 percent discount until December 8 on Steam and GOG.

Young Suns is the latest project from Ko_Op (Goodbye Volcano High). When the team announced the game this week, it immediately became available on all Game Pass tiers as a game preview on Xbox Series X/S, PC and Xbox Cloud. If you'd prefer to buy it outright, you can also do that for $20.

This is (appropriately enough) a co-op life sim for up to four players. The team readily admits that Young Suns is still in development and that means some features and quest content aren't available in the current version of the game. However, as game director Graeme Lennon wrote in an Xbox Wire post, "The game is playable and fun for its intended pattern of play: checking in for an hour or two daily, slowly building up your perfect ship-home and making new friends."

The game is set on Jupiter and you can explore space stations, planetoids and ruins. You can collect resources and other items to help upgrade your ship/home. There are 30 characters (more are on the way), and most have "over two months of unique daily chat content." Young Suns is also coming to Steam down the line.

Dinopunk: The Cacops Adventure is the first of two dinosaur games in this week's roundup. This one is an adorable-looking retro platformer from The Dude Games and publisher Meridiem. It's said to pay tribute to classic games like Wonder Boy, Alex Kidd and Contra. 

As an amphibian dinosaur, you can collect special items to upgrade your attacks. There are arcade-style minigames as well. My favorite thing from the trailer, though, is a boss called Gatling Saurus. Love it. Dinopunk: The Cacops Adventure is out now on Steam. It usually costs $8, but there's a 10 percent discount until December 1.

Upcoming 

Ferocious is a very different kind of dinosaur game. This one is a first-person shooter from OMYOG and tinyBuild in which you have a device that allows you to communicate with and control dinos. Sending a rampaging triceratops into combat or riding on the back of one looks pretty fun. You can even take charge of a T. rex.

The gist is that an evil corporation is out to change the world in its favor with the help of these prehistoric reptiles, and it's up to you to stop this cabal. Ferocious will hit Steam on December 4 for $25.

Engadget's UK bureau chief Mat Smith got to try out There Are No Ghosts at the Grand back at Gamescom, and now you can check it out too. Friday Sundae has released a demo for the odd-looking "spooky, cozy musical mystery" on Steam.

After you inherit a rundown hotel, you have 30 days to fix it up using talking power tools (such as a furniture cannon)... or else. At night, you'll have to fend off ghosts. Maybe the title of this game is a bit of a misdirect! 

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand seems a bit strange, but I'm on board with it. It’s coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S next year and it will be a day-one addition to Game Pass. It will hit other platforms later.

Indie studio Santa Ragione said it is at risk of shutting down as its latest project won't be available on Steam, which is by far the biggest storefront for PC games and a key point of sale for many developers. Horses, a first-person horror game that blends gameplay and live-action sequences, is about a college student who spends a summer working on a farm. However, the farm’s “horses” are actually naked human adults who are wearing horse masks. It’s clear from the trailer that this is a game for grownups.

The studio plans to release Horses on the Epic Games Store, GOG, Itch and the Humble Store on December 2. However, Valve's content review team blocked Horses from Steam.

"We reviewed the game back in 2023. At that time, the developer indicated with their release date in Steamworks that they planned to release a few months later. Based on content in the store page, we told the developer we would need to review the build itself. This happens sometimes if content on the store page causes concern that the game itself might not fall within our guidelines,” Valve told PC Gamer. “After our team played through the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines. A short while later the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed that extensively and communicated to the developer our final decision that we were not going to ship the game on Steam."

Santa Ragione wrote in an FAQ that it's "committed to producing challenging, adult storytelling. Horses uses grotesque, subversive imagery to confront power, faith, and violence. We reject subjective obscenity standards and believe this kind of moralizing censorship evokes a darker past in which vague notions of 'decency' were used to silence artists. Games are an artistic medium and lawful works for adults should remain accessible. We respect players enough to present the game as intended and to let adults choose what to play; lawful works should not be made unreachable by a monopolistic storefront’s opaque decisions."

This particular ban precedes the recent censorship of adult-oriented games at the behest of payment processors. Santa Ragione wanted to create a Steam store page for Horses back in 2023 to help build interest. The studio says Valve wanted to see a playable build of the game before it would approve a Coming Soon page. The game was nowhere close to being finished, so Santa Ragione scrambled to put together a playable version of the game with “tons of placeholders.”

According to an email from Valve that the developer shared, it banned Horses from the storefront over "content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor." Santa Ragione said Valve didn't provide more detailed reasons for rejecting the game. Valve noted that it wouldn't accept further submissions of Horses, "even with modifications."

The developer claimed that it spent the next two years trying to change Valve's mind, but the company repeatedly pointed it to Steam’s general guidelines and rejected its “requests for review and appeal." Santa Ragione does have a plausible theory as to why Valve blocked the game from Steam, however. The studio wrote in the FAQ that:

All characters in the game are clearly older than 20 years old, as communicated by their appearance and through dialogue and documents that you will encounter in the game. We think the ban may have been triggered during the initial Steam submission by an incomplete scene on day six, in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm.

The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the 'horses' are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one. What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag.

We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character.

As a result of the Steam ban, Santa Ragione claimed it will be “very difficult“ to recoup its investment on Horses, which it claims is “not pornographic”. It spent around $100,000 on the game’s development.

The studio initially put $50,000 of its own money into Horses after signing a deal with the game's creator, Andrea Lucco Borlera. It hoped to cover those costs with sales of its last game, Saturnalia, but that didn't perform nearly as well as the studio hoped. Horses was slated to be featured in a bundle, but that fell apart around the same time as Valve rejected the game. Santa Ragione said the Steam ban made it practically impossible for it to find an external publisher or partner, so it ultimately raised funds from friends in order to complete the game. As such, the studio claimed it is now "in a completely unsustainable financial situation unless the game somehow recoups its development costs."

Santa Ragione still plans to support Horses for at least another six months after release. It has set aside funds to cover the costs of fixing bugs and adding quality-of-life changes. But barring Horses finding success on non-Steam storefronts, that may be the studio’s last activity.

"I don't want to make a final decision before seeing how the game does on launch. But if things go the way that I expect them to go, then I think [studio's closure] is inevitable,” Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva told GamesIndustry.biz. "All the money we'll earn is gonna go to the author and to the people who have offered money to finish the project. So there will likely be no money left to make a new [game]... Unless a miracle happens and Horses does very well."