Songs of Syx, a title currently in development and available as Early Access has now officially arrived on the DRM-free store GOG if that's where you prefer your games. A good remind of a nice up and coming title, as Songs of Syx is very promising.

At its heart, it's a city-builder but it's on a grand scale. You start off tiny and gradually expand to a huge sprawling city full of hundreds of citizens. That's far from it though, it's also a strategy game that will have massive tactical battles with huge armies since you're also dealing with the politics of other kingdoms. Even though it's not finished and there's plenty missing, it's highly rated by users.

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Their vision is huge for it too, developer Gamatron is planning to have a huge living world that's filled with different races, cultures, gods and strange creatures. From what I've personally played of it which is quite a few hours now, it doesn't quite live up to the ideals just yet but it's extremely promising - one of the most promising Early Access titles I've seen come along for some time. If you've played the likes of RimWorld, Kingdoms and Castles and other similar titles you will likely feel quite at home with it.

Now you can pick it up on GOG.com if you prefer. Otherwise itch.io and Steam . GOG doesn't currently have the demo but the other stores do so you can try it first.

Coldwild Games have announced their latest game following on from the wonderful Merchant of the Skies , this time they're going with a very chilled-out game with Luna's Fishing Garden.

In the game you play as Cassie, who wakes up on a strange island that belongs to a mysterious fox spirit named Luna. You're task with creating the biggest garden ever. Catch fish, trade with the fox spirit, and create the garden of your dreams by planting new trees, placing water objects, and bringing animals to the archipelago.

Designed much like their last game, it offers a relaxed approach to gaming. You can play it like an open sandbox experience, or follow the plot. You can't lose the game in Luna's Fishing Garden so you can just go at your own pace. Check out the new trailer below:

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Main Features:

• Hone your fishing skills : catch more than 20 different types of fish, each with its own behavior and extra challenge to catch.
• Create your own garden : plant beautiful trees on the islands, place floating objects on the water, and bring in new birds and animals!
• Enjoy your stay : roam around in your boat, watch the seagulls fly, sit back and relax. This peaceful world welcomes everyone!

You can follow it on Steam and it's due to release in March 2021.

A long time coming! The popular pixel-art village building sim that gives you god powers, Rise to Ruins, has now launched DRM-free on GOG.com. This is after officially leaving Early Access in October 2019, and going on to gross over $2 million USD back in September 2020.

"Rise to Ruins is at heart a godlike village simulator, but it also throws in plenty of familiar game play mechanics from classic real-time strategy and resource management games like Black and White, Settlers, ActRaiser and many others. It also throws in some twists by melding in some tower defense and survival elements in an attempt to create a new kind of godlike village simulator. The goal is to try to bridge the gap between the depth and complexity of traditional village simulators, the fun of godlikes and tower defense, with the simplicity of real-time strategy games."

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Rise to Ruins shows how deceptive user review counts are too if you rely on them to figure out popularity. It currently has 5,381 user reviews on Steam, which I would never have guessed behind the scenes that would end up grossing so much for a developer. It's clearly still selling really well too! For those interested in some sales status: through 2020 alone up to near the end of October it grossed close to $300K from 36,702 sales ( source ), with Linux making up around 1.8% of 2020's sales for it on Steam.

SixtyGig Games which is just solo developer Raymond Doerr is worth supporting for their stance too, as they promise to keep it DRM-free with all additional content being free updates (no paid DLC). Their continued Linux support is great too.

Now you can buy it on GOG.com with 50% off until if that is your preferred store. Also available on Steam and itch.io .

What do we think about it? It's great, well worth picking up!

Cave-flying is a genre that was big a very long time ago, now though not so much but Gravity Ace from John Watson entered Early Access recently and it's absolutely brilliant.

The idea of cave flyers are that you're always fighting against gravity while you pilot some sort of spaceship. Developer John Watson took that basic idea with Gravity Ace, threw a load of code at Godot Engine and came out with an Early Access game that shows how timeless certain types of genres can be. Gravity Ace has you fly, fight, and manoeuvre through various tight levels with intense gravitational fields and cramped firefights and it looks awesome while doing so.

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I don't have a bad thing to say about it. It looks fantastic with the bright pixel-art and animations, the controls are great with both mouse/keyboard and gamepad (Xbox One controller tested) and I think I prefer it on gamepad as it's been a great game to kick-back with a bit. Being able to do a little boost, and then drift along with the gravity while you annihilate enemies just looks and feels so satisfying. Gravity Ace is thumb-aching fun, and I seriously can't wait to play a whole lot more of it.

Their current plan is to remain in Early Access for 6-12 months, while they add new enemies, bosses, more levels and campaigns, fix bugs, and add a local multiplayer/Steam Remote Play mode for player-vs-player battles which all sounds great. It's already brimming with content thanks to 24 levels, along with a fully integrated level editor which they play to expand to have a special hub for players to share levels and whole campaigns.

Since it uses Godot Engine, the Linux version is pretty much perfection.

You can buy it on itch.io and Steam .

Also a shout out to itch.io, as their press system is brilliant. Anyone approved can go in and try a game, as long as the developer has opted into it. So people like me can pick a game they think looks interesting, and just give it a go. It's super useful.

Made in the spirit of the classics like Chip's Challenge, Adventure's of Lolo, Sokoban, and Zelda and following a successful Kickstarter the upcoming Akurra has a demo now.

"Push blocks into holes, over pits, avoid spikes, explore caves, and ride sea turtles in order to find keys, gems, and stars that unlock new paths and friends to aid you as you explore a collection of islands chock-full of puzzles and secrets. The puzzles in Akurra build complexity over time as you unlock new areas and islands with new puzzle pieces and mechanics."

Back in June, developer Jason Newman managed to get over $20K in funding from the Kickstarter so there's a lot of interesting in these retro-inspired puzzle games it seems. As of the latest update on Kickstarter, they've now put up an initial build of the demo for Linux too!

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Feature Highlight according to the info from the developer:

• Open world puzzles. Each “level” is an interconnected screen in a world of scattered islands. The player can explore and complete puzzles in a non-linear fashion.
• Beautiful, atmospheric music.
• Secrets! The game is chock full of hidden items. Getting 100% completion rate even in the demo is not an easy task!
• Story. Many puzzle games do not have a story. Akurra will tell a meaningful story through gameplay and visuals, as there is no text in game.

Nice to see them getting some proper external testing done early, it's the easiest way to ensure you get a smooth release. Head over to the itch.io page to get testing.

The Linux demo will eventually come to the Steam page too, when it's had some more testing.

Built like the arcade action-puzzlers of the mid-90s, Petal Crash is a very welcome addition to the block matching genre and is a joy to play. Released with Linux support on October 12 following a successful Kickstarter campaign in late 2019 the idea is great.

Petal Crash will be real familiar to anyone who has played a block-matching game, anything similar to Match-3 style and you know mostly what you're getting into here. However, it's not as simple as just matching tiles. You're not simply swapping spaces, you're actually throwing these coloured petals around the board to try and match the colours together. If they smash into another single block of the same colour, they explode and push away any other blocks attached.

The result of that is a seriously satisfying gameplay loop, one that allows you setup some ridiculous combinations. You could wipe out almost the entire board with a few well-placed blocks, although difficult it's doable. In my own time blasting through the timed mode, I've managed to set off some pretty big chains and it's so fun to watch it happen.

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This block-smashing idea works so well that there's even a versus mode, which really shows off just how great it is. You can play against another player locally or versus the AI in a few different modes (or customise the rules to your liking). I'm a big fan of the Tug of War mode, which sees each player compete on their own board to clear as many as possible and fill up a bar along the bottom to launch an attack. Each attack in this mode reduces the opponents hearts by one, and when all three are gone you win.

Petal Crash offers up a fantastic spin on the matching genre, allowing you to often sit back and watch the fireworks as blocks keep pushing each other around and explode everywhere. It's a lot of fun. The only downside is that it doesn't appear to have online leaderboards, so you can't show off your matching skill against others online. Other than that, it's simply wonderful.

You can buy Petal Crash on itch.io and Steam and I absolutely recommend it.

Ready for a fresh challenge? Conquered Celeste and want something more? Take a look at the high-speed precision platformer RITE which is now supported on Linux.

"RITE is a high-speed precision platformer where you must conquer a series of demanding trials,a rite of passage for every Nim. Find the key and reach the exit to move on to the next trial, and maybe collect some gold along the way. Who knows, they could prove valuable to those who like a brutal challenge…"

A game that doesn't shy away from how challenging it is, with some pretty lush looking pixel-art spread across 160 carefully crafted levels it looks quite excellent. Check out the trailer below:

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RITE was developed by pond games, a "team-of-one" studio based in Adelaide, Australia. RITE was a finalist in the 2020 Australian Game Developer Awards, so you know it's good if it manages to get right up to the top. It actually won in the Music and Best Emerging Game categories.

You can buy RITE on Steam .

After looking like it wouldn't reach the goal, A Fox Tale from Danny Peet managed what looked to be almost impossible on the Kickstarter campaign which has now finished. What looks like it could end up being quite a promising game, mixing together pixel-art with some beautiful lighting and an unusual protagonist that sees you evade capture, solve puzzles and soar across near impossible landscapes.

"As our four legged protagonist Eva, you are forced to take an unexpected journey. Explore and enjoy a world of wonder and horror, as you pass through your ever changing surroundings. However, the very nature of foxes means Eva is always cautious and this fox in particular has every reason to be..."

If you missed it, the original pitch is below:

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With a final goal of £15,000 which is hardly anything to make a game with, it really didn't look like it would hit it. Then Peet managed to get a big surge with a social media push right towards the end and it managed to get through the finishing line. Courtesy of the Kicktraq website, which shows off funding charts over time for any Kickstarter project, it shows what happened quite well. Just look at this upswing towards the end:

It really goes to show that you need a good social media presence when doing a Kickstarter campaign, something I repeatedly tell developers who email in after launching a campaign out of the blue and expect it to succeed. Thousands of games release each year, there's always plenty on Kickstarter going on at any one time - you need ways to cut through the noise. Just being on a store or a funding platform is not an instant way to pull people in. Thankfully, this had a happy ending.

You can follow A Fox Tale on the finished Kickstarter and Steam .

Since it's funded, we've listed it on our dedicated Crowdfunding Page .

Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild have announced a brand new expansion for Graveyard Keeper is on the way with Game Of Crone, after a long while of no updates.

With the last DLC released almost a year ago and not many updates since, it looked like they had moved on from this anti-Stardew experience with you looking after graves instead of a farm. In the Game Of Crone expansion you'll be looking after a bunch of escaped prisoners develop from a camp to a fortified settlement.

No trailer yet but they did share some shots:

Feature Highlight:

• 6-12 hours of extra gameplay.
• Build your own refugee camp and bring it to prosperity.
• Brand new bag mechanics!
• Get access to new dishes, gravestones, fences, and to teleportation scrolls.
• Deal with a vampire terrorizing a peaceful Village.
• Unravel the secret of the mysterious death of your predecessor.
• Find out even more terrible secrets of your old and new friends.
• Become an ally of Comrade Donkey and take part in the Revolution!

The release of Graveyard Keeper - Game Of Crone is set for October 27.

You can buy Graveyard Keeper on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .