DoubleJump’s April Indie Grab Bag

Slay the Spire 2, Samson, and so much more.

April came and went and I played some games during it! It’s been a few months since I last opened another grab bag, but I felt it appropriate to share my experiences for this month, since most of the games I played during April were indie releases. April was bookended by a series of playing every Resident Evil game starring Leon Kennedy for a video essay (check me out @OddJackalope) that I’m working on, and I’m about to dive headfirst into Housemarque’s Saros. But enough on the format, here’s a peek into what I played this past month.

Slay the Spire 2

This month, as well as March, has been a sort of out-of-body experience. My astral projection is looking at me, having fallen into a Slay the Spire-shaped hole. And Slay the Spire’s sequel might be the greatest deckbuilder I’ve ever played.

Slay the Spire 2 is an improvement on the original in every single way. The animations are much flashier, the improved card designs look amazing, and the new characters are jam-packed with intricacies and newfound strategies to take down the enemies across the game’s three acts. I was most used to playing the character called The Silent from my experiences with the first game, but new characters like The Necrobinder and The Regent offered some new playstyles that intrigued me. Slay the Spire 2 is also one of the few titles that I’ve purchased while it is still in early access, and it’s interesting to see a game whose overall balance is being shaped around my play experience as I play it. I have also heard nothing but great things about STS2’s multiplayer as well.

Most of all, I’m learning a lot about how I like to play deckbuilders and what I can do to improve. I’ve been consuming a lot of NorthernLion Slay the Spire 2 content, and there’s one lesson that he keeps reiterating that’s actually made me a better player: it doesn’t matter how synergistic your deck is, it matters how fast you kill enemies. I took it to heart because Slay the Spire 2 has so many synergies between cards that make you feel like you’re creating the greatest build of all time. But building around synergies risks a run crashing and burning if you have one bad draw.

I’ve put about 40 hours into the game so far with only a few ascension wins, so I’d imagine I’ll put at least 40 more in it before the year wraps up.

Moss Moss

Moss Moss was a cute title I saw in the Itch.io storefront, starring a cute sentient moss ball that’s trying to cover the rest of the known world with his moss. This is also the first title that I’ve played on the PICO-8, which feels like a blast from the past in terms of recreating a retro game aesthetic. I’m trying not to delve too far into the mechanics of a 50-minute-long game, but developer Noel Cody’s Itch bio “small games that hide secrets,” will tell you all you need to know about how fun this game’s levels are to traverse and hunt for hidden gems.

People of Note

I’m slowly starting to remind myself that I actually do not hate turn-based/JRPGs, I’m just unfamiliar with them. I decided to test the waters again with People of Note – a take on what Persona would look like if every character, story beat, and overall world would look like if everything was themed around music.

In People of Note, you play as Cadence, a pop singer who’s trying to win her city’s version of American Idol. Cadence is disillusioned with the contest and the state of pop music at large, as she faces impossible odds against what she thinks is the industry plant boyband that runs the city. What follows is Cadence branching out beyond her city’s music scene, teaming up with rock stars and DJs alike to find a new sound that will tug at the city of Chordia’s heartstrings.

Turn-based RPGs don’t click with me often because I often write off the moment-to-moment gameplay as just clicking one button for about twelve minutes and then moving on to the next encounter. That’s not the case in People of Note. As Cadence teams up with other musical artists, there’s a surprising amount of variety between turns as characters can attack, use special moves, and apply buffs and debuffs alike. Each turn also allows for certain attacks to be magnified depending on what genre the backing tracks happen to be. For example Cadence can do more damage on a pop track, while her rocking partner Fret can apply a defense buff to both of them on the same turn, and vice versa for a rock song.

Outside of the moment-to-moment gameplay, People of Note also is just a very quirky and happy time. There’s tons of cute references to musical genres, artists, and overall habits of musicians. Fret, one of the side characters, gets his backstory after his classic rock band split up because his bandmate wanted to pursue Math Rock. The K-Pop club is flooded with paparazzi. Cadence can find hidden creatures called “Weird Owls” backed by an accordion soundtrack that are almost one-to-one recreations of Weird Al parodies. I mean c’mon man.

I haven’t finished People of Note just yet, but I’m planning on knocking the rest of it out this month.

Horse Magnifier

I like Horse Magnifier. You magnify horses and they make funny shapes. The game is free. You should play Horse Magnifier.

Planet of Lana II

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf was one of my most anticipated indies of the year after it was revealed in 2025. I wrote a ton about this in my review of the game over on GameCritics.com, but I wanted to add a few things here to complete the picture of what I was trying to paint with this review.

Everything about Planet of Lana II explodes compared to the original: the art style, the puzzles, the plot – not all to the narrative’s benefit. But it is undeniably a bigger swing, a larger expansion of the ideas in the original. So much of my playtime in Children of the Leaf made me think of the Empire Strikes Back. Between an evocative woodwind soundtrack and the beautifully intricate environments that surround Lana and his cat companion Mui, it’s hard not to draw that comparison.

If you want to hear more thoughts from me about Planet of Lana II, my full review on GameCritics is linked here.

Samson

There’s not a ton to write about for Samson – I purchased this game at the beginning of April coming away impressed with the trailer. What I thought I was going to get was a more slimmed-down, gritty brawler set in what seems like a backwater industrial town. The combat looked brutal and chunky, which is exactly what I like in games like this.

What I got was an absolutely broken mess. Samson was littered with bugs on initial release, forcing developer Liquid Swords to release a bug fix roadmap less than 24 hours after the game’s launch. Eventually I will return to it once the game works.

Vampire Crawlers

To thematically bookend this post with another roguelike deckbuilder, I checked out Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding spinoff of Vampire Survivors from developer poncle.

So much of the discourse around Vampire Survivors has branded it as a “podcast game”, a game that you can easily play while consuming content on a second screen. Survivors put players in the shoes of an intrepid hero that had autofire weapons circling around them, and the only decision-making required was choosing between three new weapons once you gained enough EXP. The game’s simplicity is not always a detriment, I strongly believe that games of all genres deserve entry points that are approachable and have a defined time limit (about 30 minutes in the case of Vampire Survivors), even if it inherently comes with a slew of dopamine and a lack real decision-making.

With Vampire Crawlers, poncle took the characters and lore of Vampire Survivors into something far more intellectually demanding. You can play Vampire Crawlers like Survivors. You can click on cards that are the same weapons and items from the first game in any random order to kill enemies fast. But you will lose faster if you play that way. To win, Crawlers is asking for much more than it did in Survivors, it’s asking for your attention. Each turn is a delicate balance of dealing damage, increasing your stats, and blocking incoming damage. But the game also doesn’t give up what makes Survivors such a compelling title in the first place – the frenetic energy behind it. Even though each turn feels like more of a delicate balance between all the competing goals, there’s still a feeling of entropy whenever you manage to pull off a hitless encounter. That sense of forward progress is still there, but I feel like I have more agency in it now.

Safe to say, Vampire Crawlers is a big hit for me. I’ve gotten about half the achievements so far, and I will be playing it through to the end.

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And that’s it for April! I hope everyone had a great month and has an even better May.