The fall release calendar is shaping up to be a lot, and if you're like me you've got a backlog making accusatory noises from the corner of the room. So before the big stuff steamrolls everything, Kotaku's weekly roundup turned its attention to a couple of indie picks that deserve a moment in the sun: a 2.5D tactics game and a retro dungeon crawler. You can read the full piece over at Kotaku.

I love weeks like this. The ones where the conversation isn't about a nine-figure marketing budget or a leaked build, it's about small teams making weird, specific things. Because money buys you a bigger map, more mocap, and more rays traced, but it doesn't buy you taste. Taste comes from a developer who looks at a genre and thinks, what if we did this differently.

The 2.5D tactics pick is the one that grabbed me first. Tactics games live or die on readability, and that half-step between 2D and 3D is a sweet spot more studios should poke at. Anyone who's spent a late night in Final Fantasy Tactics or Into the Breach knows the feeling, that moment when the grid clicks in your brain and you see three turns ahead. I don't know yet how this one plays in practice, and Kotaku's piece is the place to get the actual details, but the label alone is enough to get me curious. When a small game nails that genre feel, there's no substitute for it.

Then there's the retro dungeon crawler, and you already know I'm weak for this stuff. I wrote recently that new games on dead hardware is a tradition I love more every year, and this scratches the same itch from a different angle. Not new hardware for old games, but old aesthetics on new games. There's a reason this style never actually died, it just went underground and got better. The genre's fans are some of the most devoted in gaming, and every time a new one surfaces, the corners of the internet that love them light up.

And that's really the argument for carving out time for indies right now, of all moments. Whenever a giant release lands, the quiet stuff, the tactics games and dungeon crawlers and weird little experiments, tends to get buried under the noise. So a weekend with one of these now beats a weekend in December, when everyone's attention gets swallowed whole by whatever the big thing turns out to be.

This is also where the community side of gaming lives, if you ask me. Big releases give us all a shared thing to yell about, sure, and I'll be right there yelling with you. But indies are where you find the Discord servers with 40 devoted members who all know each other's playstyles, the forums arguing about optimal party comps, the friend who says hey, I found this thing, you gotta try it. Community like that is the reason I never aged out of this hobby.

So check out Kotaku's picks, wishlist them, maybe actually play one this weekend instead of tabbing between the same three games you always tab between. And then tell me about it. What's the small game that's currently living rent-free in your head while everyone else talks about the big ones? Drop it in the comments. My Steam wishlist is a monster and I'm always feeding it.