Main game
4.00 average rating based on 5 ratings
Hypogea feels like someone played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and loved the weighty, deliberate platforming and then played Sly Cooper and loved the idea of a stick with a hook on the end of it for platforming, and smashed the two together.
Instead of wall-running you will be balancing on top of a pipe to reach higher areas, grabbing ledges with the hook on the end of the pipe, and shoving the pipe into mesh walls to turn it into a horizontal pole to swing from. All of it feels perfectly tight, more forgiving than you would expect, and just FUN.
Couple that with some great puzzles, expert level design, beautifully directed cutscenes, an immaculately grungy PS1 esque art style portraying decaying robots venturing through a megastructure, and you have one of the best indie games of 2025 in my opinion. It's got overwhelmingly positive reviews on steam, but only 500 reviews. Criminally slept on game.
Lovely game. I really like the focus gameplay that makes the most out of a single stick and two action buttons.
Really enjoyed this one, found it to be perfectly paced. It tells a heartfelt story with memorable characters, runs through some cool variations on its simple puzzle platforming, and then wraps up before any part of it can go stale. Fantastic animation work throughout, too.
Pretty much a must-play for Ico fans, I think!

Oh wow, it's wild how specifically this game is pandering to my taste:
Even just the way the roll jump timing has different variations for height and for long distance! So so good.

Hypogea was one of the few Next Fest demos of this year that I have played this year that I'm interesred in. Cool 3D platformer with a little bit of nuance to the moveset. Just announced that it is coming out on November 10th.

https://bsky.app/profile/ccharnul.bsky.social/post/3m2ua27vixc2a