LONDON, MARCH 6th 2025 after building a loyal following with its popular newsletter dedicated to bold and bizarre games, Pantaloon has today announced its break-out game label, looking to bring weird and wayward games to market under the banner of ‘a home for misfits’.
“The world probably doesn’t need another indie publisher,” said founder Jamin Smith (previously Square Enix, Modern Wolf) about the new indie publisher. “But our vision is built off a different set of principles. With an existing awareness platform and terms that give novel agency and security to development partners, we then seek to actively court risk, finding peculiar or experimental games that can chart unexplored or choppy genre-waters.”
‘A home for misfits’ is more than just a tagline; it’s a call to arms for games that don’t fit traditional publishing structures.”
The first games signed to the label are Sub-Verge from New Zealand-based Interactive Tragedy, Limited and Occlude from UK-based Tributary Games.
Sub-Verge is a psychological narrative puzzler that plays out at the depths of the ocean. Players manipulate a fractured band of deep-sea divers to talk their way out of a deep-sea sub—before a horror from the depths surfaces. The game marks novelist and indie book publishing house founder Zach Dodson’s foray into games, as he brings his critically-acclaimed writing to a new medium.
Occlude takes the Solitaire ruleset and transforms it through a lens of cosmic horror, offering a meta-challenge where the rules are esoteric and ever-changing. With cerebral puzzles and a rich, lore-dense narrative, Occlude looks to take the revered card game into uncharted territory. As part of the announcement, a puzzle gauntlet has been thrown down ahead of release, with early playtest spots being offered up as a reward to those prepared to solve it.
Pantaloon has also announced the Steam release of Puzzletrunk; an “evolving treasure-trove of challenges, riddles and interactive-oddities designed to stimulate that slab of grey-matter nestled behind your eyeballs.” The free game, previously only available via Itch.io, will come with a host of improvements, optimisations and new Steam features when it launches later this year.
“Our newsletter - now approaching 30k subscribers - will remain the Sun around which everything else will orbit.” Smith said of the mailing list where it all began.
“We’ll still be providing the most unreasonably delightful mailing list in games, we'll still be offering up games from incredible partners each month, and we'll still be championing obscure or overlooked games. What we'll also now be doing is weaving this newsletter more deeply into the way we operate as a game label, with a plethora of exciting initiatives we'll be lifting the lid on over the course of the year. The newsletter is at the heart of it all; this is just the beginning.
For more information, please contact press@pantaloon.io, or visit the Pantaloon Press Portal for assets, future comms and more.
PANTALOON
www.pantaloon.io
Pantaloon is a home for misfits; a game label and pedestal for bold and bizarre indie games, and a nexus of resources and services for developers looking to self-publish. Pantaloon helps indie game studios bring their games to market whilst remaining fully independent.
INTERACTIVE TRAGEDY
https://www.interactivetragedy.com
Interactive Tragedy, Limited, is a small, sad studio in Wellington New Zealand. Creator-driven, they subscribe to many strange fictions. All the drama is in the games.
TRIBUTARY GAMES
https://www.tributary.games/
Tributary Games is a fully remote games studio with team members in the UK, US, Canada and France.
It develops social strategy games with innovative, collaborative mechanics.The studio’s debut title, KING OF THE CASTLE, was released in early 2023 with Team17.