Rocket Shipment is a tricky, physics based, space delivery game. The game is a love letter to the old style lander games like Thrust, Solar Jetman and Crazy Gravity. After being in development for two years now, it has entered Early Access on Steam and will remain there until closer to the end of 2021 when the full content gets added in.

It's simple and right to the point, keeping the game mechanics nicely glued together. The main mechanic is using a physics based grappling cable to move packages and other object around, while managing your fuel levels. There's also a built in level editor, and Steam Workshop support to upload and download extra levels.

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Speaking about the release, the developer Chocolate Pinecone mentioned this:

I embarked on a huge journey when starting to make this game in August 2018. My goal was to make something completely from scratch in a language I had not mastered yet. No usage of fancy existing game engines, just pure C++ code and a few libraries.

Was it worth it? Definitely! Even though it will probably not be a huge financial success, I have learned so much that will help me with future projects and the support I got was amazing.

You can find Rocket Shipment on Steam in Early Access.

Love your open-world games? How about farming life sims? The Ranchers looks like another great entry into this more casual and laid-back part of the gaming world. Releasing on Steam sometime "early" this year, RedPilzStudio could be onto a hit here. As for Linux support, the developer confirmed it very clearly on Steam .

"After years of living in the metropolis' stressful and hectic life, you finally decide to leave everything behind to buy your first lot of land in the country and start a new life, in the quiet, close to nature. However, your skills as a farmer and manager will be put to the test to make your Ranch a prosperous business and earn the villagers' respect and esteem. And who knows, maybe find love and start a family."

There's no trailer for it just yet but the developer has shared some screenshots of what to expect (click to enlarge):

Feature Highlight:

• CREATE YOUR RANCH - Raise animals, grow crops, reclaim resources, buy new lots of land, and much more. You'll have plenty of space to create the Ranch of your dreams.
• DEVELOP YOUR RANCH - Craft objects, machines, and transform your basic resources into elaborate products to attract villagers, fill daily orders, or sell them in different markets for maximum profit.
• MANAGE YOUR RANCH - Optimize your Ranch's resource consumption, sign water, electricity contracts, or build your water wells, wind turbines, and solar panels and sell your surplus to the village.
• ONLINE COOPERATION - Invite 1 to 3 players to join you in your Ranch online! Your friends can help you develop your Ranch, fulfill your goals, or explore the vast open world of The Ranchers together.
• AUCTION MARKET - You can sell your resources to other players via the online auction market to maximize your profits. The auction market is directly accessible from within the game and from the companion application on iOS and Android. It seems that in The Ranchers, money never sleeps!
• A GIGANTIC OPEN WORLD - On foot, horseback, scooter, pickup, or yacht, explore a gigantic open world where mines, wild islands, shipwrecks, and dangerous monsters abound. Use your skills to recover ultra-rare minerals, gems, etc., to make and improve your tools, donate them to the village museum, or sell them at the auction market to other players.

I am an absolute sucker for these types of games including Stardew Valley, Littlewood, Farm Together and more. They're great when you're totally worn-out by everything else.

You can wishlist / follow on Steam .

Blending together city-building, resource gathering and logistics into a fine puzzle game Malmyr is worth taking a good look at with a wonderful relaxing atmosphere. Note : key provided to our Steam Curator .

Like a lot of smaller releases, it's almost criminally overlooked. It released back in December 2020 with full Linux support, and it works very nicely. Don't let the charming intro and visuals fool you though, it's a challenging game once you get going like any good logistics puzzler. While you are building up a city, it's not a city-builder, don't be fooled by that either. Malmyr is about careful resource distribution to overcome all the challenges.

There's no war or combat and no huge factories, just a focus on the current tasks by buying up land tiles and producing resources. Getting the distribution of wares right can be quite tough, and you will find yourself often building up, only to completely demolish and re-do it 5 minutes later. Everything needs careful attention to their placement. Buildings need wood to get built, needing roads to move it around but houses also need food so you need a farm, then you need to get the food from the farm to a market to then distribute it in a small area to various houses. The chains can end up a little on the elaborate side.

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Feature Highlight:

• Inspired from games of our past and present - Like The Settlers, Anno and Factorio.
• 12 story based missions - You need to find a good strategy to solve them and handle the hazards thrown at you.
• Unique obstacles and ambience for missions - Each mission was made to give you a different experience: Sometimes more relaxing, sometimes more challenging than the previous one.
• Complex production chains - They will get longer and will need a wider variety of resources to function.
• A different take on resource transportation - You will not just connect buildings with a road, set up a transportation route or build conveyor belts. You will have to manage and optimize each piece of road manually.
• Over 45 different resources - Global resources like coin and food, building resources like wood and bricks and commodities for selling like jewelry.

While 12 missions might sound short, together it's pretty long overall and will take quite a few hours to get through. After that, you then also have the freeplay and sandbox modes to keep going for longer. The story isn't really worth much thought, and felt a little like it was just in the way so don't expect great writing from it. However, there's plenty here that makes Malmyr worth picking up. If you usually like logistics puzzlers it's an easy suggestion to buy that's unique and quite elegantly designed. Overall, it's great.

You can buy Malmyr on Steam .

WHAT THE GOLF? A game created by Triband who clearly have no idea what Golf actually is and as it turns out, they created a game that's pretty amazing. Note : copy personally purchased.

Funded originally on the Fig platform back in 2018, it later turned into a timed Epic Games Store exclusive in late 2019 and eventually a Steam release happened in October 2020. Linux support came just a bit later but now I've had plenty of time with it to give it some thoughts.

So what is it, if not Golf? Well, that answer is somewhat complicate. It's hilarious though, thoroughly entertaining but deciding on what type of game it is has proven difficult. It's something along the lines of a physics comedy title that has a basic inspiration from the idea of Golf - to hit something across somewhere. Look, describing it is hard okay. It's completely stupid but oh so brilliant.

WHAT THE GOLF? is as if Triband said "what about Golf, if we added in mechanics from everything else and mashed it together as if you're in a Portal-like testing chamber". I couldn't help but constantly smile, chuckle and sometimes just laugh out loud at some of the levels. The various mechanics constantly mixed in and blended together are a real joy as are the constant little puns and joke level names.

You could easily go into WHAT THE GOLF? expecting something slightly silly that wears thin after an hour or two, but thankfully it's clear here that Triband put in a lot of effort to not be a gimmick game. It's fun from the start, and continues to grow on you as you ace the various challenges.

Sometimes you're a Golf ball, the hole, a club, a bouncy ball, a house, a chair and much more. Yes, you will be throwing around all sorts of things and it just keeps getting more ridiculous as time goes on. The list goes on for a while and some of it is seriously inventive, like a flower vase which you need to first gently tap onto its side so you can roll it along without breaking it.

There's also quite a few clear parodies included too. Super Mario Golf? Yep. Angry Bird Golf? There's that too. You even get a Lunar Lander parody included. WHAT THE GOLF? is a game that just keeps on giving.

Once you've got the basics down, you can go back to every single level and go through two extra challenges on each. Some are a genuine challenge, others just so completely ridiculous but it shows just how much attention the game has been given to be worth playing through. There's also co-op support, a level editor, daily challenges and more. Family friendly even, not that a younger audience would get half the jokes but they can easily enjoy the absurdness of it.

Back in December 2020 the developer also released a free snowy content update adding in a bunch of extra levels. Always nice to see post-release content.

WHAT THE GOLF? is a game that you need to play if you perhaps overlooked it.

If I had actually played it last year, it would have easily made my best 2020 Linux games list , I almost feel ashamed I left it this long. An easy recommendation to pick up. Absolutely brilliant. Go buy it. The Linux version has worked flawlessly in my testing both with mouse and gamepad - no issues.

You can buy WHAT THE GOLF? for Linux on Steam .

Top marks for originality and total quirkiness here. Sleeper Games have a pre-alpha build out and available for Linux of their new title Hyperspace Harvest.

It's going to be a mix of casual farming, with a little genetic engineering and some dungeon crawling on the back of a mysterious giant space mammal who reincarnated you after being involved in some kind of war. You will need to "Grow medicinal crops on the space whale's' skin, or venture deep into its anatomy and terminate the corrupted cells yourself!". Looks and sounds wild, check out the teaser:

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We actually covered the initial announcement, and now you can jump in and try it for yourself. Keeping in mind Sleeper Games are after feedback, as it's far from being finished. Most of the core systems are there but it needs a lot more content to fill it up. From my early time spent in this pre-alpha, I can see something with a huge amount of promise and it already feels like it could be a lot of fun once the initial rough edges are sorted.

Love the mix of gameplay it will offer. All very unusual and we need a lot more of this.

Find the pre-alpha demo up on itch.io .

You can also follow / wishlist on Steam .

Need another amusing co-op and PvP party game? Crooks Like Us is all about grabbing as much as you can, and then making a run for it.

The overall goal is to carry as many items as you can, and dump them into the getaway van before the timer runs out. Sounds easy right? Not so much. If you stack up a bunch of items and dump them into the van together, you get a score multiplier but actually carrying a stack to the van is another matter - you wobble all over the place and it's quite silly. It also leaves you open to the other crooks to grab your stuff if you take on too much.

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How the gameplay works:

• Before starting the game, choose 4 different gadgets from the main menu to take with you.
• Enter the van to use your chosen gadgets. Each one has a different effect on the room when activated - you could turn out the lights, make an earthquake, drop anvils, put down ice, move doors and loads more.
• Each gadget can be used for free, but will have a recharge time after activating. You can use the money you earn in a match, and pay to use the gadget again straight away instead of waiting for it to recharge.
• Leave the van at any point to continue stealing on the ground
• Watch out for the guards in the room - they will make you drop your stack if they catch you.
• Throw items you are carrying to knock over other thieves and guards.
• Dash forward to attack other players or destroy objects like doors and walls.
• A vault will open in the last 30 seconds to reveal an extremely valuable item - sometimes enough to sway the game!
• Make sure you’re in the van ready to escape before time runs out!

An amusing setting and you can try it out yourself right now. They have a version available in Alpha on game store itch.io , which you can play directly in your browser.

You can also follow it on Steam for release in 2021.

Here's something to keep you busy over the holiday season! Stardew Valley, the awesome and relaxing farming life sim from ConcernedApe has the biggest update yet.

There's so much that's new it's going to take some time to find it all, and I don't want to spoil too much of what to expect from it. Safe to say though they've really been busy expanding what you can do. It now has local co-op support, a brand new Beach farm, new game options to customize things a bit more, there's a significant amount of "late-game" content added, new character events, tons of new items, fish tanks and you can even sit on chairs now.

Click above for big image of the Beach farm

Quick tip: the full-screen farm screenshot tool saves pictures on Linux into your "/.local/share/StardewValley/" folder.

Plenty more new apart from what's already mentioned like home renovations, the ducks actually swim now, new people to meet and so on. It is an absolute whopper of a patch to drop just before the holidays! Awesome. Think I will have to dive in and spend another bunch of hours exploring all the little new bits. Will you be doing the same?

If you want the full spoiler filled list of what's new it can be found here .

Pick up a copy on Humble Store , GOG or Steam .

Developer SquareHusky has managed to have their upcoming casual life sim Everafter Falls funded on Kickstarter, so that's another wonderful looking game coming our way.

Inspired by the likes of Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing blended with some action-RPG element it seems like it's going to be quite an interesting one. If 2020 has shown me anything, it's that we can never have enough of these games to keep us going. The Kickstarter campaign has now finished on December 10 with it pulling in AU$ 52,536 thanks to over 1,000 backers.

Check out the trailer if you missed it:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Everafter Falls appears to set itself apart from other similar games since it's story-based and there's progression to follow there, along with the ability to continue on after the story is over. Not only that, there will be actual split-screen support too which is also pretty uncommon for these types of games. Lots to look forward to on this, including the amusing looking card-based progression system where you actually eat the cards to gain their powers.

Plenty of character and world customization are planned too along with various activities including fishing where you build up a big aquarium, mining, dungeon crawling with challenging combat for those who want it with progression outside the dungeons making them easier and much more.

Absolutely one to watch.

With a full release planned in 2022 you can now follow it on Steam . Since it's been funded, we've added it to our large list of crowdfunded projects .

Enjoy your family-friendly kart-racing styled arcade games? Slide was pretty good from the demo we tried back in September, and it now has a release date.  French indie developer Oneiric Worlds announced it's going to release February, 17th 2021 for Linux, macOS and Windows.

In Slide, Animal Race, you can play with up to 8 total players, as you each ride cute and colourful animals in vibrant environments. Jump to avoid obstacles, use bonuses and master the diving mechanics on the crazy tracks to outrun the horde! Or you can just take a tour and enjoy the view, while listening to the sympho-ethnic soundtrack. That's up to you. The game is family-friendly and accessible to beginners and kids thanks to autopilot options; but to win the race, you'll truly have to master all the game mechanics.

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Originally developed as a mini-game for their upcoming 3D adventure A Thief's Melody, it ended up growing enough to be considered a game by itself. Both games will share the same world and the same contemplative atmosphere, as well as a focus on animals and nature.

Slide will have local multiplayer and full support of Steam Remote Play with 6 tracks and 6 different playable animals at release.

You can follow Slide on Steam .