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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You’ve seen the trailer, but Incredipede creator (& real live Spelunky character) Colin Northway has just posted an extended video breakdown of how to solve one of the game’s challenges, where the player’s asked to scoop up a falling bonus apple from behind a wall and deliver it to the goal before Quozzle — the game’s main character — does herself.

Admits Northway, of the seven minutes of struggle it eventually takes:

I actually thought up this level on the bus. I also thought up a nice solution to it. Unfortunately the solution I thought would work didn’t work at all so I tried various things in this video until I got it. It’s not a great level and didn’t have the showiest solution but it gives you an idea of how to play.

[How to Beat a Level in Incredipede, via Northway Games]

[VP Rewind is a quick look back at the important events of the past week or two that should have been on Venus Patrol had it actually been alive.]

Already available for discounted pre-orders (due for release in just a few short months) or for getting Greenlit on Steam, if that is your wont, Incredipede is the latest from globe-trotting developer Colin Northway, first seen around these parts several years back having found somewhat overnight success with his very first Flash game, Fantastic Contraption, now a multi-platform powerhouse in its own right.

Incredipede doesn’t fall too far from the Contraption tree-of-knowledge, as it were, still apparently being primarily concerned with creating ambulatory creatures that traverse from one side of a level to another, but what’s most worthy of note here is just how much adding just one reactive eye can elicit real empathy & tension from a player — as the video above amply proves.

As a side note, I won’t take too much credit, but I definitely can still recall an old email thread where I ranted, “you gotta make it look like the Codex Seraphinianus!”, mostly because I can’t find the email anymore, but also because Incredipede artist Thomas Shahan went into so much more fantastic territory than I could have even anticipated, and all I had to offer was a pile of words. [via Northway Games]