Indie Spotlight: BOMBANANA and 4 More Indies Worth Your Time

BOMBANANA stole the show this week. Not because of its review count or its budget, but because a $4.79 three-player co-op about monkeys who can’t see, hear, or speak managed to land Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with more than 3,500 reviews. It’s the kind of small, weird, friend-destroying idea that only the indie side of the industry can ship, and a useful reminder that the genre slots a lot of people mentally reserve for indies (party, co-op, horror-comedy, cozy sim) are quietly the most active right now. Here are five games worth your weekend, plus three more to keep an eye on. Last week’s How to Fish player-count milestone and our Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 release-time guide showed the indie side of the industry can compete with the big releases on reach, and this week’s crop is no different.

BOMBANANA (PC, Mac, $4.79, 40% off through Oct 14)

From Turkish studio Lefto Studio, published by TARK, BOMBANANA drops you and two friends into a co-op bomb-disposal gauntlet where one monkey is blind, one is deaf, and one is mute. Each player has only part of the puzzle, so you have to actually talk, point, and listen to defuse the bomb before the timer runs out. With 3,504 reviews and an Overwhelmingly Positive tag two months in, the formula clearly works, and the 40% launch discount makes it the cheapest co-op game you’ll pick up this month. Best for groups of three with a working voice channel and a short fuse.

Coal Duty (PC, free demo now, Early Access Oct 27)

Istanbul’s Corecrew Games bills Coal Duty as a 1-5 player co-op extraction horror-comedy, and the elevator pitch alone is enough. The State has issued a shift start date of October 27, and press keys are live for creators now, so the public demo is the way to get a look before launch. Think of it as the missing link between Lethal Company and a 90s HR training video: you and four friends descend into a mine, scrape together a haul, and try not to be eaten by whatever the company has been paying you not to ask about. For groups who burned out on Phasmophobia and want something that doesn’t take itself seriously.

We Were Here Tomorrow (PC, free, Oct 20)

Total Mayhem Games returns to the asymmetric co-op formula that made the We Were Here series a cult hit, this time with a more bite-sized release. You and a partner wake up inside a mysterious Norček facility with no memory of how you got there, and you have to pass information back and forth to escape. It’s free to play, releasing October 20 on Steam, and it supports cross-platform multiplayer if you and your partner are on different setups. For pairs who liked We Were Here Forever or Split Fiction and want something to clear in a long evening.

The Dark West (PC, demo during Steam’s next event)

Black Hand, based in Laguna Hills, California, just dropped a Liquid Courage trailer for The Dark West, a Western that centers its combat on an alcohol system. Drink to steady your hands and slow time, but the drunker you get, the worse your aim becomes. The full game’s date hasn’t been announced, but a demo is heading to Steam’s next event, which is the right time to see whether the system actually works in practice or just sounds good in a trailer. For players who burned out on Red Dead Redemption 2 and want a smaller, meaner take on the same era.

Goeland: Seagull Adventure (PC, demo as part of Steam’s Birds of Play event through Oct 16)

Montréal’s Maarti Games built a whole adventure game around a seagull, and somehow it’s part of Steam’s curated Birds of Play event running through October 16. The hook is environmental storytelling from a bird’s-eye view: you scavenge, harass, and generally make life worse for the humans at the beach until the story resolves itself. Indie games about animals doing crimes have a strong hit rate this year, and the demo is free for the next few days. For anyone who liked Untitled Goose Game and wants a shorter, scrappier version with wings.

Our read: This week’s indie crop leans hard on co-op. Lefto Studio is a Turkish studio founded around co-op party ideas; TARK is its publishing arm, handling the BOMBANANA launch and the 40% discount. Corecrew Games is an Istanbul studio whose Coal Duty pitch leans on the same Phasmophobia and Lethal Company template that made co-op horror the genre it is right now. Total Mayhem Games is the South African studio behind the We Were Here series, one of the longest-running asymmetric co-op franchises on Steam. Black Hand is a small Western-genre studio out of Laguna Hills, California, and Maarti Games is a Montréal studio that built a whole adventure around a seagull. Four of the five main picks and one of the three on the watchlist are built around playing with friends, which tracks with the post-pandemic return to local and online couch play and the success of Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, and the We Were Here series as genre templates. The other throughline is small studios taking big swings on a single mechanic: blind/deaf/mute monkeys, a drinking system, a seagull’s perspective. None of these are aiming for Game of the Year; they’re aiming for a tight, weird, shareable idea, and that’s the lane indies need to stay in to keep winning on Steam.

Keep an eye on

• Mark of the Ram (KurosuDev, TBA 2026): a soulslite horror shooter set in a twisted 1950s America, following housewife Barbara Peterson through a world that just stopped making sense. The Games Press reveal dropped today.
• ATMOSFAR (Apog Labs / SHUEISHA GAMES, Early Access Oct 29): a sky odyssey across floating islands on an alien planet, with a mobile airbase and a collapsed colony to investigate. The first published game from SHUEISHA’s Western-facing indie label.
• Slide Soldiers (Distracted Coder, Dec 1): a sliding puzzler with 5,000 levels and a free demo. The kind of game that quietly takes over your Steam library for a month without you noticing.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report