hellerphant

I stumbled across this one while scoping out the Quebec Games Celebration this week, and the weirdness of the art immediately had me hooked. Horripilant is an incremental dungeon crawler (which I THINK is a fancy way of not saying “Roguelite”), with a strange pixel art style that also somehow manages to feel like hand painted ink nightmares with a dot matrix vibe. Yeah, it’s a lot. Pulling from classic dungeon crawlers, this one looks super weird and delightful.

Worth mentioning that there is a demo for this one on Steam, but I haven’t had a chance to play it myself yet.

Who am I?

Former game journalist, current game dev who wants to put a spotlight on games. Indie games are struggling to get enough coverage. I run a weekly newsletter of games I find that look cool called Indie Dispatch.

Android users have a tonne of options, but is there anything an iOS user can do to make their phones more private. It was not my choice to get an iPhone but it’s what was provided to me so I’m rolling with it.

I am trying to get better with my privacy, and I specifically want to try and avoid big US tech where possible. I know they there are many people saying you should use multiple browsers for better privacy and all that stuff, but I’m also being realistic with myself - I just want a solid browser experience that has decent privacy and i can live with that for the most part. Not opposed to maybe 2 browsers, but I’d like one daily driver, especially for work.

I do a lot of social media management and am using the Steam backend daily as I work for a game studio. I need to use YouTube and Bluesky and all those things, so it needs to handle media.

I’m running Vivaldi at the moment after jumping off Chrome. I don’t need to use Chromium. I was trialing Orion on my Mac but I use a Linux machine at home, a windows PC sometimes at work, having something across all would be nice and once again I know that is not 100% privacy, but it’s better than the average user.

Advice would be super appreciate.

I left Melbourne 7 years ago to live in Japan. I’m heading back next month with some co-workers to exhibit at The Game Expo. They want good food, good coffee, good beers. I don’t know anything that is open anymore. My old go to spot was Pope Joan and it’s long gone. I don’t even know if Faraday’s Cage is still around, or good.

Please help me be a good host and give me some recommendations. I also plan to go to Very Good Falafel if it’s still there!

Oh, and how much am I looking at for a latte these days? My family say the price of everything has gone up so I’m scared.

I am an indie dev and former game journo, and I run a newsletter where I share recommendations of cool indies coming out every week. I’m not going to link to it here but I thought I could drop an interesting find on here.

LOVE ETERNAL is a brutal platformer with a psychological horror story behind it. A soft sequel to an insane platformer called LOVE that took 7 years for someone to actually beat it or something like that. This has some of the edges sanded down, and does some really unexpected things. Worth checking out if you love hard platformers.