A lex Austin, known professionally as Cryptic Sea, makes delightfully weird and surprising physics games. Some of them, like Sub Rosa, are on Steam, but my favorite Cryptic Sea games aren't so easily found. They come to me like dead drops that were meant for someone else: a download link in a reply to someone on Twitter, a YouTube video about a hockey league no one's ever heard of, an itch.io page linked in Discord. The last drop I intercepted drafted me into a flying, flailing duel with a stranger: Our bodies were robots and our weapons were dunks.
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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