A one-person dev named BrandonWritesGames has been grinding on Dieselpunk 1921 for nearly a year, logging hundreds of hours of collage-making, and he’s almost across the finish line. To prove it, a free condensed quickstart edition drops tomorrow (July 23) on itch.io, packing the full rules, a condensed character creation process, 34 country description pages, and an item list. Thirty-four countries. The Doctor is taking notes.

The pitch is political intrigue in the interwar period, which is basically the Dieselpunk sweet spot: grease-stained trench coats, Art Deco everything, factions that would sell you to the highest bidder before the ink dries, and the slow creep of Very Bad History just offstage. If you’ve ever wanted to run a game set in Monaco in 1921 where everyone is lying to everyone else, this is your game. The full release is inbound; the quickstart is the appetizer.

Go grab the free edition when it drops. Support the solo dev. Give the Doctor a full release to write about. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: BrandonWritesGames on itch.io

Two guys. One enormous dieselpunk spider-turret. A 1920s Castillian monarchy held together with hydraulic grease and bad decisions. IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator just became the number-one most wishlisted game of the June 2026 Steam Next Fest, and its demo is sitting at 99% Overwhelmingly Positive. That is not a rounding error. That is the universe telling you to pay attention. The Formula recognizes this game immediately: take a colossal interwar war machine, lock a lone operator inside it with teleprinters, ballistic calculators, hydraulic levers, and enough moral ambiguity to last a decade, and you have DieselPunk distilled into a first-person box of clanking, groaning, morally compromised steel.

Here is the thing nobody tells you: you will spend approximately zero percent of your time actually firing the cannon. You will spend the other hundred percent reading coordinates, charting ranges on a map the size of a kitchen table, calculating powder charges, manually rotating a turret that weighs more than a battleship, and then questioning whether High Command actually has any idea what they are pointing you at. (They do not. High Command never does.) It is part math test, part immersive sim, part ethics seminar nobody signed up for. The full release drops August 6, 2026. The free demo is still up right now. Go. The Doctor will not be held responsible for the hospital.

Via: Steam