If one thing has become clear to me over the last couple of years, it’s that Those Who Game need even more ways to spend their cash on discounted games. In the lull between digital sales events that are engineered with more precision than Black Friday’s SWAT support, wallets are exposed to a paltry forty two thousand bundles and Steam has not yet incorporated second-long flash sales into its infrastructure.

Good news arrives in the form of Indie Pi ata, a collection of games selected by developers. They’re all on Steam and if you own one, you qualify for discounts on the rest. I’m not particularly interested in the discounts (too common), but I am intrigued by the idea of dev-curated collections. Particularly now that keeping track of ‘new’ releases on Steam has become rather difficult.

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Jim was the first member of RPS to wander down the Road Not Taken and we’ve barely seen him since. It’d take a brave or foolhardy individual to follow in his footsteps, trekking deep into the life sim roguelike puzzler, and I reckon I’m the right man for the job. The video below shows the core mechanic in action, portraying the game as a cross between the developer’s own Triple Town and Bomberman. Except with lost children and twigs instead of bombs. The video doesn’t tell the full story though – Road Not Taken is a game of secrets. Each playthrough lasts for a maximum of 15 in-game years, although death will often occur before that time, and multiple lifetimes will be required to discover all.

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So, it’s fairly widely believed that King, creators of Candy Crush Saga, don’t seem a very lovely lot. In fact, last week brought news of some alleged actions that are deeply unsavoury (geddit?), as the creator of CandySwipe revealed the extent to which King are apparently going to make his game – made in tribute to his late mother – go away. A game that, while not a match-3, happens to have a lot in common with Candy Crush Saga, only it came out two years before King’s own. This follows unpleasant behaviour toward Stoic and The Banner Saga, and their attempts to trademark basic English words and use this to legally threaten other developers. So, all in all, yeah, possibly not a company you’d want over for dinner.

Bearing all this in mind, it would seem rather nice if an enormous number of people were to stop playing their games, if you ask me. But of course, a lot of CCS players aren’t going to be RPS readers, but rather your mum or dad, cousin, colleague or friend, and maybe they’d be less keen to play if they knew who made it. Maybe you are too. So, with this in mind, below are my suggestions for games to play instead.>

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