This Week In Games Australia: Trek To Yomi Leads A Week Of Strong Indie Releases

Welcome back to another edition of This Week In Games Australia! We’re well into the mid-year dry spell now, and indie creators are taking full advantage. This week, we’ll dive into the wave of interesting indies coming down the pipe, from idle clickers to co-operative terraformers, and industrial simulators to side-scrolling samurai. There’s even a mystery in an old Victorian mansion to solve.

Here’s what you could be playing this week:

May 2

Per Aspera: Blue Mars (PC)

Blue Mars is the latest DLC for an existing game, Per Aspera. It’s a planetary base builder, a cooperative terraforming game about bringing life to the Red Planet. The focus of the new Blue Mars DLC is creating great Martian oceans and bases that float on their surface. Play this with your engineer friends, they’ll have a great time.

May 3

Fidget Spinner RPG (PC)

I include this idle clicker in the list because I think it’s just so beautifully, perfectly ridiculous. The entire premise of Fidget Spinner RPG is to accelerate a fidget spinner toward ever more ridiculous speeds. A simple idea, an incredibly dumb idea, and I absolutely love it.

Loot River (XSX, PC, XBO)

This is a dungeon crawler roguelike combining swift combat and block-shift puzzle solving. Loot River drops players into a proc-gen labyrinth on each run, so that no two runs are completely alike. The look and vibe are also extremely cool. I can see this one leaping into the broader conversation on socials next week. Keep an eye out for it. Coming to Game Pass!

Neon Speed (PC)

This one’s a very basic city racer, but I include it because of its immaculate synthwave vibes. Simple goal: weave through cyberpunk-styled traffic at speed, see how far you get. The games on this list don’t all have to be super complex, and here’s a great example of one with a clear and simple design priority.

Oaken (PC)

Oaken releases into early access this week. It’s a board-based tactical roguelite with roots in collectible card games like Magic and Hearthstone. Use an army of creatures and spells at your disposal to dominate the board and put your opponents on the back foot. Gorgeous art direction too. Looking forward to checking it out.

May 4

Bakery Simulator (PC)

We love a needlessly detailed industrial simulator on This Week In Games Australia. Bakery Simulator, like Cooking Simulator before it, attempts to recreate the life of a suburban baker. Get in early, fire up the ovens, prepare your goods for the day, see what sells, and manage ingredient inventory accordingly. The Twitch streamers will love it.

Wildcat Gun Machine (NS, PC, PS4, XBO)

A cartoony, bullet-hell dungeon crawler all about big guns and noisy mayhem. Great title, love the art style, and the upgrades look super fun. Feels like there might be a lot of replayability in this one.

May 5

Best Month Ever! (PS5, XSX, PC, PS4, XBO)

An emotional rollercoaster of a game, Best Month Ever! is a narrative point-and-click adventure game about a single mother with only one month to teach her young son the fundamentals of life and how to be a good person. This is a game that lives in very sensitive territory, so without spoiling anything that isn’t in the trailer, I’ll put a broad content warning on this one for spousal abuse and sudden death. Worth playing, if you’re up for it.

Road Maintenance Simulator (PS4)

Yessss, more industrial simulators. More, I say. This one’s on the list because it’s coming to retail in Australia.

Trek to Yomi (PS5, XSX, PC, PS4, XBO)

The ‘This Week In Games Australia pick of the week’. Trek to Yomi is a side-scrolling samurai game in the vein of classic Akira Kurosawa films. From a narrative standpoint, it has a lot in common with Sony’s Ghost of Tsushima. Guide your vengeful ronin toward his destiny, and cut down anyone foolish enough to get in your way. Gorgeous art design and a smart perspective. Reviews are dropping this week so keep an eye out. We’ll be talking about it.

Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters (PC)

Bring the flamer, Brother. The heavy flamer. Who knows what it took, but they’ve convinced Andy Serkis to star in a Warhammer game, a W so huge I don’t even know where to start.

May 6

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit (XSX, PC, XBO)

A point-and-click adventure game wrapped around a small-town mystery. The game follows a woman named Milda who receives an unexpected inheritance. Her grandfather has left her a house in Lithuania. The arrives in Europe to threats and an insistence that she gives up her inheritance. Certain that there is more to the property than meets the eye, Milda investigates her new home, inadvertently opening the door to a mystery dating back to the 15th Century.

The Inheritance of Crimson Manor (PC)

A spooky, dusty old mansion with a tangled mystery unravelled room-to-room? Say no more, I’m in. I love that there are developers still thinking about games like these. They live and die on the strength of their puzzles, though, so hopefully, developer MediaCity Games has those on lock. There’s a demo available on Steam if you want to give it a test run first.

And that’ll do it for another This Week In Games Australia! What are you playing this week? See anything you like? Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments below.