In the tradition of indie classics such as Limbo and Inside, comes a new action adventure starring a cartoon octopus caught up in an alien invasion.

We don’t actually play that many video games that are truly awful, since there’s usually nothing of note about them to make a review worthwhile. There’re occasional exceptions, like the mind-bogglingly terrible Code Violet and the baffling MindsEye, but most of the worst games are just worthless slop of the sort Sony is currently trying to clear out from the PlayStation Store.

The majority of video games aren’t unusually good or bad, they’re somewhere in the middle. And so it can be difficult to know which are worthy of further investigation, given there are dozens of new indie games released every week, even at quiet times of the year.

We’re not familiar with French developer ZDT Studio, since this seems to be their debut game, but since the graphics for Darwin’s Paradox looked good, the publisher is Konami, and octopuses are cool we decided to give it a go. In the end we wish we hadn’t, not because it’s terrible but because it’s so deeply average.

Maybe average isn’t entirely fair. The graphics are really good for an indie game and on paper your octopus powers are all very neat, including the ability to camouflage yourself; shoot out ink to cover your escape; and walk along any surface, including the ceiling, like a spider (which we’re pretty sure octopuses can’t do, but whatever).

Darwin’s Paradox is, rather randomly, named after Charles Darwin’s discovery that tropical seas don’t seem to contain enough nutrients to sustain coral reefs, despite the fact they’re teeming with life. That has nothing to do with the game, other than the octopus you control is called Darwin, whose friend is captured by secret aliens running a food processing company and planning to invade Earth.

What this translates to in gameplay terms is a 2D platformer influenced by the likes of Limbo and Inside, but swapping melancholic mystery for cartoon silliness. Darwin spends a surprising amount of time on dry land but whether he’s hiding from guards or trying not to get eaten by a moray eel everything works in the same general way.

His camouflage ability is basically a cloak of invisibility and as long as you activate it in time you become completely invisible to enemies. Although it does take a while to complete, so you spend a lot of time slowly inching your way across the screen, spending more time going into camouflage than moving or hiding.

Spraying ink is only good for masking your movement underwater but the gob of liquid you shoot out can be aimed quite precisely and so ends up getting used to activate switches and machinery when you’re on land. Although you don’t have any offensive abilities at all.

The climbing on any surface gimmick is used a surprising amount and while it seems quite clever at first it’s fiddly and inconsistent. Not enough to be a total wash but certainly enough to irritate, with sticky and slow movement that makes you constantly wish you could just get back in the water, where you’re much more mobile. The worst thing, though, is the game is filled with trial and error traps that often cannot be foreseen.

The checkpointing is generous enough that you don’t usually have to repeat too much but it’s still frustrating getting caught out by something you couldn’t have anticipated, especially as it happens so often. Even without this, the puzzles just aren’t interesting enough to engage you, as the solution is usually instantly obvious but pushing items where you want them or getting a pixel perfect jump just right is frequently more difficult than it should be.

As the scope of indie gaming begins to grow wider, from tiny games made by a single person to those whose scale begins to rival low-end games from traditional publishers, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to judge how fair their price tags are.

Darwin’s Paradox is relatively expensive and it’s only around six hours long and yet you can see where all the money went, as the cartoonish visuals are excellent and mixed in with almost photorealistic backdrops. That said, it’s never actually funny, no matter how often Darwin’s googly eyes try to emote as he’s being pecked to death by birds or squished by alien machinery.

Despite its attempts to provoke a reaction we found it impossible to hold any strong feelings about Darwin’s Paradox. It’s competently made, very pretty, and almost completely uninteresting. The dull and long-winded puzzles are the biggest problem and give the impression that the whole game was designed around the visuals, with everything seemingly having been worked back from there.

That’s never been a good way to make a video game and while this is an acceptable enough way to waste away a rainy Sunday afternoon, that’s about as positive as we can be about it.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Konami
Developer: ZDT Studio
Release Date: 2nd April 2026
Age Rating: 7

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After Square Enix prevented the game from being reviewed before launch, a passionate fan of Life Is Strange gives her opinion of what may be the last entry in the series.

It’s a strange cosmic space to occupy, being both a Pricefielder, who sacrificed Arcadia Bay in the first game to stay with Chloe and a gamer largely unsatisfied with the frictionless writing of Reunion, the game expected to be the death knell of the franchise for Square Enix and developer Deck Nine.

After the critical flop of Double Exposure, insider gossip suggests that Deck Nine shifted their plans for Reunion. So perhaps we will never truly know how much of Chloe’s return was planned and why Square Enix previously took such a hard line approach to shutting down fan criticism of her absence in Double Exposure.

What the rumours also suggest is that many of Deck Nine’s developers were laid off as the project wrapped up. The combination of a short development schedule (Double Exposure was only 2024), reduced staff, and a possible story pivot has led to a game that would have perhaps been better suited as an apology DLC, à la Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC.

The studio (and/or Square Enix) has made the decision that this curtain call should be a love letter to Max and Chloe – the heroines and potential lovers from the original game – while hoping that nostalgia will make up for the disappointments of Double Exposure. Chloe’s return is certainly a welcome change from the Avengers style team-up that the ending of Double Exposure seemed to be hinting at. Although retconning the ending of Double Exposure as Max’s ‘Storm Amnesia’ is a bad way of doing it.

If you’ve ever been in a lesbian situationship, you will be familiar with elongated conversations about each other’s feelings and extended, longing handholding. Rest assured, the title delivers firmly on this premise. There’re also some fun Easter eggs available via Max’s time-rewinding superpower, which makes for a fun touch of extra detail.

The game shines when you get to play as Chloe, who is as outspoken as ever, but now with a decade of extra lived experiences, leading to some funny interactions with pre-established characters in the town of Lakeview.

However, Deck Nine’s attempt to fix the damage caused by Double Exposure unfortunately doesn’t change the fact that the game is still its sequel, so it continues to struggle with many of the same problems.

An average playthrough takes around nine hours and is missing the chapter structure Life is Strange fans will be accustomed to. The reduction in scope plays out across the limited mechanics, with very few proper quick time events, let alone any action sequences that aren’t pre-rendered cinematics. I established very early on that you could walk away from the controller without fear of messing up a quick time event or interrupting the flow of a scene.

Chloe’s much advertised backtalk feature, where she’s able to bamboozle antagonists and talk her way out of trouble, appears a mere three times and is a shadow of what could have been. It’s lovely to return to Max’s rewind powers, even if their use is a little limited in places, but it does lead to some narrative inconsistencies.

Locations in-game are incredibly limited and are mostly sections of locations already seen in Double Exposure. There’s a lot of those moments throughout the game, where we are given an off-screen hint at things that would have been really cool to see play out on a grander scale.

The game does shine when it is allowed to do things without reference to Double Exposure. The Abraxus house section is certainly the most well-designed section of the game, feeling like a return to form for the franchise. The game is at its darkest here, and the split perspective between Max and Chloe works well, despite the continued issue of a lack of player agency.

Reuniting Chloe and Max is the game’s saving grace. However, I can only wonder whether any of this was even necessary. In my playthrough of the original game I left Chloe and Max racing off into the sunset together – having to piece back together their lives in the fallout of Max’s decision, rightly or wrongly, to sacrifice the Bay.

Unfortunately, having also played the version where Chloe died in the school bathroom, I can say that the story here is weak – Max’s reactions are noticeably reduced to the bare minimum that can be reused across both timelines.

The game’s retconning of the core ideas and lessons of the original is its biggest crime. In Life is Strange, regardless of your final choice, we learn, alongside Max, that even superpowers cannot fix everything. Grappling with the topic of evil and moral choices is what made it so compelling, leading to the continued debate between Arcadia Bay-ers and Ba-ers over the last 10 years of fandom.

But now there is no debate, because Max can have her cake and eat it.

Reunion’s writing establishes a universe where anything is theoretically possible. Could Max simply jump into a childhood photo and save Rachel? The consequences of her time travel and the butterfly effect seems to have been solved and sidelined in Reunion. The way to prevent the collapse of the space/time continuum is to merely think it away.

The merging of timelines creates a paradox, so that Chloe and Safi both simultaneously exist and don’t exist. It’s established that merely thinking about this causes the two to be transported into the Overlight – a dream place where they blink out of existence for a few seconds. The fact that this is solved by the power of ‘not thinking about it’ may feel a little unsatisfying.

Meanwhile, Safi is reduced to a strange pantomime villain role, no longer on her mission to find other people with superpowers, but popping up periodically to confuse Max. Her pressing concern is that she believes herself to be half-dead, revelling in the nihilism of her semi-existence and attempting to bring down Chloe with her. Unfortunately, I found myself agreeing with her at many points in the game.

I’m not sure if it was a deliberate message by an upset developer, or divine intervention, but Safi is the character that sums it all up, late on in the game, lamenting that ‘All of us have the seeds of our deaths planted inside of us. But I’m trying not to focus on mine while I still have a life left to live.’

Unfortunately for the Life Is Strange franchise, the seeds of its death were sown long, before this final entry, and this attempted quick fix, to get things back on track, isn’t nearly good enough to achieve that goal.

Whilst ultimately an underdeveloped entry, it does make for a loving send off for Max Caulfield. Unfortunately, being another weak entry, it may also play that role for the franchise itself.

Score: 5/10

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £44.99
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Deck Nine
Release Date: 26th March 2026
Age Rating: 16

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A new indie puzzle game from the creator of ElecHead is one of the best releases of the year – and also one of the cheapest.

We are glad that Nintendo tries to highlight new indie titles, in their semi-regular Indie World showcases, but their irregular schedule and short running time means they can only cover a tiny fraction of all the games that are released. Add in the strange obsession with shadow drops – which means there’s often no way to review many of the titles until long after they’re out – and we’re not sure how much many of the games really gain from the exposure.

Öoo wasn’t in the most recent Indie World for the UK and we had no idea it even existed until a reader pointed out it has been in the Japanese version of the showcase. Given it has only two reviews on Metacritic, we’re clearly not the only ones. Why it wasn’t featured in the Western version we don’t know, but it’s unclear whether the companies have to pay to be included in the shows.

The game is primarily the work of just a single person, with Japanese indie creator Nama Takahashi having previously made 2021’s ElecHead. That’s also a game that escaped our attention the first time round, but now that we’ve become aware of Öoo we can confidently say it’s one of the best games of 2026.

We’re not sure how you’re meant to pronounce the game’s name, which is actually a pictograph of the caterpillar creature you play as, with the umlaut taking the role of his little antenna. That’s all very clever but as we’ve said many times before, indie games where there’s any confusion over how you say or spell their name are not a good idea and it’s infuriating how many times developers keep doing it.

To add insult to injury there is already a game called oOo: Ascension, which came out in 2018 and is also on the eShop. We’ve no idea what it is, but it doesn’t seem to involve exploding caterpillars.

There is no real story to explain what’s going on but the idea is that each segment of the caterpillar is made out of a bomb, which can ejected and exploded at will – assuming you’re on the ground at the time. If you’re within the blast radius you won’t be killed but will instead be launched forward, essentially allowing you to jump; what direction you move in depends on what side of the bomb you were sitting on when it went off.

At first you can only use one bomb at a time, but when you gain the ability to use two at once the puzzles get exponentially more complicated and interesting. Bombs can, in classic Zelda style, also be used to destroy walls and set off switches, and so you learn to not only launch yourself but also the other bomb, in order to get it where it needs to be.

That makes Öoo sound like a Metroidvania, especially as you’re stuck in a maze-like 2D world where some areas seem completely inaccessible at first. But while there are some small similarities with things like Animal Well the second bomb is the only extra one you get and all the new abilities you learn are really just tricks and exploits of the game’s in-built mechanics, that it’s entirely up to you to work out.

It may look like an old ZX Spectrum game, but Öoo is an incredibly clever sandbox puzzle game. It’s not a direct comparison but it reminded us very much of the superb Baba Is You, in the that the game sets up the rules for you at the start and you have to work out how to interpret and stretch them into solving the puzzles. Nothing is scripted and everything feels organic, as you slowly realise the logical extent of you powers and how they can be used to your advantage.

The game doesn’t just drop you off in the deep end though, as there’s a lot of what is the puzzle game equivalent of signposting, as new techniques are hinted at and then you ended up being teleported back to an earlier location, where you realise you can actually progress through it after all.

Unlike the cold and unforgiving The Witness, Öoo seems to actively want you to succeed and to not get frustrated. There are plenty of checkpoints, no penalties for dying, and while the game’s certainly not linear it won’t have you exploring aimlessly for too long; especially as areas are blocked off by frogs that require you to feed them flies before they’ll let you pass.

As with all good puzzle games, the obstacles seem absolutely impossible right up until the moment you work out what you’ve got to do, and you kick yourself for not realising how easy it was after all. Some obstacles require careful timing, which can be a little frustrating, but it’s a rare problem and for the majority of the time it’s brainpower and not fast reflexes that are most important.

Sandbox gaming might be more commonly associated with giant open world games but the much more modest confines of Öoo are infinitely more engaging and versatile than most titles a thousand times its budget. Your progress is impeded only by your own imagination, and the game is a master at stimulating it and making you feel like a genius for every problem you solve.

Formats: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £8.50
Publisher: AMATA Games
Developer: Nama Takahashi
Release Date: 3rd March 2026
Age Rating: 7

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A new indie game from the makers of The Binding Of Isaac may seem a frivolous tale of magical furballs but it’s actually one of the most deeply complex strategy titles of recent years.

For a brief time, at the end of the 2010s, turn-based strategy games were fashionable. Despite loving the genre, we never would have thought that possible but, alas, those 15 minutes of fame were fleeting, and the obsession was only brief as far as mainstream gamers were concerned. As such it’s unlikely there’ll ever be another XCOM and a game like Into The Breach was only ever going to be a one-off.

Although Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat did keep the concept alive for triple-A gaming – and there’s a Star Wars themed XCOM clone coming out this year – turn-based strategies have largely returned to being the preserve of indie developers. And Mewgenics is about as indie as it gets, as one glimpse at the graphics and the credits – which largely consist of just two people – will tell you.

Beyond all the cat nonsense, Mewgenics is a disarmingly complex strategy roguelite combined with a breeding simulator to furnish an army of moggies to take on the powers of evil. It’s very silly and incredibly deep, in what must be one of the most extreme mismatches ever seen, between how a game looks and how it plays.

Although Mewgenics is essentially two games in one the basic explanation of what you’re doing is relatively straightforward. You start by managing your team of felines, kitting them out much as you might in XCOM itself. You can take four of them at a time on a single roguelite run, with combat resolved in an isometric arena reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics and all its many derivatives.

Should you be so skilled as to survive to the end of the day any cats that remain are automatically retired and can no longer be used again (except in special cases that we won’t spoil). Instead, you have to select replacements from your ever-growing cattery – ideally ones that have been purposefully bred for the occasion.

There’s a whole research and development element that goes on at your home base, both in terms of breeding the cats and expanding your HQ, with additional rooms and equipment that allow for buffs and other upgrades to be carried across multiple runs.

Although managing the loadouts of your cats involves a lot of very nerdy video game style considerations, the breeding is both complex and funny. Rather than dealing with test tubes and cloning vats, as you might expect when genetically engineering an army of killer kitties, you instead have to encourage loving relationships, making the critters feel comfortable and trying to stop fights between competing males. Even then your plans may be thwarted, if a female cat rejects a potential partner or a cat’s sexual preferences mean it’s not interested.

While breeding is important there’s also the issue of cat collars, which confer class types and associated abilities, and which frequently take the role of the most desirable loot. Combing genetics with collars, especially if your cat had a particularly powerful parent, allows your pussycats to gain abilities from multiple classes but also causes mutations and disorders, which can be either positive or negative – from sharper claws to an unstoppable urge to eat nearby poo.

Normally at this point in a review, we’d try to assure you that the game isn’t necessarily as complex as it sounds, but in this case that’s not really true. Mewgenics is a satisfyingly deep game, but it is a lot to take in at the start, especially given it can’t take itself seriously enough to give proper tutorials and the interface isn’t the most instinctive – especially when it comes to item descriptions, which make Elden Ring seem transparent.

The whole breeding aspect could easily have been a whole game in itself but technically it’s just a prelude to the combat, which in theory is fairly standard for the genre, as you move and attack across grid-based maps. However, the complexity of your cats’ abilities and weapons, and the weirdness of your enemies, means fights are highly unpredictable.

A successful run can take up to three hours but there’s so much randomness involved in that, in terms of the abilities your team is served up (you pick one from a selection of four each time you level up), the enemies, the locations, and random rolls of the virtual die, that the game can seem brutally unfair at times. At a base level it’s not actually that difficult but if luck is not smiling on you then it seems anything but.

As you might guess from the visuals, Mewgenics is by the creators of The Binding of Isaac. We can’t pretend it’s an art style we’ve ever liked but the game is made by basically two guys, so it’s hard to be too negative, especially given the impressive variety in cat and monster appearances. But a lot of the humour didn’t land for us and some of the depictions of the mutated or injured cats are, like their previous games, quite disturbing.

Despite its foibles, Mewgenics is an extremely ambitious and well thought out game. We didn’t gel with some of the elements, especially the random aspects and the artwork, but they’re clearly meant to be like that and are not an accident. Just like a cat, Mewgenics does not apologise for being itself and while it may not be purr-fect it’s impossible not to forgive its missteps, even when it’s purposefully annoying you.

Formats: PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel
Developer: Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel
Release Date: 10th February 2026
Age Rating: N/A

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