February is here! Love is in the air, taxes are starting to be filed, and I got stood up by my favorite JRPG series on Valentine’s Day. Love truly never comes easy in this month’s Manygame Collection.
But my shipping speed loss is your gain. Instead of diving headfirst into Trails Through Daybreak II, I sampled the finest of indie turn-based cuisine, capitalist slot machine hell, and a surreal desk job platformer. Enjoy!
Last month’s collection: Manygame Collection (January 2025): One Step At A Time
Copper Odyssey 2
Copper Odyssey 2 begins strange and, thankfully, gets even stranger. You’re Celeste, an Angel sent to act as a local art museum’s Monitor. (The game loves proper nouns.) People act strangely around you. Some call you a religious freak, but others seem to covet your power. Celeste can touch blank canvases to bless them with Craft, creating a new work of art.
Her Job (Again, capitalization not mine!) is to bless thirty canvases in the museum. But she’ll need help from other party members to get through the wild turn-based combat.
Copper Odyssey 2 leans even further into creator CAM’s style. Text is off-kilter, dialogue cryptic, and character designs straight from the mad scribblings of the early 2000s. Bright colors clash with the strange, uneasy world building. My first combat encounter absolutely walloped my three-member party. And even modern art galleries hide sharp edges.
Copper Odyssey 2’s mood is equal parts Space Funeral and Paradise Killer, wrapped up in a delicious RPG Maker shell. I’m intrigued enough to snap up the first Copper Odyssey, too. Fellow RPG freaks, rejoice!
Luck Be A Landlord (Xbox Series X)
You live in an apartment complex with a complimentary slot machine and a predatory contract. But the rent amount goes up every in-game month. And job prospects are slim to none. (Oops, got a little autobiographical there.) But you can spin the slots and hope you get lucky.
There are oodles of symbols for your slot machine–bees that pollinate flowers, babies that wreak havoc on bubbles, presents, and pinatas–but even with the best combinations can’t beat long-shot odds. The disarmingly simple pixel graphics mask the tongue-in-cheek gears of capitalism underneath.
Despite an uptick in slot-battler roguelikes, few match Luck Be A Landlord’s expertly tuned difficulty curve. But every loss is instructive. After my time-worn 2023 strategies from the Steam version failed to deliver, I stumbled into an overpowered omelet build. My chicken symbols laid eggs. Then my frying pan item would convert two adjacent eggs into an omelet. Adjacent omelets gave each other buffs, more omelets formed, and soon I steamrolled the final encounter.
Luck Be A Landlord’s console port is a near-perfect refinement of the original PC release. And despite the slot machine framework, there are no in game currencies or additional layers, only the endlessly compelling core loop. Tiny hiccups persist–unclear tooltips on individual symbols and run-persistent items, odd instances of UI scaling. But the gameplay remains compelling enough to pull both me and my husband into its vortex.
Luck Be A Landlord’s balance of goofs and mechanics feels very 2025. Every month is a gamble and all I can do is keep trying.
Keep Driving
Keep Driving turns the rhythms of an early 2000s road trip into a rollicking resource management game. You’re a young adult driving cross-country to meet a friend at your first music festival–a jaunt that’ll take you across the country. You’ll juggle your money, gas, and resources to get there in time or take another exit altogether.
And despite the title, Keep Driving wisely backgrounds the actual act of driving. Instead of steering, you tackle problems on the road through turn-based combat. Most of the screen is dedicated to watch the gorgeous pixelated scenery whizz by.
Icons appear on your dashboard during events, some with warning triangles above them. Match the icons with something from your glove box, player skills, or hitchhikers you pick up along the way to avoid damage. Some skills cost energy to use, or only affect a certain icon type.
Buckle Up
Passenger quirks turn potentially tired tropes into fascinating procedural characters. My first hitchhiker–the Hurricane, a proto-party girl–quickly became crucial during events. Her skill removed one icon of each type, turning nail-biting gas guzzler encounters to more manageable mishaps. But every passenger has their own needs. Hitchhikers scatter trash around the car, sleep at inopportune moments, and have desires of their own.
Keep Driving preserves the spirit of long-haul road trips without making a full detour into tedium. The node-based map slowly unfurls new types of encounters and resources, but never at a pace that feels overwhelming.
So the road trip theming is the glue that holds the entire experience together. It feels natural to rummage for items through your glove box or pull over to reorganize trunk space. And no road trip is complete without at least one unplanned, deeply annoying setback. I encountered everything from road hogs to a determined bee between mile markers. And with oodles of unlockable skill trees and entirely optional quest lines, every run will roll at its own pace.
Lion Quest Infinity
Lion Quest Infinity mixes narrative slice-of-life with surreal puzzle-platforming. By day, you’re a man working a mind-numbing marketing job. And by night you’re pulled into your computer, where Lion Quest Infinity’s platforming challenges bleed through.
Yet somehow, the narrative and platforming elements support each other. Jethro the Lion’s jump feels a little too rigid. Jeffrey’s office job segments are deliberately tedious. But the two halves together? I’m drawn in, even though I can’t pinpoint why.
Lion Quest Infinity’s bright, blocky aesthetic and font choices immediately form something odd and cohesive. Text is large and clear; UI elements are unobtrusive. But Jethro the Lion and friends navigate through increasingly surreal platformer landscapes. Moving the camera reveals 3D depth behind a two dimensional plane.
And while I haven’t fully unspooled Jeffrey’s work situation or the barbed banter with his sister, I want to keep pulling that thread.
That’s all for this month’s Manygame Collection! For more indie game coverage, stay tuned to Press SPACE to JUmp. Take care of each other out there, and see you in March!
