Gamebox 2.0: Games of April 2025
April typically brings rain showers, but it also rained down some great games for us to play. We racked up high scores in 3D space in Pinball FX VR, fixed up spooky houses in Haunted House Renovators, survived a zombie apocalypse in Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, battled an intergalactic cosmic horror in Starless Abyss, and more. Check out everything we’ve played for Gamebox 2.0 this month.
Starless Abyss (Zach): From Konafa Games and No More Robots, Starless Abyss combines cosmic, Lovecraftian horror and sci-fi in a new deckbuilding roguelike. You play as a Proximae, awoken from stasis to journey deep into space, battle unimaginable creatures, and ultimately kill the powerful Outer Gods. With a fleet of ships, you battle the various horrors via turn-based combat scenarios. You can move your ships around the battlefield to try and gain a tactical advantage, and then you use cards drawn from your deck to initiate attacks, build up defenses, gain temporary boosts, and more. You have limited energy per turn, and each card costs a certain amount. You and the enemy forces take turns, and if you survive the battle, you’ll gain rewards and proceed in the run. You are usually presented with two options for what you want to do, each offering a different award, so you can decide what you want to focus on and how you progress.
Starless Abyss draws clear inspiration from Into the Breach, both in its visual presentation and in its combat design, where players are given advance knowledge of enemy actions and must carefully plan, reposition, or brace for impact. There’s a wide array of weapons and powers you can build up, from basic lasers to nuclear missiles. None of the cards are tied to a specific ship in your three-ship fleet, so you can use whichever card and whichever ship, which makes the strategy much more flexible and enjoyable. The card-playing mechanic also feels more dynamic than many deckbuilders, where there’s more of an effect and impact as you feel like you are throwing it into the arena instead of just clicking it and dragging it to a designated spot. You can build up some awesome combos as you gain more cards, like gaining mines each turn or deploying automated turrets, but the enemies, especially boss encounters, are no pushovers. In typical rougelike fashion, you’ll die plenty of times and have to start a new run, but you will unlock new Proximae with different abilities and permanent upgrades that will help you advance further in your quest. Starless Abyss is a fantastic deck builder with that addictive, “one more turn” mentality that will keep you playing long after you intended, and it combines both aesthetics and mechanics in cool new ways. Starless Abyss was released on April 25, and you can check it out now on Steam.
War Rats: The Rat’em Up – Early Access (Chris): When the humans are away, the rats come out to play — and by ‘play,’ they mean rodent warfare. War Rats has launched into early access this month; this new version builds upon the demo released during Steamfest and addresses fixes based on community feedback. Wootusart Industries’ War Rats: The Rat ‘Em Up is a cartoonish and violent Tower defense, where the main mechanic revolves around strategic placement and resource management, challenging players to build structures that hold off hordes of enemies. As the newest and brightest soldier in the war machine, you’ll fight to secure build sites and push toward the enemy headquarters before they get the chance to invade your own. But it’s easy to get cheesed out of battles by an enemy laser or one bad grenade toss. So step aside, hounds of war, the rats are ready to invade the battlefield.
As an Early Access build, this includes a whole campaign and skirmish mode, both of which will highlight the game’s core mechanics of base building and weaponry. Campaign mode follows the player taking the role of the Rat commander and leading the charge against the TechnoRats forces. The goal of each level is to lead your rat troops into the enemy base and blow it up. The TechnoRats have taken their positions and are prepared to deploy as many cybernetic bodies as necessary to stop you. At the moment, there are 1o levels to battle across, with each level featuring more aggressive and challenging resistance. The skirmish mode allows players to set up a customized level, where they can select enemy types and placement in the level, then see if they can outmaneuver them all.
The main loop of the game revolves around attacking and retreating. The player must defend their positions as enemies emerge in waves to attack. How well you defend can expand further into the enemy side, or get pushed back closer to your area. There are fixed building sites on each level that let players construct one of three types of structures, all of which help you or your rat troops survive longer in battle. Aside from defensive warfare, War Rats emphasizes good resource management by testing how well the player can utilize credits (CHz) gathered during battle. CHz are little energy balls that are found scattered either in barrels, dropped by enemies, or harvested by pumps created by the player. CHz are used to purchase structures, call troops, and acquire new weaponry and upgrades at a shop between levels. You can burn through a lot of CHz from simple mistakes, such as calling in expensive troops at the wrong moment in a fight or building too many structures you don’t need.
It’s easy to assume these furry squeaks and tiny weapons would fool you into thinking this game will be a cakewalk. Blind charging into gunfights is almost like asking the game to restart the level again. The player could gain a significant advantage by rushing early at the start of the level, but pushing too far into enemy territory before you are prepared can lead to a swift end to your little rat commander. The enemy’s firepower and defenses become more deadly the closer it is to its base. Building up your defenses, such as turrets and walls, allows you to fight with cover or retreat to a safer position while your troops arrive to provide backup. You can easily gain a lot more coverage in a level by sending in costly but deadlier rat troopers to take down more armed enemies for you.
While the game doesn’t heavily emphasize it, farming CHz becomes a top priority later in the campaign mode. If you have been playing the game as an action shooter without really making big upgrades after each level, you’ll come across at least one battle that will get you killed over and over again. Luckily, the roguelike progression carries over upgrades and weaponry from each death, so you’ll adjust your gear and playstyle to figure out a strategy to win. Once a stronger enemy defeats you, you’ll have a sense of what weapons and perks you’d like to enhance so you can make the next run a fair fight. However, those looking for a harder challenge can play the Iron Rat Mode, which restarts the campaign back to the first level on the player’s death.
War Rats is a fun, action-packed title filled with crude humor and addictive gameplay. The visuals proudly flaunt the game’s silly premise. The mechanics are solid, but tend to slow down when you’re actively grinding for more CHz instead of passively harvesting them to keep up with the rhythm of combat. The Campaign gameplay doesn’t feel too unbalanced by players who quickly burn through resources or become CHz hoarders, since later levels feel like a resource management skill check. If you’re smart about your resources early in the game, you can lead a great assault charge that can quickly bring the fighting to the enemy’s front door in a matter of minutes. But the game is meant for players to go through repeated trial and error until they are prepared. For an Early Access build, a solid foundation of designs is laid out that I am eager to see further explored. The campaign can last a few hours and is easy for almost anyone to pick up and play. There are options to provide veteran players with a finer challenge if they desire it, and an upcoming multiplayer mode will determine which players can rise to the top of the leaderboard. If you are in the mood for warfare, but don’t want overcomplex human drama, then check out War Rats today! War Rats was released for Early Access on April 22nd for Steam.
Pinball FX VR (Zach): The pinball wizards at Zen Studios leaped into VR this month with the launch of Pinball FX VR on Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S, and Pro. Get transported back to the 80s and into the virtual arcade to play various virtual pinball machines. You get three Zen Studios originals, Sky Pirates: Treasure of the Clouds, Pinball Noir and Curse of the Mummy when you buy the base game and there is DLC to add tables based on Univeral TV properties like Knight Rider, Xena and Battlestar Galactica as well as classic Williams pinball machines in VR for the first time including Indiana Jones and the Pinball Adventure, World Cup Soccer, The Addams Family, Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Twilight Zone (I was given all the tables unlocked for our review copy). The base game is $9.99, and the rest of the tables can be purchased separately. There’s a pack for the three Universal TV tables, and each of the Williams tables is their own separate purchase. If you’ve played other Zen Studios titles and possibly bought these tables in those games, you’ll have to repurchase them here. The tables look fantastic, with the real tables being exceptional recreations of their actual physical counterparts, and the Zen Studios originals feeling like they are based on actual machines. I’ve played many virtual pinball games, many of them from Zen Studios, but Pinball FX VR is second only to standing in front of an actual pinball machine. The sense of scale makes you feel like you are standing in an arcade playing these pinball machines, and little touches like being able to drop in a quarter to start the game and pull back the launcher add to the immersion.
Of course, this being VR, some touches can only exist virtually. Each table has special effects and characters around the table while you play, which react to things happening in the game and add some fun atmosphere. For instance, if you’re playing Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure, a full-size Indy stands next to the table and shakes his head in disappointment when you drain the ball or react positively to a big score or combo. All the tables have something like this, and the sense of presence and scale is fantastic. If these characters are distracting, you can always turn them off.
Along with a classic three-ball pinball game, there are several other modes, like arcade, that allow you to turn on different power-ups and practice that enables you to play with unlimited balls. There are challenges on each table, like trying to get the highest score with only one ball or having a limited number of flipper hits. There’s also a campaign mode where you take on specific challenges on each table and can unlock tickets that will let you spin a prize wheel and unlock customization items, tapes for playing different in-game music, and more. You can take most of this customization in Mixed Reality, where you can see your actual space and place any tables and customization items wherever you want to create your own arcade. New tables will be added as the game progresses, and I cannot wait to see what else gets added. This is the best way I’ve ever experienced pinball outside of standing in front of an actual machine, and if you have a Meta headset and love pinball, you must check this out.
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days (Zach): The latest entry in the Into the Dead series that started with the first-person action game in 2012, Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days takes the action back to the 1980s and spins the perspective around to become a side-scrolling survival game. Set in Walton City, TX, you choose from several pairs of survivors, all of whom have different traits and advantages, and then set out trying to survive as long as possible. You have a base shelter that you need to keep fortified, and you can upgrade and add new functionality from resources you collect on scavenging missions. There are day and night phases, and you can set each survivor to do one task in each cycle, like fortifying the barriers, sleeping, crafting equipment, etc. You need to manage their rest, hunger, and health, and if you let one or more of those factors lapse, your survivors will gain some very negative traits that will affect how they can perform. If you choose to go on a scavenging run, you equip your chosen survivor with whatever equipment you think may help in their backpack, and then you travel to the site you chose to scavenge. You proceed through that location and find areas where you can collect resources, but the dead are also roaming. If they kill your survivor, they are gone, and the other needs to go on alone. If both survivors die, your run is over, and you’ll need to start over and try again, but this isn’t a roguelike, as there aren’t any upgrades to unlock for a future run.
There’s a great risk/reward mechanic to the scavenging runs, as you can back out and return to your shelter at any time but you’ll want to try and get as much as you can so you can unlock new functions, weapons and items at your shelter but, if you stay too long and get overwhelmed by the dead, all of that scavenging was for nothing. You can peek into rooms before opening doors to see if you can spot any zombies, and you can always run and try to escape if things get too hairy. Weapons are also a must, and if you find yourself without a weapon in a scavenging mission, you probably need to bail. As you progress, you unlock new locations where you can scavenge, and some of them are potential new shelters where, if you clear out all the zombies, you can move there and stay one step ahead of the zombie hordes. The game looks great with some great details to the world, and it feels like you are looking into a diorama as you move from room to room, almost like an interactive version of the base map from a game like X-Com. The lighting is also fantastic, with a great use of light and dark, and going into dark areas with just your flashlight can get pretty unnerving. The game is in Early Access, and new updates are planned for the future, including a significant update in May that will add some new mechanics and general fixes. There’s a demo on Steam if you want to get a taste of the game for free. Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days has a great gameplay loop and just enough survival and crafting mechanics to keep things interesting, but not overwhelming, and the scavenging missions are a great, tense push to see how far you want to gamble.
Haunted House Renovator (Chris): Flipping houses is no easy task for anyone. There’s a lot to analyze, budget, and plan before you even begin to choose which color to paint the walls. But nothing could make that task even worse when sprites and mischief-making creatures become squatters on your potential fortunes. Image Power and PlayWay present Haunted House Renovator, a spooky yet cozy construction and ghostly exorcism simulator. You take up the role of a newly hired employee of the Haunted House Renovator, a renovations company that specializes in fixing up homes that have beneficial property value, but are the hallowed grounds for ethereal entities. You are tasked with the demolition and cleanup work of a regular renovation, but you will also be prepared to perform ghost evictions of supernatural beings. But the sprites like their hiding spots and will delay your renovations, so you’ll have to be clever and crafty if you want to get a big profit on your work.
Haunted House Renovator has a great premise, utilizing construction mechanics typically found in casual simulator titles —the kind of games where you perform relaxing tasks and experience those rewarding dopamine spikes, with gentle frightful visuals and jumpscares. The easiest way to describe the game is to liken it to a mix of House Flipper and Luigi’s Mansion, but Image Power does put in the extra effort to introduce new game elements to deal with the supernatural. Each room of a house has a certain number of tasks that need to be addressed for it to be considered “fixed”; every room has different requirements and decor, and the game generally lets you freely choose how you want to start your renovations. The game does not handhold the player a lot once you get past the initial tutorial instructions. You follow a list of requirements on your hub when you enter a room, and use an index to see a room’s quest requirements to figure out what exactly a room needs to pass. The clean-up work and making minor fixes are easy, but I got frustrated scrolling through menus to figure out which exact items I need to purchase to fulfill some of the room’s vague quest requirements. This doesn’t happen for every room, but there is a learning curve involved in determining which items mean what and how you want to place them.
There is a fun mechanic to how you deal with the supernatural elements that doesn’t just make the player a handyman ghostbuster. To encourage them to leave the house peacefully, you will need to analyze the sprites you are encountering and the demands it is seeking. If you meet their demands, you get a reward of treasures that will increase your budget. If you are frustrated or want to complete the renovation task quickly, you can use your launcher or hammer to purge the sprite forcefully. However, doing so will not leave a bonus reward. Typically, most sprites cause minor inconveniences, such as tossing the room around or leaving goopy plasma trails, all of which can be easily cleaned. Meaner sprites will actively destroy items and hinder your renovation progress. How you approach each sprite is the player’s choice and depends on your patience for mayhem.
Haunted House Renovator is an engaging simulator title that allows players to get as invested and detailed in their renovation project as they like. The frights in this game are family-friendly, so you can expect no major scares to discourage your reconstruction creativity. I would’ve been carrying my hammer all the time if that were the case. Since this game relies on physics-based placement, it’ll take some time to get used to the sensitive controls. You can carefully place items in a perfect setup and watch it all topple from a wild chair toss you didn’t mean to perform. I appreciate that the game avoids forcing players to spend hours grinding resources, as mistakes can be quickly corrected, and encourages players to explore more rooms at once instead of working in a linear order. So, whether you’re a laid-back simulator fan or a horror lover craving a slower thrill, Haunted House Renovator should be on your next cozy gaming session. Haunted House Renovator will be released on April 30th for Steam.
Seafrog (Zach): Coming from OhMyMe Games, Seafrog offers a colorful combination of platforming and skateboarding. You play as the titular Seafrog, an aquatic mechanic trying to escape from a mysterious sinkhole in the middle of the ocean. He makes his way between different ships, gathering supplies to upgrade his ship and fix it enough to get away. Seafrog’s main mechanic is a rocket-powered wrench that Seafrog rides like a skateboard. You can grind on rails, run up walls, and launch off ramps, and you can do tricks to build up a boost meter to reach higher and more out-of-reach areas. The controls take some time to get used to, and you’ll probably not go exactly where you want to at first, or be unable to reach a specific area. Once you get the hang of it, there’s a definite cool flow to the gameplay as you blast around the different areas, fixing leaking outlets and unlocking new areas of each ship.
Along with the platforming, you’ll battle enemies using the rocket wrench’s boost and engage in some crazy boss battles. Along the way, you’ll also find mod chips that will give you boosts like more health and learn more mechanics that will help you explore further. The game has a great cartoony art style with 2.5D graphics, and it sometimes feels like it’s evoking Dreamcast or PS1 era games. The music is also great and helps add to the fun of exploring each area. If you can get the hang of the controls, Seafrog is a fun plat. It definitely feels unique from many other games in the genre. You can check it out right now on Steam.
