The Indie Heroes Evercade collections are sometimes divisive to the community.

These are collections of a dozen or so indie games, mostly "aftermarket" recent games for old systems. A few "native" games running directly on the Evercade. They are typically games that you'll pick up on itch.io for a couple bucks a piece, made by solo devs or small teams.

Some folks love the idea of these weird little games and supporting smaller devs. Some folks appreciate the "bargain bin" quality of some of the titles. Some folks think that - maybe beyond a "headliner" or two - most of the games are not worth paying for.

For me, I typically enjoy the Indie Heroes carts so I was pleased to see it return for another year.

Let's see how they fared this year.

The Curse of Illmoore Bay

Curse of Illmoore Bay is a Halloween-themed 16-bit platformer with a lot of style. It looks great, it sounds great, it plays...alright.

The game has 18 levels across 6 worlds. It has a bunch of collectibles to collect, challenges to complete, powers to unlock. It's got a fair bit of content, is what I'm getting at. I 100%d it when it was Game of the Month, and I'm on my way to doing it again on cart. It all really works for me.

But the game has plenty of rough edges and may hinder your enjoyment of the game, depending how sensitive you are to them. Most notably, the hitboxes can get a little weird. Your melee attack already has a pretty short range and with hitboxes seemingly shifted a little bit it can be tough to line up your attacks. This can make the bosses especially a little frustrating. There's also a distinct lack of coyote time that can make it tough to take care of some of the longer jumps.

I was able to get used to it and it didn't bother me too much, but it's bad enough that it really kills the game for some folks.

Block 'em Sock 'em

Block 'em Sock 'em is a puzzle game with what was, to me, a novel concept. Though it turns out to be heavily inspired by Taito's Plotting/Flipull.

You play as a little YouTuber dude who carries around a little box around a series of single-screen puzzles. Throw the box up into boxes of matching color to clear them. If you clear some boxes then hit a box of another color, you swap colors. Keep clearing blocks until you're below the goal count (usually 3 or 4). You get a certain number of throws to do it, or you must start over.

This game might not be the worst game on the cart, but it is certainly the most disappointing. This game has more than its share of bugs. "Wildcard" boxes don't seem to work consistently, sometimes leaving you stuck in a level with still a few throws left. And in a couple of cases you'll throw a box and it will just keep circling the screen forever until you restart the level. Those are both bugs I ran into within the first 3 levels.

I can forgive games for bugs and rough edges. In fact, it's a quality instrumental to my enjoyment of the Indie Heroes carts. But the trouble here is that the game is just dull even where it's not broken.

As I mentioned above, this type of puzzle was novel to me, so I was excited to see what they could come out with to pit my brain against. But...the puzzles never got interesting. I played the game basically on autopilot and never really had to engage my brain against any of the puzzles. I had to replay a couple of levels a couple of times (bugs aside) but most of the levels I just sailed through first time without really thinking about it. To be clear, I'm not saying that it's because I'm so great at puzzles, because I'm not. The puzzles just weren't very interesting. They're much more static than you'll see in a Plotting/Flipull and so were very easy to just sort of eyeball.

And then, before I knew it, the game was over. Not because I was having so much fun. But because 25 levels are all you get and they go quick.

Nyghtmare: The Ninth King

Nyghtmare: The Ninth King is a classicvania-inspired GBC game. It offers two playable characters, a handful of levels, and branching paths with a couple different final bosses and endings. And, I gotta say, it's not the worst Castlevania you'll play on a Gameboy.

The levels are fun to make your way through and don't offer many cheap deaths or anything that I remember. The bosses, though, are a little uneven. Some of them are very fun, some of them are pretty boring and drawn out, and some of them are frustratingly difficult. On average, though, they're fine.

One thing to note, is that the default control mapping is a little weird, with your "sub weapon" on select. So you'll probably wanna remap that to one of the main face buttons for convenience. They're pretty important - especially for boss fights.

Jane Austen's 8-Bit Adventure

Jane Austen's 8-Bit Adventure is a literary-themed 8-bit platformer.

It is a surprisingly-expansive platforming adventure where you must navigate several levels, each based on a different Jane Austen book. Within each level you must collect 4 pages that you use to open the boss door, then defeat the boss to take back your book and unlock a new power.

Each level is pretty sizeable, so you'll find yourself doing a bit of exploration to find each page. Along the way you'll come up against locked doors - try to remember where they are cause you'll need those later.

This game was such a pleasant surprise. It looks great and feels good to play. And it offers a lot more content and playtime than you might expect from an NES game.

Collie Defense

Collie Defense is, nominally, a tower defense game. It's a cute little GBA game that probably meets the minimum requirements for the tower defense genre, but doesn't take it much further than that.

Protect your flocks of sheep from foxes, bears, and tigers across a dozen or so levels by building towers along paths. As you defeat enemies, you earn money you can use to build more towers.

The game offers both story mode - where you play each level in order - and high score mode - where you play a single level at a time. You might think you should start with story mode and circle back to high score mode once you've mastered everything. Big mistake.

Story mode makes the bizarre choice of persisting your money across each level. So if you complete one level with no money left, you'll have no money with which to play the next level. Instead, you just have to watch helplessly as the enemies make their way across the screen and slowly kill you. It's very annoying.

So story mode is instead a bit of a "challenge mode" where you must play each level relatively optimally and ensure you have enough money at the end of each level to start on the next one.

And if the game were a little better or meatier it might be good fun to figure out the optimal play for each level and string them all together. But there's not terribly much depth here. Indeed you are unable to sell or upgrade your towers, let alone even more advanced mechanics like elemental weakness/resistances. This leaves Collie Defense feeling more like a tower-defense-themed puzzle game than an actual tower defense game itself. And as much as I like puzzle games, it doesn't really work for me.

Collie Defense was originally made for a game jam and is available for free on itchio. This all makes much more sense in that context. But on the cart here, it's not really adding much.

Flea!2

Now this is more like it. Flea!2 is the aptly-named flea-quel to challenging auto-jump plat-fleamer Flea! from Indie Heroes 1.

Flea!2 picks up where Flea! left off and only gets more wild and challenging from there. If you aren't flea-miliar with the series, you control Henry the Hyperactive Flea. You are constantly jumping and must navigate through tightly flea-signed levels full of spikes, acid pits, and...non-acid pits. Eventua-flea, new obstacles, enemies, and other mechanics get added.

Make your way through the 100-ish mostly-single-screen levels, collecting blood as you go for additional lives. Every 10 levels or so, you'll find yourself up against a "boss," typically an auto-scroll level. And every so often you might find a fun little flea-cret(?) path.

If you liked Flea!, you are definitely gonna be into Flea!2. If you haven't played Flea!, you might have some trouble jumping in on this more challenging second ent-flea(?) in the series. But if you're into challenging platformers, you'll have a blast here either way.

Batty Zabella

Batty Zabella is a point-and-click adventure game for Game Boy. You play the, erm, titular heroine, Batty Zabella as she point and clicks her way to saving her family and defeating the phantoms that have appeared around her house.

There's a fair bit of game here considering the platform, and the art is really great. The puzzles and exploration are a lot of fun, but the combat is a little meh. Introducing real-time combat using a weapon that must be periodically "recharged" in a specific room introduces padding and friction to a game that is otherwise a joy to play. Especially since, if you're prepared for the combat, there is no real way to lose so it's just wasted time.

But that is a minor tarnish on an otherwise lovely game that is chock full of personality and offers a few secrets along the way.

Murtop

And here we come to the cart's headliner: Murtop.

Let's get this out of the way. Murtop looks and plays like a cross between Dig Dug and Bomberman. You play a bomb-pooping rabbit named Murti and you've got to kill moles and get carrots across 256 frantic levels. You can kill the moles with bombs that you poop out behind you and explode bomberman-like, or you can drop rocks on their heads.

As with all good arcade(-style) games, though, what it looks like is less important than how it plays which is augmented by how scoring works. You get points for every mole killed, with bonus multipliers for killing multiple moles at the same time. Despite the focus on bombs, you can actually get more points by strategically dropping rocks on enemies. You also grab a bonus for completing levels quickly. There are more secrets and scoring tricks to learn as you play, so be sure to experiment.

The 256 levels are laid out in sets of 5, with a "boss fight" at the end of each set that has a mole raining boulders down into the level. And each set is bumpered by a bonus stage that has you collecting carrots raining from the sky. Rinse and repeat a billion times or so.

I admit that I was surprised to see a native game show up on this collection. Blaze seems to have been haunted by trouble with native games almost since the first one was introduced. Many native games have had, or continue to have, compatibility issues with different types of hardware. But Murtop uses the same engine as Donut Dodo (from Indie Heroes 3), so maybe they don't expect it to add too much additional complexity over time. Or the complexity was worth it to secure this great game and shore up the high end of the cart.

The one criticism I can levy against Murtop is that it doesn't offer a "Quick Restart" option. If you want to restart a run you must exit back to the main menu and start it over again, adding a bit of friction to the experience that is absent from its cousin Donut Dodo.

By the way, Murtop offers a global leaderboard through the use of a QR code. I was at one point number 26, though I've since been pushed down to 46.

Soko Banana

If there's one genre Indie Heroes carts are good for, it's puzzle games. Alien Cat, Tapeworm Disco, Big2Small - each Indie Heroes cart has had at least one excellent puzzle game. And Soko Banana easily fits on that list.

As the name suggests, Soko Banana is a sokoban puzzle game. Push the banana crates around the warehouse to get them out onto what I imagine to be the loading dock. The boxes slide until they hit a wall or other obstacle, so take care to avoid the various traps or simply pushing it over into a corner where you can't get it back out again. Collect bananas and other secrets across the levels to unlock special bonus levels.

There are 55 levels total across 5 different worlds. Each world offers unique theming as well as puzzle mechanics, obstacles, and traps.

And these puzzles are excellent. Indeed, this is the one game on the cart I haven't actually completed yet (I'm in the third world, so a bit less than halfway through) because some of these puzzles are really stumping me. I spent a lot of time with Big2Small on IH3, but I think Soko Banana is going to take me even longer.

My main complaint with this game is that there is no quick restart option for levels. If you need to start a level over, you need to exit the level and then re-select it from the menu. I don't need a full-on rewind/undo function, but I'd really love to be able to quickly restart the level because some of these take me about a billion attempts.

But that is a small complaint about an otherwise charming and excellent puzzle game.

Starseed

Starseed is a cute, little GBC shoot 'em up. And I really do mean "little." Starseed looks a little bit like Uridium, but plays almost nothing like it. You know, because GBC.

Each level in Starseed takes place across a series of fixed screens. Your spaceship is positioned along the bottom of the screen and enemies fly in to the top of the screen. Destroy the enemies - and sometimes static "targets" - to move to the next.

The art looks really great, and it is pretty fun to play. But, there are only 3 levels. According to they playtime stats, I cleared the game in 10 minutes. It's possible I'll return to it some day to perfect my runs or something or just have a quick blast when I've only got a few minutes to spare. But honestly? It's just as likely I never start this game again.

I can't fault the game on quality, to be clear. What's there is fun, there just...isn't very much there.

Block Droppin'

Last on the cart is Block Droppin'. A match-three puzzle game. Block Droppin' offers two modes: puzzle and arcade.

Puzzle mode presents you with a series of 20 boards. You have a certain number of moves to match a certain number of blocks of each type to move on to the next board. Arcade mode presents you with a random board and a fixed time limit. Match as fast as you can to set a high score. Beyond basic "match-three" you get the usual niceties of special "bomb" blocks from matching more than three and score multipliers for combos, etc.

As with Starseed before it, Block Droppin' is a solid game that offers a good time but not a long time. I cleared the 20 puzzles in about a half hour, then played a few rounds of arcade mode and was done with the game in less than an hour.

To be clear, unlike Starseed I do see myself returning to it now and then to play a couple rounds of arcade mode, but even then I'm not sure. It would be nice if arcade mode allowed you to win time extends with combos or something, because I always like the excitement of lining up an extend just as the timer is running out and that's not really present here as each round lasts the exact same length of time.

So, again, a fun game that just doesn't really offer a ton of content.

Wrap Up

As will all Indie Heroes collections - not to mention all collections in general - this cart has its ups and downs.

As these games came to last year's Game of the Month program each month, there was a real feeling in various community spaces of "oh no, they've run out of games." But...I don't know if it's necessarily all that dire or even all that different from prior years.

When I think about the Indie Heroes collections, my brain sorts the games into "headliner/great/good/filler". And, while Indie Heroes 4 has fewer games total than the other collections, I think most of the "missing" games would have slotted under "filler" anyway so I don't feel like I'm actually missing anything.

Across the four collections, Indie Heroes 4 easily surpasses Indie Heroes 1 for me - IH1 is the cart where I have the most games filed under "filler." It's right in line with 2 and 3 for me, though I'd be hard-pressed to rank across those three which all have a lot of games I love.

At the end of the day, though, if you vibe with these sorts of indie games that aren't quite beefy enough for their dual-cart, then I easily Recommend this cart.

By the way, it may be worth mentioning that for 2025, Blaze has replaced the Game of the Month program with the Highlight of the Month. While this doesn't necessarily mean we won't be seeing an Indie Heroes next year, it is an interesting move.

Rather than receiving a game from the upcoming Indie Heroes cart, we'll be receiving a game that could be from any currently-in-print cartridge. The community response has been interesting. I'm sure it's not the exact same people on both ends, but taking the community voice as a whole it seems to have gone from "stop giving us bad nesmaker games every month" to "wait, not like that."

Full-setters will be getting games they already have rather than games they will probably have in a few months. Meanwhile, non-full-setters and new owners will enjoy discovering guaranteed-good games from across the wider library rather than one of the (with all due respect) "bargain bin" games from the upcoming Indie Heroes cart.

As for me, I'll miss Game of the Month a little bit but I think the pivot of Highlight of the Month makes a ton of sense due to (a) all of the negative feedback they received for every Game of the Month and (b) the number of new owners who are looking for pointers to help them fill out their cartridge library.

I'm hopeful that Highlight of the Month can help center community discussions a bit and help folks discover some of the great games we already have. So much of the community is constantly focused on what's coming next, I think a lot of them miss out on what we already have.