Welcome to Indie Watch, a regular feature here at P2 where our Editorial team take it in turns to highlight 2 or 3 Indie titles that have them excited. It is our chance to show off some games that you may have missed and a way to help boost the things we love most about the industry. Join us each week for a new edition.
Indie Watch - The Indigo Initiative & Enfant
The Indigo Initiative
When a friend of Player2, Jono Pech, reached out to see if we’d come and check out his game, The Indigo Initiative at PAX AUS this year, I jumped at the opportunity. Jono is a fantastic writer, but secondly, what Clinton McCleary, studio founder, had put together looked incredibly appealing to me. Picture a portal game, with more than one solution to any puzzle, and a design philosophy that puts out Breath Of The Wild/Tears Of The Kingdom auras, and then check out some footage of The Indigo Initiative, and I’m confident that what you hoped for when you imagined the game, will match with what you see on screen.
The Indigo Initiative is a very promising puzzle game, and it’s being improved upon all the time. The player, has access to a gun that can absorb different elements, and then shoot them to navigate through different types of puzzles. There’s also a telekinetic ability that will help you move objects around. Perhaps you need to melt down some obstacles with fire to expose some wiring, which you then use an electrical element to power up, which prompts the obstacle to move. Maybe you use your telekinetic power to create a ladder out of buzz-saw plates which you’ve shot into a wall, only to then jump on top of on your way up.
Different puzzles can have a variety of solutions, and the PAX AUS experience allowed the team to observe player behaviour, and make changes to the level design, to make some of the approaches that players employed into viable ways to navigate their way through the game. The power of playtesting huh!
I’m excited to see more from the game in the future, it looks, and plays incredibly well.
Enfant
Enfant caught my eye in the weeks leading up to PAX AUS 2025 when the YouTube algorithm magically put the game in front of me. Enfant is a 3D Metroidvania that is already looking and playing extremely well. You’re an elephant in a post-human world where you’re fighting for survival in a world filled with a variety of threats. In very Resident Evil fashion, your backpack allows you to hold onto a range of different resources, which you can use to break or burn down obstacles, and fight off attackers. There will undoubtedly be more cool tools at your disposal, but the small sample size, paired with the logical ability of an elephant to hoover up water and blast it around, and presumably other elephant-based skills.
In the grand scheme of things, Enfant is still quite early in its development, but in combining a suite of fantastic gameplay systems, gorgeous visuals, and fascinating world design, the promise of Enfant is enormous. There are areas for continued development though. While MetroidVania’s are known for not necessarily holding your hand through the world exploration, a little more could be done to highlight the golden path a bit more. It’s simply about balancing what they currently have.
I’m hooked by what Zebrar are developing, and cannot wait to see more.
