Forty-one concurrent players. That’s it. That’s the entire population giving a damn about Elise and the Spellbinding Marionette right now, and frankly, more people should.

Released April 24 by developer wagasibiyori and published by Kagura Games, this anime-style adventure RPG has the kind of review ratio PR teams dream about: 100% positive across all 2 user reviews. One player logged 40.8 hours and came back calling it “strongly recommended for fans of kemomimi heroines.” Another praised it as “a very cute game full of love and detail.” The setup is straightforward — you play Elise, a small-town adventurer who finds a mysterious girl collapsed by the roadside and carries her back to town. Things escalate from there into questing, Mana Stone refinement, and, judging by that first review’s headline, “hypnotic ecstasy and beyond.” It’s on sale at $10.39 (20% off the $12.99 base price). The concurrent count has dropped 39.7% since the last snapshot, which means the window to be early to something genuinely charming is closing.

Then there’s Itsy Bitsy Spider: Vengeance, a free-to-play movement-shooter roguelite built by a nine-person team and published under Niagara College. You are a spider. You have a gun. You must fight your way to the top of a waterspout and overthrow a tyrannical tarantula named Big T. It is exactly as unhinged as it sounds, and it currently sits at 0 concurrent players with 3 reviews — all positive.

The standout review, posted after 0.1 hours of playtime, reads in full: “It really makes you feel like spider-.” If you don’t recognize that as a perfect homage to the meme around a certain PlayStation exclusive, you haven’t spent enough time in Steam review threads.

Both games dropped the same day. Both are the kind of small-release stories the algorithm buries under AAA noise. Both have actual personality. One costs less than a lunch special; the other is free. You could do worse this weekend.

Sources