After the impressive success of Recettear and Chantelise, it was clear that indie localization team Carpe Fulgur were on to a good thing. Now, they’ve unveiled their third translated Japanese indie title – Fortune Summoners: Secret of The Elemental Stone, due for release on January 17th for $25. A steep price, even compared to their previous two releases – it’s going to be a hard sell.

In a year when Dungeons of Dredmor was released, and Dungeon Crawl ascended to new heights, Tales of Maj’Eyal (aka TOME 4) won the hearts of dungeon crawlers in the ASCII Dreams Roguelike Of The Year awards, and was voted best of 2011. What makes this sleeper hit such a big deal, winning over even the most hardened of loot-hoarders and monster-mashers, and usurping the would-be-king that was Dredmor? Find out after the break in our freeware pick of the day.

The poor gits over at The Indie Stone haven’t really caught any big breaks lately, but despite an almost cartoonish level of bad luck compounded by quite stunning hostility from their own audience, they’re still kicking. Or at least shambling grimly forward, as any self-respecting brainmuncher would. While a new public alpha version of their horror-survival RPG sandbox Project Zomboid isn’t available quite yet, the team have put up a couple of videos detailing the finer points of survivor AI and their upcoming conversation system – it’s really clever stuff. We’ve seen a lot of zombie games this year, but nothing like this.

Technology and charm are not two things that naturally go hand-in-hand. This year has seen massive studios create technologically stunning new ways to render brown dirt roads and shattered concrete – there’s just no room for whimsy in triple-A development, it seems. That’s where the indie scene comes in. Frozenbyte’s Trine 2 is a great big cozy comfort-blanket of a game, but is charisma all this fairy-tale storybook has to offer? It takes more than graphics to make a complex platform-puzzle game sing, after all. Wrap up warm, grab yourself some hot cocoa and read on for our verdict.

Independent developer Spiderweb Software emailed us this morning to let us know that their upcoming RPG: Avernum: Escape from the Pit finally has a solid release date, or, rather, a more solid release date. According to the press release the guys plan on launching the game on Windows and iOS in April of 2012, which should give them some time to boast during next year’s GDC. A Mac version is expected this month, but there is not solid release date that I can find.

‘Maximalist’ is a good word to use to describe Trendy Entertainment‘s action/tower defense hybrid Dungeon Defenders. Lots of levels, lots of monsters, lots of stats, huge numbers, mountains of loot, options out the wazoo and more over-bloomed neon colored lighting than you’ve ever seen before. The bigness extends beyond the core design, too, with sweeping rebalances in patches and heaps of content-filled DLC already bulking the game out further. But does all this extra baggage make for a compelling co-op tower-defense experience, though? Read on and find out.

Ever wished you could play an 80′s-style RPG like Dragon Quest, but with friends? No? Well, someone else did, and then they made this game. NEStalgia is a primarily-free (more on that later) small-scale online RPG in the style of Nintendo JRPGs of old, built on the BYOND platform. It’s simple, it’s accessible and available for PC, Mac and Linux. Boasting turn-based combat, simple party mechanics, some modern MMO refinements and a whole lot of 8-bit content all controlled via an interface that could fit on a NES gamepad. After the break, a trailer and some initial thoughts on this cute neo-oldschool romp.

It’s no secret that a lot of indie developers have been turning away from Microsofts Xbox Live Indie Games service as a marketplace for their creations. A cluttered storefront and hundreds of seemingly zero-effort shovelware titles drown out what little quality there is, and Microsoft themselves seem to have made only the very most cursory attempts at promoting the store. While there’s no doubt that there are some genuinely great games on XBLIG, it’s hard to pick out the wheat from the chaff. Zeboyd Games was one of the developers to make the jump from 360 to PC via a Steam publishing deal, and now we know just how successful the transition was.

Minecraft isn’t the only building/mining/fighting game on the block – or made of blocks, for that matter – but I digress. It seems like an age ago now, but Terraria was released just six months back and has since offered several major updates, adding new areas to explore, new weapons to use, new features and new bosses to fight. Things have been quiet on the development front since the big ‘V1.0′ update a while back. The reason just became clear; this next update is going to be huge.

Back in 2007, The Witcher showed up many of the largest, highest-budget RPGs of the time by doing so much more with a comparatively tiny budget and studio. The game wasn’t perfect by any means, but an official ‘directors cut’ update addressed many of the software and presentation issues. One of the most dedicated modders in the community, Flash, produced an enhancement and rebalance mod to address everything else, and it was so good that it got him hired by CD Projekt to work on the sequel. Now the sequel is out, he has returned to his old project, to revive the original Witcher and bring it closer to its successor in terms of quality. The end result is this mod.