I am jonesing hard for The Crimson Diamond too, the demo was perfectly pitched. Although it seems to be evolving at a glacial pace and if the streams are to an indication, the dev is focused on singular minutiae of pixel placement over iterative development, I guess.

Old Skies has weird but good feels. The story should be kind of boilerplate on paper, but it stayed with me for awhile afterwards. Maybe something about the execution and mise en scene made the package memorable. Or maybe they got the cliffhanger just right.

Two that recently came out and I demoed are Dreams in the Witch House and The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (formerly INCANTAMENTUM).

These were both utterly fantastic, the latter with its pacing and suspense, and the former with the dev’s ingenious idea to combine survival/RPG-ish mechanics with a traditional point and click game and add a sense of urgency to a Cthulhu survival experience. A minority of staunch players on the Steam forums criticized these elements for being “difficult” (i.e, “give me zero consequences, comfy adventure gameplay”), but the game is not about unfair timers or chase sequences like in games of yore. It’s a highly original marriage of inventory/time management/branching path mechanics with a more traditional story, and gives you the tools to tackle both the puzzle and survival aspects of the game in your own way while having that ever-present feeling of dread like in the IF game Anchorhead. And from what I can tell, the game was universally praised on Big Blue Cup forums, so I think those that care have taken note of the innovation-within-tradition being done here.

I’m excited to play both of those games and have them top of mind in my backlog.