Every Wednesday, dive into the Indie Select Hub — your gateway to a fresh, curated indie collection plus four themed spotlights that rotate weekly! You can always find this collection hub in the XBOX Store and on XBOX.com/IndieSelects.
Halloween has never been just about scares. Sure, there’s plenty of room for heart-pounding frights, but it’s also a season that celebrates imagination, creativity, and stepping into worlds beyond the ordinary. This month, indie developers embraced that spirit in unforgettable ways.
For October, the ID@XBOX team has curated six standout Indie Selects that invite you to discover mysterious realms, conquer new challenges, and uncover stories waiting to be told. From epic battles and eldritch horrors to cozy puzzles and island adventures, each game offers a richly crafted world filled with surprises around every corner.
So, whether you’re seeking thrills, mystery, or a new adventure to get lost in, here are this month’s Indie Selects (in no particular order):
Mortal Shell II
Mortal Shell II
Playstack
Mortal Shell II is still unapologetically challenging, but combat feels faster and more aggressive this time around. The removal of the traditional stamina gauge means encounters aren’t simply about waiting for a bar to refill. You can stay in the fight, combining melee weapons, sidearms, abilities and brutal executions. It makes combat feel considerably more fluid than before.
The world has grown too. Rather than simply pushing you down a predetermined path, Mortal Shell II encourages exploration across a compact, interconnected open world filled with hidden areas, dungeons, weapons, upgrades and, naturally, plenty of horrible things waiting to ruin your afternoon.
What I particularly enjoy is that exploration feels connected to progression. Finding another Shell isn’t just another collectible checked off a list. It can completely change how you approach the game. Weapons offer extensive upgrade paths as well, giving you plenty of room to shape your own approach to combat.
Mortal Shell II certainly isn’t interested in making life easy for you, but there’s something satisfying about gradually turning the tables. You go from cautiously approaching every new enemy to becoming the nightmare wandering through their world.
If you enjoy dark fantasy, exploration, challenging combat and the satisfaction of mastering a game that initially seems determined to destroy you, Mortal Shell II is absolutely worth having on your radar.
– Steven Allen
Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game
Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game
PM-Studios, Inc.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to assemble your dream team of benders and settle legendary rivalries yourself, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is ready to make that happen. This 2D tag-team fighter brings together iconic characters from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra,” combining elemental bending, flashy special moves, and fast-paced team combat into an experience that’s easy to jump into and rewarding to master.
As a longtime fan of the Avatar universe, this game immediately grabbed my attention. There’s something incredibly satisfying about watching beloved characters leap from the screen into a fighting game that feels so true to the world they come from. From the first match, I found myself grinning at familiar abilities, character interactions, and bending styles brought to life in exciting new ways.
What impressed me most is how distinct every fighter feels. Experimenting with different team combinations kept me coming back for “just one more match” as I discovered new strategies and synergies. Fans of games like Dragon Ball FighterZ, Marvel vs. Capcom, and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid will recognize the thrill of building a team and learning how each character complements the others.
There’s plenty to learn with its tag mechanics and assists, but the journey of improving feels rewarding and keeps every victory exciting. Whether you grew up with “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” fell in love with “The Legend of Korra,” or simply enjoy energetic team-based fighting games, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game captures the heart of the franchise while delivering a fun and action-packed experience that’s hard to put down.
– Jessica Ronnell
Mewgenics
Mewgenics
Nicalis Inc.
From the moment I started playing Mewgenics, I knew I was in for a wild ride. From Edmund McMillen, the developer behind The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy, and The End is Nigh, Mewgenics is a roguelike tactical turn-based RPG presented in a unique and cartoonish macabre art style, filled with dark humor and clever references.
Mewgenics offers a staggering amount of content that easily demands over a hundred hours of playtime, complete with deep strategy and a generational breeding system (yes, you breed mutant cats).
The game hooks you right away with its chaotic setup, you’re managing a house full of mutated cats and sending them out on tactical, grid-based runs. Every item, skill, and attribute is randomized, meaning no two runs ever play out the same way. When your cats survive a brutal dungeon crawl, they bring back scars and mutations that you can pass down to future generations. Breeding the ultimate mutant cat squad and trying to balance their weird genetic traits became an obsession.
The dark and sometimes graphic humor and the relentless difficulty might not be for everyone, but for me, it hit the right buttons. Mewgenics easily eats dozens of hours, keeping you hooked on trying just one more run. Mewgenics creates something entirely fresh, endlessly repayable, and wonderfully grotesque, fur-real!.
– Oscar Polanco
The Sinking City 2
The Sinking City 2
Frogwares
The Sinking City 2 takes the series in a bold new direction, delivering a third-person Lovecraftian survival horror experience set in a flooded 1929 Arkham. The story follows Calvin Rafferty as he searches for a way to save his fiancée, Faye, who has been trapped in a supernatural slumber after a ritual gone wrong.
From the moment I stepped into Arkham’s flooded streets armed with little more than a flashlight and a pistol, the game nailed its horror atmosphere. Traveling between districts by boat gives the city an open feel, while interconnected environments, puzzle-solving, investigation mechanics, and scarce resources keep the tension high.
What truly sets The Sinking City 2 apart, however, is its enemy design. Familiar Lovecraftian creatures provide plenty of frantic encounters, but the real stars are the Slither: parasitic worms that survive after their host dies. If ignored, they can crawl into nearby corpses, reanimate them, and force you to fight the same enemies all over again. This simple but brilliant mechanic transformed every multi-enemy encounter into a desperate scramble and created a constant sense of dread.
I don’t think I sat down once while playing The Sinking City 2. Between its unsettling atmosphere, intriguing mystery, satisfying survival horror gameplay, and genuinely frightening enemies, it stands out as one of the genre’s most memorable experiences and a must-play for horror fans.
– Raymond Estrada
Woodo
Woodo
Daedalic Entertainment
Woodo is that takes the cozy puzzle genre and turns it into something closer to a child’s toy box coming to life as it tells you a story. The puzzles put you in the position of assembling handcrafted wooden dioramas piece by piece, watching each empty, colorless scene slowly fill with detail, animation, and life as you click objects into their correct spots. It’s a small, tactile premise, but it’s executed with a level of care that makes every placement feel extraordinarily satisfying.
The narrative at the heart of Woodo is a story about Foxy, a city girl sent to the countryside for the summer, and her growing friendship with a local villager, who happens to be a frog named, well, Ben the Frog. The narrative unfolds across a series of interconnected dioramas, each one capturing a different moment from their shared adventure, guided by a warm, friendly narrator’s voice that makes the whole experience feel less like a puzzle game and more like a warm, cuddly bedtime story. And while the gameplay is generally pretty simple, there is some complexity to it. The assembly of the wooden pieces isn’t necessarily linear – you have to rotate and explore the 3D space to uncover hidden pieces, while watching the world react and transform with playful animations as you place each one. This instills in the gameplay an almost toy-like sense of discovery.
That nostalgic pull is really the whole point. Woodo doesn’t exist to make you wrack your brain or lose a hundred hours in layer after layer of puzzle mechanics. Instead, it elicits the particular kind of childlike wonder that comes from sparking an adventure out of the simplest object. It’s a game that adapts to your pace, offering help when you need it without breaking the spell, and by the time you’ve filled in its last diorama, it’s hard not to feel like a kid again.
– Glenn Gregory
Lou’s Lagoon
Lou’s Lagoon
Megabit Publishing
I honestly didn’t expect to dig into this one as hard as I have, but here we are. Lou’s Lagoon is a cozy exploration-and-crafting adventure where you play as an “up for whatever” helping-hand-style character who is just looking to lend some resourcefulness in the recovery efforts to reunite a series of tropical storm-hit islands via collecting, building, and resource gathering… And I may even discover where my missing Uncle Lou (a legend among the island denizens) went? Count me in!
To do all the things needed, you’ll wield everything from a two-way vacuum-like tool to a fishing rod (collect those fish scales!) and especially a handy glider to ride gusty currents. Roam the islands on foot while uncovering chests, befriend some in-need beach-faring folk, and complete quests that in turn let you upgrade your arsenal of gadgets to continue your journey. But the main hook for me is being able to pilot a little seaplane across the different archipelagos that dot your game world – the sense of discovery gave me that Skies of Arcadia feel (Dreamcast hive, rise up!). Add in busting through swag-filled air balloon loot drops and seeking out broken radio towers to repair to get comms systems up and running to fast-travel when you don’t want to fly – all of it feels gratifying in a way that hoovered up hours of my time and kept me up past my bedtime with no complaints.
Sure, some of the guidance and systems feel a little opaque or DIY at times, and man, the currency can sometimes be a bear to amass for purchasing new goods… but really, the joy in completing a goal or upgrading your “Swirler” (your two-way vacuum tool) to collect wool off of a grumpy island llama-like creature…totally worth it.
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