Indie Monthly: November 2025

So another year draws to a close. Once again, Steam has set a record - with a month to go, VG Insights is showing slightly more releases than in 2024. Depending on how you categorize everything, we're going to see close to 20,000 releases this year, and I've only been able to show off the tiniest fraction of that.

Even so, we've learned a lot about the world of indie games in 2025. Doing the research for this year's State of Indie was particularly enlightening, and if you haven't read that one yet, it's here and here. The short version, though? This year was promising, brutal, surprising, unfair, inspirational, and wide open - the same as it is just about every year.

In any case, please enjoy my last four reviews for the year, as I will be taking December off. I could use the break.

HANGRY

HANGRY is a sci-fi ARPG with a focus on crafting. It's an action-heavy, story-light game that's all about eating, cooking, and evolving.

Hangry is a hunter in a region of space where fine cuisine is the center of everything. Restaurateurs and food processors are the power brokers, and a rare cut of meat is the most valuable thing there is. Hangry would be the best at what he does, were it not for his habit of nibbling on the product. With the help of his boss Goutra, a chef and underworld caterer, he'll have to navigate the gastronomical politics of his world - and maybe come out stronger on the other side.

The gameplay loop of HANGRY centers on visiting various planets, tracking rare animals, and taking them down while dealing with robotic game wardens. The combat is fairly standard for action RPGs - using combos of light and heavy attacks plus specials - but HANGRY also has a focus on stuns. Each enemy has a Poise meter that is depleted by rapid, precise attacks and the enemy is knocked senseless if their Poise falls below a certain threshold.

Beyond its obvious tactical advantage, stunning an enemy gives the player a choice as to how to finish it off, with different finishers providing either short- or long-term benefits. A ravenous finisher - in which the protagonist partially devours the target - gives a large amount of experience, but destroys the meat and can ruin a quest if done recklessly. By contrast, a clean finisher yields a large number of ingredients that can be used in cooking later.

The cooking minigame is a significant part of HANGRY. It's done at the end of mainline quests, but players are also free to cook for their own benefit using either found recipes or experimentation. Well-made dishes give experience, but can also grant permanent stat bonuses, making them key for more powerful builds.

Overall, HANGRY is a solid choice for action fans, offering a satisfying combat system and lots of opportunities to develop a character.

HANGRY is available for PC via Steam. A copy was provided for this review.

A Pizza Delivery

A Pizza Delivery is a short, surrealistic narrative game focused on themes of humanity and memory.

Taking on the role of a pizza delivery girl only known as "B," the player has a very mundane task: deliver a pizza. There's nothing mundane about the delivery route, though. B's world is a bizarre, dreamlike place, one that's almost devoid of life. The only instructions come from a disembodied voice at the other end of a series of pay phones. It's a mystery as to who would have a pizza delivered across such a strange land, but the few people B encounters suggest that pizza might be more than mere food here.

A Pizza Delivery leads the player across a series of surreal, often melancholic locations, each of which has a puzzle or two, and most have one lost soul eager for a chat. The puzzles and challenges are mostly intuitive, and there's little that will stop a dedicated player from finishing the story. Beyond the main plot, A Pizza Delivery truly revels in environmental storytelling, with lots of odds and ends pointing at events happening behind the scenes.

The core story explores a few themes. The copy suggests that the story is about human connections, but a bigger element might be time. Most of the characters appear to be stuck in a timeless space, unable to process the past or find a new future. Memories are a key part of this, with some discussion about whether memory is a positive force or something that holds people back from moving on.

Overall, A Pizza Delivery is a typical narrative adventure with some really nice visual imagery, and it should appeal to anyone who's into more surreal and symbolic storytelling.

A Pizza Delivery is available for PC via Steam. A copy was provided for this review.

Dark Quest 4 is a party-based TRPG dungeon crawler with some minor simulation elements. It features a distinctly old-school vibe that's bound to appeal to fans of tabletop and older PC RPGs.

Dark Quest 4 is, both mechanically and aesthetically, modeled after a kick-in-the-door tabletop game. There is a minimal storyline, only enough to guide the player through a series of dungeon encounters. The player selects a party of three adventurers from a total of ten, eight available from the start, with two more in need of rescuing. For each section of the dungeon, the objective is to reach an end goal while collecting money for upgrades.

Both combat and exploration are straightforward. The player advances through the dungeon one turn at a time, with the party members moving and acting independently. Once a member sights an enemy, the game shifts into combat mode. Each character on either side gets one action per round, with the order dictated by an initiative roll. All characters, be they PCs or NPCs, have a basic melee or ranged attack and (usually) one or more special abilities that can be used once per fight.

Dark Quest 4 also features some light simulation elements. As much as you might want to pick one party and build the members into powerhouses, that's not really an option. Party members return from the dungeon beaten and exhausted, lowering their hit points until they've had a chance to rest. Between the low starting HP totals and minimal healing, tackling a dungeon at less than full health is not recommended, and a smart player will need to rotate party members to keep them all in fighting shape.

It's probably not wise to put too much focus on individual party members anyway. The player can use looted money to buy skills and equipment for the PCs, but this isn't the kind of game where one can grind their way to success. End-game characters will be stronger than they were at the start, but not enormously so, and victory is more about strategy and risk management than raw numbers.

Overall, Dark Quest 4 is a respectable choice for fans of old-school tabletop, but it won't have as much appeal to those who prefer more complex modern RPGs.

Dark Quest 4 is available for PC via Steam, for PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. A copy was provided for this review.

Berserk B.I.T.S

Berserk B.I.T.S is an idler in the vein of Rusty's Retirement, meaning that it doesn't obscure the entire screen. It's a game designed very much with Mega Man fans in mind.

As with other games in this category, Berserk B.I.T.S runs in a frame (or in this case, a series of frames) along the bottom of the screen, leaving the top two-thirds unobstructed. There is a range of options that allow the game to float on top of other windows, adjust the size relative to the screen, and move or hide individual frames.

The game itself is an autoplaying RPG modeled heavily on the Mega Man Battle Network series. The player drops the BIT - the main character - in one of several areas in the explorer frame, where the character will fight through a dungeon with minimal to no direct input. A second frame houses the simulation element. The player can keep a certain number of supporting characters, including robots that periodically yield resources and programs that, as long as they are fed and cared for, allow the BIT to perform special attacks.

Berserk B.I.T.S is more hands-on than other games in its genre. Most functions can be automated, and the game can eventually be fully idled, but it will take slightly longer to reach that point. And while the BIT will use special abilities as they are saved up, some difficult fights may require the player to manually choose skills to optimize their effectiveness.

Unusually for these types of games, Berserk B.I.T.S does have a story. It isn't immediately apparent, but plot elements will begin to creep into the gameplay starting around an hour or two in. This is another element that calls upon a bit more attention than similar idle games.

Overall, Berserk B.I.T.S is best for anyone who likes idlers, but wants a little more involvement in the action.

Berserk B.I.T.S is available for PC via Steam. A copy was provided for this review.

And with that, Indie Monthly is done for 2025! We wish all of our readers a wonderful holiday season, and we will see you right back here in 2026!