Last week I was at Develop:Brighton, the biggest UK-based gaming conference and a haven for indie developers on this side of the pond. It’s a great place to get eyes on an upcoming project as most of the expo visitors are professionals in the gaming sector and video game press, like myself. Across this article and the previous, I played 10 games that were chosen to appear at Develop:Brighton’s Indie Showcase 2025 and the Brilliant Indie Treasures side-event and below are my thoughts.

In this set of indie game previews, I talk about a few titles with a retro spin, whether they be harkening back to gaming of old or quite literally made for hardware from the gaming of old!

Nanuka: Secret of the Shattering Moon

Developer: OutOfTheBit Ltd

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2810190/Nanuka_Secret_of_the_Shattering_Moon/

An exciting action-platformer inspired by the style of 90s animation. Fight your way through a handcrafted, pixel art world, recruit allies to power up your gameplay and enjoy cool combat moves in a thrilling adventure packed with action and charm.

Nanuka: Secret of the Shattering Moon is definitely my game of the show. A 2D action platformer that has simple fighting game style combat with Shovel Knight-esque level design and impressively animated pixel art. The game is adorable, cool and overall just a ton of fun to play. It also presented me with one of the best demos I’ve ever played at an event like this. A perfectly curated expo of what the game has to offer, introducing its various mechanics and set-piece to give just a tease of the full package with zero downtime. It was very efficiently done.

If there’s one thing I can criticise about Nanuka, it’s that movement is a tad stiff. It’s a personal preference for me as I do like my high-speed platformers like Donkey Kong Country, and this has more of a Mega Man, pre-skid feel to it but the game is designed with this in mind and makes up for it with other movement mechanics like wall-jumping. 

The game’s combat is a real highlight, with different enemy types that require some forethought to defeat, and boss encounters that range from one on one battles, Robot Master style, and huge Cuphead-esque mega bosses (which are also incredibly animated). It’s like the developer looked at every popular 2D platformer of the last 40 years and said ‘yeah, I’ll do that too’. 

Nanuka was a blast to play and fans of 2D platformers should really keep an eye out for this one. It felt great to play, it was fun to just watch the animations and the challenge felt right, testing a player’s understanding of the game’s mechanics in a way that is satisfying. 

UrbX Warriors

Developers: Tony Warriner & Stoo Cambridge

Itch.io page: https://ufospares.itch.io/urbx-warriors

Urban explorers, Alejandro and Ramona discover what they believe to be an as yet unexplored Mayan temple, deep within the rain forest. However, to their shock, they quickly discover that they are not alone and find themselves dragged down into the temple’s deepest dungeons.

Can they evade demons, zombies and robber gangs then solve the temple’s traps and puzzles to become the first to ever escape with their lives?

The last few years has seen an increase in games being made for out-of-print hardware, like the NES and Game Boy. It’s certainly niche but it has its dedicated fans who enjoy retro games and are excited to get new entries from developers who have had decades to come to grips with that platform. Of all these retro consoles, the ZX Spectrum is one that I am very unfamiliar with and in the last decade it made an under-the-radar return with the Spectrum Next. And here, we have a game designed specifically for it in UrbX Warriors.

Made by industry veteran duo Tony Warriner (Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword) and Stoo Cambridge (Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder), UrbX Warriors is an arcade-like top-down shooter where the player explores a mayan ruin, looking for treasure to increase their score and making it through a progressive more difficult series of rooms – some even containing secret exits and hidden objectives. 

The game is fun in a very arcade-like way. It reminded me a lot of Zombies Ate My Neighbours but with a focus on collecting treasure and not people. It also requires a good sense of spacial awareness and key observation of environmental details, as it’s possible to trap yourself by blocking off paths but also discover hidden paths to even more points. 

With the ability to find new weapons and an ever increasing amount of enemy variety there is a lot to spice up a run here. I’ve been told that it’s not just arcade-like, further into the game we could expect it to open up and become more adventure and narrative focused which is exciting. From what I played now though, it’s a cool arcade game with great pixel art that I could see myself trying over and over again to optimise my path through. It’s available on Itch.io now and can be played on PC, Evercade and , of course, the Spectrum NEXT.

G-ASTRO

Developer: ConnorRMCG

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3602060/GASTRO/

Play as a hyperintelligent, intergalactic, space Snail on a mission across the universe. Discover wildlife and plantlife to determine whether this world is habitable for snail-kind.

A recently released game where you play as a snail. A snail that can go really fast! This cozy, exploration-focused adventure game asks the player to travel a dream-like planet and scan its fauna, animals and minerals. The latter can be used to craft upgrades and new abilities for the snail to help with exploration, and presents the player with the freedom to just go in a direction as fast as possible.

Playing this game, I found myself asking ‘is it possible to go too fast?” The speed aspect is definitely the funnest part of G-ASTRO. Just zooming across the different biomes like the mollusc equivalent of Sonic the Hedgehog is great. But for a game that then asks the player to stop and smell the roses, it feels rather counter-intuitive to its design. The camera struggles to keep up with the player as well, resulting in it being rather difficult to see where to go. More than once I somehow found myself going back on myself as the environments blurred past me and I went up ramps the game didn’t want me going up. It was a bit of a mess.

Which is a shame, because the vibes of this game are great. It has a retro sci-fi feel to its environment and UI design, and the creatures of its world are bizarre in a very alien way. It’s just all a bit unruly and with the ability to increase your speed, the game’s core mechanics feel rather at odds with its world and objective design.

Dream Surge

Itch.io: https://husyada.itch.io/dream-surge

Similar to Calcium Crusaders 64, I really debated even covering this one as there really is nothing here in this demo. You play as the grey equivalent of the Original Starwalker, just walking through a forest until you fall off a cliff. I was told this isn’t actually what the game is like, instead it’s actually an action platformer and the Original Squarewalker here is actually just a generic mob enemy. There is an unfinished build of the July demo on Itch.io now which has a bit more in it, but it’s very debug feeling at the moment.

But I decided to write about it anyway because, similar to UrbX Warriors, this is another new game for an old console. This time around we have a new Game Boy Advance game in development and I just think that’s really neat. I was told an actual, more representative demo, will be coming out soon so if I catch it then I’ll give this article a quick update. For now though, I’m going to keep an eye on the game just because I really like platformers and the Game Boy Advance, so this could be a win-win for me.

Galatico

Developer: Galatico Studios

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3308220/Galatico/

Fight your way through the mega-corporation Galatico, the gatekeepers of the universe’s most powerful transportation devices. Destroy their infrastructure and blast your way to the top in this boomer shooter inspired FPS.

The Boomer Shooter is one of those genres that has just bounced back into popularity across the indie scene in the last decade of gaming. Galactico is a new entry into this pantheon that captures the gameplay feel of games like Quake with the level design and physics based puzzles of Portal. 

What makes Galactico stand out, and what impressed me, was its use of portals to traverse its labyrinthian levels and find the path forward. There are some rooms that feel almost one-to-one with Valve’s puzzle game, but with the inability to make portals yourself these feel less like puzzles and more like a cool-looking way to navigate the games world. We’ll see if this remains the same throughout the whole game or not, as you can get a variety of weapons and sub-weapons as expected of a game like this and portal gun could be one of them. Maybe.

Even if it doesn’t happen, as a boomer shooter this one is fun, if not a bit easy. Each level has secrets and hidden objectives that award the player with upgrade kits, used to increase the players health, armour and ammo. But even without those upgrades, I never really found myself in any danger. You get a knife early on and it actually one-shots most enemies – a single stab and they explode into comically large chunks of blood. Some tougher enemies appear later on but a quick grenade to the face sorts them out and so I never found myself on the back foot. Of course, I only played the first third of the first level, in which there are nine in total, so the difficulty might increase to the point where it really starts to feel like the hectic bloodbath of guts and gore the genre is known to embrace.

For now though, what I played was fun. It’s not the most visually striking of boomer shooters, for sure, but it feels nice to play and the portal mechanic is a neat mechanic for this genre that has the potential to provide some memorable moments. It begs to be seen if the game can capitalise on this promise or not.