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Cyberpunk platformers, gallivanting geckos and other new indie games worth checking out


Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. Once again, there are some neat new games for you to check out this weekend. We’ve got a bunch of updates and announcements for upcoming titles to tell you about too.

There have been a bunch of solid indie showcases lately (and highlights from another one to tell you about below). If you want to learn about a ton of other games ASAP, you might want to set your alarm pretty early on April 25.

Starting at 5AM ET that day, the latest edition of Indie Life Expo takes place on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Bilibili and elsewhere. This one will feature more than 200 games! A rapid-fire Indie Waves segment will power through 160 of them. Organizers received 1,100 submissions for this installment, so hats off to them for featuring a sizable percentage of those.

Before that, you can check out another showcase on April 21. Top Hat Studios Presents: Spring Showcase 2026 will start at noon ET on the publisher’s YouTube and Twitch channels.

The stream will feature Motorslice, Well Dweller and survival horror game Becrowned, as well premieres and other Top Hat games. I’ve been looking forward to Motorslice, which has a May release window. I wager we’ll get a precise release date for that during this stream.

Meanwhile, there’s an interesting Steam event taking place soon. InterfaceX26 will run from April 27 until May 4. This one is focused on games that deal with made-up operating systems and other custom interfaces. Organizers have brought together more than 150 developers and publishers, who are asking Valve to introduce an official “Fake OS” tag for games on Steam.

Some neat games will be included in a sale and a showcase on May 2, including Blippo+, TR-49 and The Roottrees are Dead. Expect demos and relevant new releases too. Speaking of which…

New releases

We’ve been waiting a very long time for Replaced. This cyberpunk adventure from Sad Cat Studios and publisher Thunderful finally landed this week on Steam, GOG, Xbox on PC and Xbox Series X/S. It’s on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Otherwise, the base game costs $20. A supporter edition that includes the soundtrack is $25. It’ll hit the Epic Games Store at a later date.

The game was initially supposed to arrive in 2022. It certainly didn’t help that Sad Cat Studios was forced to relocate from Belarus to Cyprus after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the game is finally here and it debuted to generally positive reviews.

Replaced is a 2.5D action platformer set in an alternate version of 1980s America, in which you play as an AI trapped in a human body that may or may not dream of electric sheep. I haven’t yet had a chance to properly jump into this gorgeous-looking game, but I’m hoping to do so this weekend.

Speaking of games I’ve long had on my wishlist, Gecko Gods arrived this week. I think I first clapped eyes on this around 2022. Various trailers charmed me with the idea of a puzzle exploration platformer that casts you in the role of a gecko that’s able to run along walls and ceilings.

I’ve played around 90 minutes of this one so far. I dig the look and the gecko is very cute (being able to customize its appearance is a nice touch). I love that you “collect” different types of bugs by eating them. It’s a fairly relaxing game, which is broadly what I need at the minute.

I think there are some issues here, though. I’ve explored two of the main five islands in the open world and it feels a bit sparse so far. The joy of being able to clamber up and around any object complicates things when it comes to more precise platforming sections. While the sailing sections are pretty, the boat is clunky to control on the choppy water. I ran into some mild technical issues as well on PS5 with occasional framerate dips and objects popping in. Hopefully, that’s something the developers at Inresin are able to address.

Gecko Gods — from publishers Super Rare Originals and Gamersky Games — is available now on Steam, PS5 and Nintendo Switch. It’s normally $20, but there’s a 10 percent launch discount until April 30 (on PS5, this only applies to PlayStation Plus members)

Another highly anticipated game landed this week in the form of Mouse: PI for Hire. We’ve had our eyes on this first-person shooter/detective game with sumptuous rubberhose-style animation for quite some time. Reviews have been generally positive so far, and it seems that there’s enough substance here to live up to those stellar visuals.

Mouse: PI for Hire — from Fumi Games and publisher PlaySide — is out now for $30. It’s available on PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Thirsty Suitors developer Outerloop Games and co-publisher Outersloth served up the cooking-themed Dosa Divas this week. It tells the story of two sisters who set out on a journey with their mech to take down a fast food empire and reconnect communities through cooking.

It caught my eye when I saw it during a showcase a while back and it has a great concept, though I don’t exactly love turn-based combat. I’ve read a few lukewarm reviews of the game, and the consensus seems to be that the cooking mechanics and combat perhaps needed some more time to simmer.

If you’d like to try Dosa Divas yourself, you can pick it up on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. It’ll usually run you $20, but there’s a 10 percent launch discount until April 28.

If you’re looking for a puzzle game that can be relaxing or rather dark, depending on your mood, it might be worth checking out A Storied Life: Tabitha. As you pack up the home of a late loved one, you’ll need to decide which items to keep in the limited storage space you have and discard the rest. You’ll need to wrap fragile items in bubble wrap and vacuum pack soft items to save room in the boxes.

As you save items, you’ll unlock words that you can use to fill in the blanks of your loved one’s life and tell their story, Mad Libs-style. Given that you’ll find items like a blackmail letter and a shirt with lipstick on the collar, it seems like there’s a lot of variety to the kinds of stories you can tell.

A Storied Life: Tabitha is available on Steam now. It’ll normally run you $15, but you can save 10 percent if you buy it before April 28.

To round out this section, I’ll quickly note that Hades 2 is out now on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S for  $30, with a 20 percent launch discount. It’s on Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium and PC Game Pass too.

I bought Hades 2 when Supergiant Games brought it to Steam early access two years ago, telling myself I’d wait until the full game was out. But I still haven’t gotten around to it yet. There are always too many games tugging at my fragile attention span and Hades 2 faded into the background for me. I really ought to play it, I know!

Upcoming

I’m keeping an eye out for Agefield High: Rock the School from Refugium Games. This spiritual successor to Rockstar’s Bully is set to arrive this summer on Steam. It emerged this week that it will hit PS5 and Xbox Series X/S later in the year.

It’s a coming-of-age adventure in which you play as Sam, a young lad who has moved to a new school in the early 2000s. He wants to make his last few months of high school a time to remember.

There’s a branching narrative with multiple endings here — you can opt to go to classes and be a good student, or skip school and cause trouble. As a mostly rule-abiding student way back when, I’d be tempted to go for the latter. This seems like a bit of a life sim with a broad array of activities and ways to get into bother. I’m looking forward to it.

The latest edition of the Galaxies Showcase — yet another indie spotlight event — took place this week and The Backworld caught my attention. This is a Mother-inspired RPG from Numor Games and publisher Top Hat with charming art direction (yes, I did see that one character doing a Naruto run), an intriguing mix of characters and…

Oh no, why did the music stop? Why did it get so dark all of a sudden? What are these horrifying beasts that are chasing my character? Yup, there’s a heavy horror element here. Numor took inspiration from The Backrooms as well.

The Backworld will be released later this year. A demo just hit Steam.

A Study in Blue, from Relate Games, was another highlight of the Galaxies Showcase, thanks in large part to that impressive animation. This is a point-and-click adventure in which you play as two characters with complex pasts: private detective Kenneth and runaway Blue.

You’ll explore a semi-open world and solve crimes by collecting clues and calling out characters’ lies. There are three intertwined story acts and multiple endings. A Steam demo featuring a side quest from the main game that’ll take around two hours to complete is available now.

I’m always going to be interested in any game that riffs on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. On the face of this trailer, Elementallis developer AnKae Games seems to borrow quite a bit of the design language and other ideas from the SNES classic. Still, if you’re going to crib from anything, it may as well be the best game of all time.

This 2D action RPG, which is also published by Top Hat and has a heavier focus on elemental powers than A Link to the Past, looks very much like my kind of jam. It’s coming to Steam, GOG, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One on April 28. Per the eShop listing, it’ll cost $18.



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Python Serialization | A Complete Guide on Python Serialization


Python Serialization – Table of Content

Serialization in Python

Serialization in python is a process to serialize data in a species that is user-friendly, human-readable, and easily inspected. There are two very common python serialization libraries that serialize data objects in python. They are ‘HDF5’ and ‘Pickle’ which take dictionaries as well as Tensorflow models for storage purposes and transmission.

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Why Python Serialization?

The serialization process allows the python user to send, receive and save his data alongside maintaining the original structure also. The user finds it very useful to save a certain kind of data in the database so that he can reuse it later whenever it is needed. It can also be used to transmit data on a server network and the user can access it on any system later on.

The process of serialization is also very helpful for projects related to data science. For instance, the process of dataset preprocessing can be very time-consuming, hence preprocessing is done just once that too before saving the data on the disk. It is preferred that the user performs preprocessing each time he uses it. It also eliminates memory limitation problems for big data too which is heavy for loading in the memory as a single piece. So when the data is split into smaller chunks, the user is able to load every single chunk for preprocessing, and he can then save the outputs to the disk, removing all the data chunks from the memory.

Python Serialization: Text Based

The process of textual serialization means serializing the data in some specific format that is easy to understand, human-readable as well as easily inspected. Formats which are text-based are mainly language agnostic and they can be formed with the help of any language related to programming.

JSON is a standard format that is used to exchange data between servers and web clients. JSON is known to serialize the objects in a plain text file format and allow for easy visual identification to the user. JSON stores the objects in the form of key-value pairs, just like a dictionary in Python. JSON is a built-in library in python which makes it a breeze for the user to work with JSON. 

It is very easy to perform JSON serialization just like creating a JSON file and dumping the object. This is done with the help of the dump() method. This method has two arguments which are:  

  • The object user is serializing
  • File which will store the serialized object.

Python JSON has two main functions which it works with:

  • dump(): This function helps to convert a Python object into JSON format
  • Loads(): This function helps to convert the JSON string back into a Python object.

The table below will show the conversion of the python data type into a JSON type:

dict-object
List, tuple- array
str- String
True- true
Int, float- Number
False- false
None- null

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YAML

YAML is not a Markup Language but it is actually a parent set of JSON made in a way to be more comprehensible to the user. The most important and distinguishing feature of YAML is the capacity to create references for other objects in the same file. Another most important advantage is that it is possible to write comments in python. This feature has proved very useful to work with the configuration files also.

Python Serialization: Binary Formats

It is not possible for binary formats in serialization to be human-readable; however they are faster in general and also require much lesser space than text-based counterparts. Let us see some very popular binary formats below:

Pickle

It is a very popular format for python serialization. It is used to serialize almost all the Python object types. Pickle is considered to be an original serialization format used for Python, hence when a user plans to serialize objects in python that he expects to share and he must use with many other languages used for programming, he has to be mindful of the issues such as cross-compatibility. Similarly, pickle works in the same way for various Python versions. The user cannot unpickle a file present in the XXX version, which he picked in the python ZZZ version. So by doing such unnecessary changes, the execution of malicious code gets tough.

Let us see an example below and understand how pickling is performed in python:


import pickle
 
class example_class:
    x_number = 10
    x_string = "Welcome to the tutorial"
    x_list = [10, 20, 30]
    x_dict = {"Heya": "x", "How": 5, "you": [10, 20, 30]}
    x_tuple = (2, 3)
 
my_object = example_class()
 
my_pickled_object = pickle.dumps(my_object)  
print(f"This would be pickled object:\n{my_pickled_object}\n")
 
my_object.a_dict = None
 
my_unpickled_object = pickle.loads(my_pickled_object) 
print(
    f"The dictionary of unpickled object is:\n{my_unpickled_object.a_dict}\n")
 
 Output
This would be pickled object:
b'\x80\x04\x95!\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8c\x08__main__\x94\x8c\rexample_class\x94\x93\x94)\x81\x94.'
 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 19, in 
AttributeError: 'example_class' object has no attribute 'a_dict'
> 

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Module Interface for Pickling and Unpickling

The data format is always Python-specific for the pickle module. That is why it is always important to write the essentially required code when the user is performing the process of serialization or deserialization. dumps() is the Python function that is used to serialize an object hierarchy whereas loads() is the function that is used to de-serialize the same.

Pickle Protocols

Protocols in pickle act like the convention measures to deconstruct and construct the python objects. There are in total of 5 protocols that a user can use in pickling. Whenever a user uses a higher protocol version, he will need the latest version of Python to obtain the highly compatible as well as readable pickle.

Protocol version 0: This version is readable by humans. It is compatible to use with data and interfaces from the older python versions.
Protocol version 1: It is known to be an old binary format. Just like protocol version 0, it is also compatible with older python versions.
Protocol version 2: It came into effect during the release of python version 2.3. This version is well known for providing new styles in picking.
Protocol version 3: This version was discovered during the release of python version 3.0. It is famous for supporting byte objects however the major drawback with this version is it gets unpicked by python version 2.0
Protocol version 4: This version was discovered during the release of python version 3.4. This is able to support large objects and various different objects can be picked too. It is also famous for supporting data optimization.

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Numpy

It is a very popular python library used by the user to work with large and multidimensional arrays as well as matrices. It stands for numerical python. They are open source and free to use but slow to process. NumPy arrays can be stored in one continuous place in the memory; however this same is not possible for lists. Processes can therefore access as well as manipulate the arrays very efficiently.

Let us see an example below and understand how the Numpy library is used in python:


import numpy as np
arr = np.array( [[ 10, 20, 30],
[ 40, 20, 50]] )
 
print("The type of array is: ", type(arr))
 
print("The no of dimensions are: ", arr.ndim)
 
print("The shape of the array is: ", arr.shape)
 
print("The size of the array is: ", arr.size)
 
print("Array stores elements of the type: ", arr.dtype)
 
 Output
The type of array is:  <class 'numpy.ndarray'>
The no of dimensions are:  2
The shape of the array is:  (2, 3)
The size of the array is:  6
Array stores elements of the type:  int64
> 

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Conclusion

Serialization is a process that aims at simplifying the data storage methods for a data scientist. Serialization in Python is one of the most important features that ease the data conversion interface of the data. In this article, we have talked about why we need serialization. The serialization process allows the python user to send, receive and save his data alongside maintaining the original structure also. The user finds it very useful to save a certain kind of data in the database so that he can reuse it later whenever it is needed. 

We have also discussed JSON and YAML in python. Then we talked about binary formats of python serialization which are pickle and NumPy. In this sub-topic, we will also have a glance at module instances of pickling and unpickling along with pickle protocols. Now we will be discussing some frequently asked questions by the developers and will give solutions for them.

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