Frontier Warfare, Feminist Punk Rockers, and Simplified Tactics

Hello folks, and welcome to another dispatch! I hope that this week has been treating you well. I have been absolutely S L A M M E D at work with our Steam Next Fest build, all while I am staring down the barrel of DICE, GDC, PAX East, TGX, Indie Fan Fest, and The MIX planning. Who thought it was a great idea to put so many events back to back in March? Can I sleep now?

I did managed to spend some time playing Dwarves: Glory, Death and Loot that I included in the dispatch a few weeks ago. I’m new to the auto-battler genre, but this charming collecting of little drawrven folks charging head first into an onslaught of Orcs has brought me many moments of joy during brief 10 minute pockets of down time while waiting for builds to cook. The meat and potatoes of the game is definitely in assigning gear, and forging upgrades, because as the game goes on your small crew will be facing impossible odds. Creating interesting combos of healing priests backed by fire wizards and the big slammy hammer guys is the only way you can make a dent, and sometimes even survive.

It’s a fun game, and the reviews on Steam seem to say it’s a great one of these. I am not super qualified to say that, but I can say I am having a lot of fun, and for the price, I definitely think it’s worth checking out if you are curious.

Developer: Overhype Studios
Steam rating: Very Positive
Store page

This one was brought to my attention by Pyxel from our community, and quickly shot up to the top of my list. From the creators of the beloved Battle Brothers, MENACE is a squad-based tactics game set in a grounded sci-fi universe. You command a strike force of marines, mercs, and sometimes criminals, who are fighting on frontier worlds against pirate warlords, corrupt corpos, and shitty governments.

MENACE is a very open-ended game where your tactical decisions really matter. You will need to pin down enemies with suppressing fire, and have another squad flank effectively to get the drop. There are multi-operation missions where your command decisions will drastically change the challenges that await you. Do you take out their air support in the first op so you can land your tanks in the later levels, or do you risk it all for a full-frontal assault, those kinds of things.

This one is getting a lot of positive buzz, but I am seeing a lot of YouTubers and media say it is “X-COM 3”, which after reading the reviews on Steam, it most certainly is not. Sure, it has turn-based tactics, but it’s more of an open-ended decision making RPG where you are building squads, not dice rolls and overwatch moments like you would expect.

Tactics games are my new obsession, so this is what I will be playing this weekend.

Developer: Triple Topping, Akupara Games
Steam rating: N/A
Store page

When I came across the trailer for Dead Pets: A Punk Rock Slice of Life Sim, I was immediately charmed. A unique blend of rhythm game, narrative adventure, and a life sim, Dead Pets follows Gordy, an almost 30-something year old who’s life is in shambles, and their punk band Dead Pets is taking their one last shot at success before the weight of real life brings their dreams to a crushing halt.

The art is absolutely incredible, and the soundtrack has a real bite to it that reminds me of the riot grrrl classics. Dead Pets is described as a feminist, management-lite, minigame-heavy, slice-of-life, narrative game. It also warns that it has a major storyline the relates to sexual assault, but there are plenty of warnings before it happens, and you can skip over the scene if you wish. It’s awesome to see games tackling this stuff at all, let alone with this level of care and forewarning, so I am pretty excited to see how this tale unfolds.

Dead Pets is out tomorrow, so there are no Steam reviews just yet, but this game has been around the festival circuit for a while, and definitely has some buzz.

Developer: Transhuman Design
Steam rating: Positive
Store page

Combine Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the gameplay of Hotline Miami, and add a heavy layer of smoke and jazz, and you have Jackal. This frenetic hyper-violent top-down shooter throws you back to Vegas in the 70’s as a drug super-powered hitman, who is cleaning out casino hotels run by the mob. Utilizing a bunch of melee weapons and iconic guns, you will shoot your way through randomly generated raids that will force you to be creative with the items you find along the way.

While Jackal is certainly set in the 70’s, it has some supernatural elements that will see you unlocking new spells that can be used to fuel your quest to murder all the baddies. And for those who are score chasers, there are leaderboards, and mutators that can keep the challenging ramping up long after the credits roll.

I was kinda interested in the vibes and story of this one. I am in the mood for a stupid throwback to a Hotline Miami-esque time. However, most of the Steam reviews praise the intense and creative combat, but also call out that the story leaves something to be desired. Having saying that, the vibes here are pretty strong, so maybe I will check this out regardless.

Developer: I M Game
Steam rating: Positive
Store page

I found this one as part of the Tiny Roguelikes festival on Steam, and I am so glad I did because this looks to be incredibly my jam. Master of Piece is an easy-to-play turn-based tactics auto-battler, that has a striking art style that feels like an old fantasy board game from a dark realm. You deploy your band of mercenaries on the board, taking into account their traits, their speed, and try to stack the odds in your favor. Then the pieces battle it out, as you go deeper and deeper into the fog.

The developers use this very simple graphic, which I think immediately tells you if Master of Piece is for you.

I am into all of those things, and while I am starting to really get a grasp on the strategy genre now, I could use something that’s a little lighter to play when I am not able to sit for a long thinking session. I absolutely adore this gritty art, that reminds of Darkest Dungeon, just without the gunky Eldritch residue.

Master of Piece has won a bunch of awards on it’s way to Early Access, including Best Indie Game from the 2025 Game Development World Championship Summer Season. There is a free demo available if you want to try before you buy, but this is an immediate get for me personally.

Developer: Mike Monroe, Belief Engine
Steam rating: Overwhelmingly Positive
Store page

Another game that I found thanks to an obscure festival on Steam, this time the Typing Fest. Dead Letter Dept. is a psychological horror mystery game where you play the role of a data entry clerk who types up and transcribes lost mail that has nowhere to go. As the days and night go on, the content starts to get weirder and weirder, and your sense of reality will surely come into question.

You actually need a mouse and keyboard to play this one, because you really are typing into database as you play. There are multiple endings and secrets to find during your playthroughs, and due to the volume of content you will be sifting through, no two playthroughs are exactly the same. The devs also did us a solid, and mentioned that a single playthrough is approximately 2 hours, so that gives you a solid sense of the time commitment on this one.

I am a sucker for narrative games where you are the character, inputting data via a fake computer screen. I mean, I worked on Hacknet and Orwell, two games that had you sifting through people’s personal files to learn more about the world. Dead Letter Dept. feels as though it was made specifically for me to lose my mind over, so that’s what I intend to be doing this week. Keen to see how this one is received.

You probably haven’t heard of Kromlech, because let’s face it, discovery for indies in 2026 is pretty bad. Hey, that’s why this newsletter exists. I am throwing this great looking viking adventure onto your release radar because it comes from a small studio in the Czech Republic called Perun Creative, and it just so happens that one of our community members Pyxel is one of the developers over there.

These folks have been toiling away for years on this game, and it’s finally getting a release into Early Access. Give the team some support and throw it on your wishlist.

Thanks so much for reading, and please tell some friends to subscribe! We are also trying to raise some money for server hosting costs and a few games, so if you enjoy the posts perhaps consider buying us a coffee. Got something that we should be playing? Let us know on the forums or shoot us an email below - we do read them!

See you next week - Steve