Dinos with swords, making music with gnomes and other new indie games worth checking out

A Spinosaurus Earns Its Blade

Dinoblade is the kind of origin story that the indie space seems to specialise in: a silly idea that turns into a real product because someone on the internet willed it into existence. The game grew out of a 2022 Twitter clip by Jean Nguyen, a senior animator at Sucker Punch, in which a Spinosaurus runs through a Final Fantasy VII-style combo with a comically oversized sword. The clip went viral, Nguyen decided to make a full game, and the result is a Steam action RPG in which players fight to prevent their species from going extinct, summon the souls of fallen bosses, and swap blows with weapon-wielding rival dinosaurs.

According to Engadget, early impressions describe the title as janky but fun with slick combat, which positions it as a palate cleanser in a market saturated by Soulslikes. The article's editor floats one polite critique: the name. Dinosword, they argue, was right there. At its usual $20 price, with a 10 percent launch discount through July 30, Dinoblade is also playable on Steam Deck, lowering the friction for anyone curious whether a meme can actually carry a full game.

Building a Song, One Gnome at a Time

Offbeat, by the three-person Whetstone Games, takes a more meditative angle on the creative-tool genre. Players inherit a four-track sequencer from an uncle and begin producing jingles and songs for clients, earning cash to buy weirder instruments, including what the article calls a singing gnome. The framing is light, but the game does something quietly ambitious: compositions export as real WAV files, so the work players produce is portable and usable outside the game itself.

The piece notes that Offbeat is in early access for an expected six to eight months, with the current build offering two chapters and seven musical items. The developer plans to add tasks, instruments, and other features monthly. That iterative cadence is fairly standard for the genre, but the WAV export sets Offbeat apart from sandbox toys like LittleBigPlanet or Dreams, where creations often live and die inside the platform.

E3, Time-Capsuled

The roundup also spotlights a non-game release that is hard to ignore for anyone who cares about gaming culture. The Video Game History Foundation unveiled a new archive of E3 materials, including flyers, press kits, panel transcripts, and video footage from the show's earliest years, when pressers were not yet the choreographed livestreamed spectacles they became. The collection reportedly includes the only known footage of the Sega Saturn reveal and Sony announcing the original PlayStation's price, both from the 1995 edition.

That last detail carries its own quiet irony. The article points out how low-key Sony's 1995 presser was compared with the bombastic productions of later E3s, a reminder that the event's modern reputation is largely a product of the late-1990s and 2000s arms race between console makers. With E3 now defunct, archives like this one are doing the work that used to happen organically through recorded television and enthusiast communities. It is preservation work that may matter more in ten years than it does today.