Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here on Venus Patrol for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

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There’s sort of no better way to spend an hour or so of your Wednesday than with Exotworking‘s just-released game, The Visit, which, finally, fully considers — to all of its various logical conclusions — the ethics of retro-platformer sociopathy.

It’s a brief, perfect short-story of a game which initially formed out of a 48 hour jam, by Irina Gross, Benedikt Hummel, and Majus Fietzek, who you may recognize as the developer who landed himself a Double Fine internship by putting together a fully playable adventure game “application”.

Just as funny (if not as anarchist & severe) as TheCatamites’ Murder Dog, you’ll be finished with The Visit when you’ve branched out on all six punchline paths, only the three most obvious of which I’ve yet found, each as satisfying as the last — the best kind of mid-week distraction. [The Visit, via Tim Schafer]