Drill, craft, and blast your way through the demo of Veridian Expanse

Bringing together the worlds of twin-stick arcade shooters with crafting and exploration, Veridian Expanse is another indie game with a demo worth a go.

It's a sci-fi themed action game with an expansive map filled with different biomes to explore, and a whole lot of hostile creatures to take down. As you progress you collect resources to be able to upgrade your pod to eventually escape, with the developer noting how the biomes have an assortment of unique creatures and resources, along with the upgrade system giving you a constant stream of new mechanics to try throughout the the whole game.

Check out the most recent gameplay trailer video below:

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After trying the demo, I absolutely loved the atmosphere in it and the way it mixes together elements of a twin-stick shooter with the exploration and crafting systems into something a little unusual feeling. That, and the sound design along with the lighting together makes the action feel really good.

There's a lot more to appreciate in this one too. The ship design is interesting as well, with you swapping between systems to scan for things, to manually grab resources and pull them into the ship and your weapons. Plus, your ship is powered by a series of nodes you need to craft and place throughout the map - lots of little features come together in an interesting way.

The developer shared some fun facts about the development: "The game is being developed from scratch primarily on Fedora Linux. (Some of it has even been developed on my Steam Deck when I needed a stand-in for my dead laptop!) Most of my players so far at conventions and such have played the game on a Pi, and the game's min spec is a 2GB Pi 4. The source code is also included under the GPL for preservation purposes, but also so people can run it on basically whatever they want. Check the included README for more information. :)"