Indie jungle, the mighty jungle.

Hello and welcome back to another dose of your indie intake. This week we’re talking about updates to come in serial adventure Strange Brigade, The Golden Joystick Awards, and a nifty little dating game that’s in the works. So, without further ado, let’s get to it.

Dead Cells wins Best Indie Game of the Year

Dead Cells beat the likes of Minit, Celeste, and Owlboy to take home the Best Indie Game of the Year award at this year’s Golden Joystick Awards.

The hard-as-nails Metroidvania from developers Twin Sticks had a bumpy release, with much of the attention for the game taken over by a controversial incident concerning a former IGN employee. But even in the midst of that incident, the game received a huge amount of positive reviews early on and the game has seemingly gone from strength to strength.

Celeste developers Matt Makes Games and Noel Berry also had a lot to celebrate, with their beautifully challenging platformer going toe-to-toe with the likes of God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 for the Best Game of the Year Award, and while they didn’t win, it’s a rare acknowledgement for such a small studio.

You can pick Dead Cells up for 20% off on Steam during the Autumn sale, so go on – treat yourself!

Strange Brigade is getting a new difficulty mode

1930’s adventure inspired shooter, Strange Brigade, is getting a pretty big update next week, and introducing a new “Extreme” difficulty mode, and a fancy new photo mode.

The free update will let players pause the game at choice moments and snazzy up their screenshots using an array of -we’re assuming – campy filters, before sharing moments of them booting a mummy or chilling in Egypt.

The new Extreme mode is pretty self-explanatory, enemies are much healthier (especially seeing that they’re already dead) and a lot tougher, so expect to use the traps littered around environments a little more.

The two updates come alongside the introduction of Score Attack levels and a new Horde map, called Void. Dan thought Strange Brigade a fun shoot ’em up overall even if the shooting is a little janky, and we had the chance to speak to Ben Fisher about the game before its release, so have a read and a watch if you haven’t played the game yet.

Boyfriend Dungeon developers working on a new dating game

Kitfox Games, the minds behind rogue-like Boyfriend Dungeon, where you romance your weapons to level them up, have released a whole new dating game and it sounds pretty strange.

Mostly because the game, called Bad Cupid, works using procedurally generated flirtings. The game is spent choosing on places two AI bots go for a date and then vote on what they say during the conversation. The idea of procedural dialogue is, without doubt, an interesting one and hopefully we won’t be sitting there watching the same lines being spouted out every other minute.

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