First-person explore-o-puzzler Infra has been one of my favourite gaming surprises of recent years, sending me tromping around the dams, sewers, and bridges of a European city as a structural analyst investigating infrastructure damage. Who could have guessed I’d be so happy wandering along a river snapping photos of crumbling concrete? Now Loiste Interactive want to send us back to Stalburg in an expansion, set on a prison island, as well as in a curious spin-off game about repairing and managing run-down tenements.

Loiste have announced their next big game too, and it’s not more Infra.

So! Infra’s Whiprock DLC will send us to investigate the “abandoned seafortress and high security prison island of Whiprock”, Loiste say. It does not seem a happy place. Infra proper spooked me at times, though it isn’t a horror game, and I’d like to say I won’t be surprised if Whiprock has some scares too – but I definitely will be surprised, and will surely jump and scream.

Details are vague but Loiste say they hope to release it “late this year” (though it might be later) and yes, there are minitrains.

Open Sewer, the Infra spin-off game, is a curious thing. It’s set in the same city but with a different art style and a very different perspective, plopping us in the run-down Obenseuer district (geddit?) as an undesirable swept out of sight by the callous council.

“You’ll have to repair and rent tenements, trade moonshine alcohol products of questionable legality to survive and to stash enough funds to leave this cesspit of mayhem for good,” Loiste say. Stardew Valley comes to mind, weirdly, but as some sort of tongue-in-cheek hobo urban fantasy? They plan to launch this “within one year.”

As for Loiste’s new game, it’s named Valta and could be… anything? It’s set 200 years in the grim future, when civilisation has partially collapsed into small city states and tribes, and our modern technology is mostly gone. It seems workshops and fortresses might play big parts but I have no idea in what way. MYSTERIOUS.

“Can you, and your people, set the path towards brighter future?” they ask. Dunno, mate.

For now, they have neither a release window nor anything to show beyond concept art.

Weird. Open Sewer and Valta sound weird. But after Infra, I’m certainly excited by what Loiste can do with weird.