Loddlenaut instantly caught my eye, and it was with good reason. The new indie game from Moon Lagoon and Secret Mode is oh so adorable, featuring a unique premise that sees you care for an alien planet's ocean and raise adorable underwater creatures called loddles (yes, these guys are literally extraterrestrial axolotls and I'm so here for it). If you love all things cozy like I do, then you're in for a treat: Loddlenaut has just dropped.
The ocean planet of GUP-14 is not a happy place. Its seabed has been gunked up with piles of trash, globs of purple gunge and nasty clouds of micro-plastics, all because an industrial megacorp couldn't be bothered to clean up after themselves after bleeding it for resources. That megacorp's since upped sticks to, sadly, continue their terrible ways somewhere else in the solar system, but calling out these bad practices (beyond them being obviously bad and not good for the planet) is not really Loddlenaut's concern here.
Rather, your job is to simply clean up this mess with your array of high-tech gadgetry, healing its polluted environments so: a) it's not a grim, purple hellscape anymore; b) native, axolotl-like loddle creatures can move back in and prosper. It's simple, satisfying work that's designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside without having to think too hard. But its straightforward, frictionless tale may leave some wishing it had just a little more bite, and less of a sense that you're laying the ground for some other faceless corpo power to go and splurge all over it again.
