Indie Games

Just in time for Halloween: The Consumed launches on Steam on October 23, 2026, and you can wishlist it right now. Wishlist on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/5230130/The_Consumed The Short Version You’re the night-shift security guard at the Hargrove Galleria, a dying mall where employees have been disappearing and stores have been quietly closing. You’ve got a flashlight, a camcorder, and a checklist. Your job is to secure every open store, file your report, and clock out. ...

Most fashion collabs get you a capsule drop, a lookbook, and a couple of influencer posts. GREY GRADIENT went a different way for Series 002. They partnered with indie studio OTR HVN and made a horror game. That game is The Consumed, and it hits Steam on October 23, 2026. A Fashion Brand That Wanted to Talk About Consumerism GREY GRADIENT’s idea for Series 002 is a fashion brand poking fun at how religious corporate culture has gotten. It’s a funny thing for a clothing label to take on, and that’s kind of the point. The Consumed treats the mall like a cathedral. The storefronts are chapels, the mannequins are saints, and spending money is the ritual everyone shows up for. ...

The indie game that’s been floating around as a promising demo since earlier this year is now out in full. Iron Abyss, a sci-fi horror mecha dungeon crawler from developer OTR HVN (with co-development from YG3), hit digital storefronts today for Windows PC, macOS, and Linux. The price: $9.99. A free demo remains available for anyone wanting a taste before buying. In case you missed the pre-launch chatter, Iron Abyss puts you in command of a three-pilot android crew — ASSAULT, MEDIC, and SYSTEMS — as they descend 30 floors into a sealed, post-apocalyptic structure. The game’s hook is its “sensor-rendered” visual style: you see the world through the mech’s amber wireframe reconstruction, never the actual environment. That aesthetic draws heavily from Evangelion, Alien, Blade Runner, and Soviet New Wave cinema, according to the developers, who’ve been transparent about their influences from the start. ...

The comms channel is dead air except for your own breathing. The IRON ARK’s sensors are the only thing standing between you and whatever’s actually down there. Three android pilots are waiting. The world has ended, Commander. You still have your orders. What Iron Abyss Actually Is If you’re dropping in for the first time: Iron Abyss is a sci-fi horror mecha dungeon crawler from OTR HVN, built in collaboration with YG3, and it’s one of the more distinctive atmospheric indie games to land this year. You command the IRON ARK and its three-pilot android crew — ASSAULT, MEDIC, SYSTEMS — as they descend into a buried, post-apocalyptic structure that was sealed off for reasons the game makes you piece together one floor at a time rather than hand you outright. Nothing is spelled out. You’re reading environment details, item fragments, and your crew’s own deteriorating state to reconstruct a story about a world that already ended. ...

You can’t really talk about dungeon crawlers without eventually landing on Wizardry — it’s one of the games the entire genre is built on top of. So when I found out it was a direct influence on Iron Abyss, it actually explained a lot about why the game feels the way it does. Descending Floor by Floor, On Purpose Wizardry’s whole structure is built around the dungeon as a place you methodically work through, level by level, learning its shape as you go. Iron Abyss keeps that bone-deep dungeon-crawler DNA intact — you’re descending through a sealed structure floor by floor, and the demo alone gives you procedurally-generated floors plus a handcrafted boss floor and a story floor. It’s not an open world pretending to be a dungeon crawler. It’s an actual descent, the way Wizardry always meant it. ...

Beast of Reincarnation just came out, and it’s a genuinely big deal — Game Freak’s first AAA game outside the Pokémon series, directed by someone who spent years on Pokémon’s battle systems and sound design. If you’ve been playing it, or you’re about to, I think you should have Iron Abyss on your radar too. Post-Apocalyptic Without a Clean Fix Beast of Reincarnation drops you into the year 4026, humanity on the edge of collapse, land corrupted by beasts nobody fully understands. Emma and Koo aren’t saving a healthy world, they’re surviving the wreckage of one that’s already mostly gone. Iron Abyss opens from the same emotional place — the world has ended, and you’re not trying to prevent that, you’re descending into what’s left of it to find out why. Neither game offers you the comfort of a world worth saving in its original state. You’re just trying to make sense of what’s left. ...

I didn’t expect to be making this comparison, but here we are: NieR: Automata and Iron Abyss are circling a lot of the same emotional territory, and once you notice it you can’t really unnotice it. Androids, Not Humans, Carrying the Story NieR: Automata’s whole gut-punch works because 2B, 9S, and A2 are androids grappling with something close to humanity in a world that doesn’t have humans left to validate it. Iron Abyss puts you in command of a three-pilot android crew doing something similar — descending into a sealed structure beneath a world that’s already ended, uncovering memories that were never meant to survive. Neither game needed human protagonists to make the loss land. If anything, the android distance makes it hit harder. ...

Usually when I write one of these comparisons, I’m the one connecting the dots. This time I don’t have to — OTR HVN has said flat out that BioShock shaped Iron Abyss, and once you know where to look, it’s obvious. It Starts With Echo Iron Abyss gives you five commanders to choose from, and Echo — the AI-designated one — is explicitly built on BioShock’s Big Daddy as a reference point. You can feel it the second it’s pointed out: something clearly built for a purpose, not entirely at ease in its own skin, more machine than person and all the more unsettling for it. If Big Daddies were the character in BioShock that stuck with you the longest, Echo is going to hit the same nerve. ...

I want to be upfront about something before I get into this one: System Shock and Iron Abyss are not the same kind of game. One’s a real-time immersive sim where you’re picking locks and hacking cameras, the other’s a turn-based mecha dungeon crawler. But the feeling both of them leave you with? That’s where it gets interesting. View this post on Instagram You’re Never Actually Looking at the World Directly This is the connection that hooked me. System Shock never lets you trust your own eyes completely — you’re piecing Citadel Station together through logs, cameras, SHODAN’s voice, a HUD that’s mediating everything. Iron Abyss does its own version of this literally: you watch the descent from the IRON ARK’s command deck, and everything renders as amber wireframe sensor data because the world outside is too sealed, too dark, too damaged to observe directly. Neither game gives you the comfort of just looking at things. You’re always looking at an interpretation. ...

Hellblade is one of those games people bring up whenever “sanity as a mechanic instead of a theme” comes up, and honestly, it should be. So when I started seeing it name-dropped in Iron Abyss discussions, I had to sit with why that comparison actually works. Sanity Isn’t Flavor Text in Either Game Hellblade built its whole identity around Senua’s psychosis being mechanically real — the whispers, the darkness creeping up her arm, the (fake, but terrifying at the time) permadeath threat tied to her corruption meter. It wasn’t a stat you glanced at, it was the game talking to you. Iron Abyss goes for something similar with its own sanity system: pilots accumulate insanity from combat losses and from perceiving things the IRON ARK’s sensors were never built to render, and it’s not sitting quietly in a menu — it’s shaping what you can actually do turn to turn. ...