Are you North American?! Do you own a PS Vita?! Puzzle games – are they lovely?! If you answered “yes” to all of those questions then you should probably make a purchase over on the PS Minis Store. Not just any old thing though, we’re talking specifically about Die Gute Fabrik’s Where Is My Heart?

Why would we be doing such a thing? Well, those who are smarter than the average bear will know that the game has, until now, only been available to European PS Vita owners. Today marks a change as those who reside in North American can also download it. How lovely. Puzzle fans you’ll seriously want to do that too. This one is pretty tough though highly enjoyable. You are set with the task of getting a weird little family back to their homely tree – it’s simply getting the characters from A to B.

Making that journey quite a bit harder is the quite confusing pictogram aesthetics, which sees the levels split into tiles that are connected through non logical sense. You could exit one tile from the right bottom of the screen to emerge out of another at the bottom left, for instance. More gameplay mechanics are added with progression so expect that initial confusing level design to get much more complex.

Where Is My Heart? will most certainly be a good accompaniment to most journeys, so taking it around with you on your Vita would prove to be a real time killer. It’s very easy to get stuck into this one. To purchase it for your PS Vita just go to the Minis section of the PlayStation Store. More information on the game is available on the official website.

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Back for the fifth year, the Unity Awards 2012 has just been opened up for submissions so if you have a promising game from the last year then now is the time to put the best foot forward.

Looking to reward the best games made using the Unity Engine and Tools, the Unity Awards can be fierce in competition but they always highlight some interesting games, either for their innovations, clever use of the engine or luring presentation – hopefully all three.

The rules for submission are that your game must be made in Unity (obviously), the project must be released before June 30th 2012 unless it’s a student project, in which case it must have been made during the 2011-2012 school year, and lastly is no projects that were nominated for last year’s awards may be re-submitted, unless it’s a student project that has since become a commercial project.

You have until June 15th to submit your game for the Awards over on the official submissions page. The awards will be rewarded to the winners at the Unite 12 conference in Amsterdam on August 23rd.

The categories for the awards are as follows:

• Best Student Project
• Best Technical Achievement
• Best Visual Experience
• Best Gameplay
• Best Serious Game
• Best Non-Game
• Community Choice
• Golden Cube

Last years big indie winners were Spiderling with GLiD and Recoil with Rochard, so we’re hoping to see the winners improve upon the standard they set for last year. Make us proud!

More information on the Unity Awards 2012 can be found over on the official website.

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Based on the Estonian national epic “Kalevipoeg”, Sohni: Second Visit to the Underworld is a graphical adventure title with humor, beast slaying and grunting, muscular heroes. You play as the eponymous and legendary Sohni and control him using the familiar point and click mechanics. The left mouse button does all of the action while the right just opens your inventory should you need it.

You’ll start off in a very dark camp with a cause to make a magical cabbage soup, preparation of which is made more complex than the actual mundane nature of the task due to the pointing around in the dark and finding out which items to use where and when. It’s not so bad that you’ll get stuck, it simply drags out a simple task longer than it actually would be, like most point and click adventures do. Mind you, there is a beast to slay on your way to getting logs and one would imagine that to be a slight hindrance to your daily chores.

The battle mechanics in the game are probably the game’s weakest assets, simply because it’s confusing visually and mechanically. Right click while in battle to retreat, left click to attack – that’s all there is to it. The problem is that the game’s animation consists of about 10 frames in all that are quite badly patched together with a blur in between, rendering it near impossible to see what’s happening while in a battle. You don’t have any health either, you seem to just die or hopefully win the battle through sheer luck most of the time. Presuming you do win, you’ll then gain motivation points, which can also be earned by performing other tasks in the game, such as desecrating your opponent’s corpse and making the aforementioned cabbage soup.

Communication in the game will no doubt prove divisive as it is realised through grunts from the burly warriors (as if doing a bad Stallone impression) and sighs and other simple noises from the other characters – witches, dwarves and other fantastical persons. At times you get some dialogue options, which mostly boil down to being a typical alpha male bastard, being generous or something in between. The results from your actions can be genuinely quite funny, as long as you’re into dark humor as these Estonians seem to be.

Personally, I loved the presentation of Sohni – it may be a little too dark in places but the artwork and audio design really gives the game both a retro and very European sensibility. It most certainly isn’t for everyone though. It does feel like you’re wandering through an old painting and the developers managed to hit the atmosphere on this one just right. The mouse cursor and dialogue options use photos as a title in the same genre might in the 80s and 90s and it’s great to see that used again after all of this time. Definitely a game worth a try if you’re into graphical adventure titles, especially ones with something different to showcase.

You can download Sohni: Second Vist to the Underworld for Windows by clicking on this link. If you do enjoy the game, consider donating some money to the developers on the official website. If and when they hit 200€, they say they’ll release the source code, soundtrack and wallpapers.

More information on Sohni: Second Visit to the Underworld can be found on the game’s official website.

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Dutch indie developers are amongst some of the exciting out there and Indievelopment 2012 has invited some of the very best to conduct talks on May 16th in Utrecht, Netherlands. How they have managed to grab such a good roster of studios together we don’t know (we suspect offerings of drinks), but it’s definitely not an event to miss if you are able to attend.

The day will kick off with Ronimo Games giving a talk, they of course being the developers behind the recently released Awesomenauts. Then Tale of Tales and Game Oven Studios will take to the stage, The Graveyard and Fingle being their most famous games respectively. Of course, Tale of Tales are Belgian – getting there before we’re called out on that.

After lunch, Goosegogs (German) and Stolen Couch Games will deliver talks about their experiences in game development with their releases Goosegogs and Kids vs. Goblins respectively.

The big talk to finish off the day comes from the marvellous Vlambeer of Super Crate Box fame. Coincidentally, we attended a talk given by Vlambeer not so long ago which you can read a summation of here.

A very good lineup if we do say so ourselves. The day-long event will take place in ‘t Zand Maarssen and a ticket can be bought for €7,50 through this payment form.

More information on Indievelopment 2012 can be found over on the official website.

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After several delays and months of silence regarding the European and North American release of platformer La-Mulana for WiiWare, Nicalis have come out and said that they have cancelled it entirely.

An upsetting day for many, especially after such hopes have been built, delays have been met and worries arisen; Nicalis announced the cancellation of the EU/US release of Nigoro’s action platformer with this tweet:

“Regarding La-Mulana, we have chosen to cancel publishing in North America and Europe for WiiWare.”

We and other publications have been bugging the publisher and developer recently for answers and now they come out with this. The reason for this retraction is that Nicalis seems to think they have been waiting on the developers for too long. Whatever the case, no one can change the facts – La-Mulana will not be released to the western side of the world through WiiWare.

UPDATE: Tyrone Rodriguez of Nicalis made a statement to GoNintendo in which he pointed to the decline of the WiiWare market since the initial contract and the development issues regarding the DLC for the game.

There is good news though! Someone asked Nicalis after the cancellation announcement whether there would still at least be a PC release to which they responded:

“Yes, and you can support @nigoro by purchasing the PC version.”

Obviously we have no idea of the timeframe on this or whether this will involve Nicalis, or any other details for that matter – at least there is some hope for the game though. We’ll be asking some more questions but until then, that’s all we have for you on this at the moment.

More information on La-Mulana can be found on the game’s official website.

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After four months of conspicuous silence, Japanese developers Nigoro, creators of 2D action-adventure title La-Mulana, have finally spoken out over the status of the game’s upcoming remake.

The good news? The PC remake has almost completed its development cycle, bringing genuine hope that it could well see the light of day in the near future. Nigoro will likely spend the coming weeks both adding an extra layer of polish to the current build and exploring how and when to distribute the game once it’s ready to launch.

The slightly more worrying news? The game’s WiiWare port is still nowhere to be seen. According to Nigoro’s latest official statement, Nicalis, who were originally tasked with the localisation process onto Nintendo’s home console outside Japan, have simply given no response to the former’s requests for progress updates on how the project is coming along, leaving Nigoro with “no idea” when, or even if, we can expect La-Mulana to be made available on the WiiWare service.