Enlarge / Timely art from the game Traverser, soon to be published by developer Gatling Goat Studios. (credit: Gatling Goat Studios/Adult Swim Games)

Warner Bros. Discovery has spent at least two months threatening more than a dozen indie games developers with the "retirement" of their games, with little to no response as to why they couldn't do something simple and much better for the games' players and creators.

Late last week, one of the Adult Swim Games creators impacted by Warner Bros. Discovery's (WBD) seeming shutdown posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he received an email from Warner Bros. indicating that his Duck Game was "safe." "[T]he game is being returned to corptron along with [its] store pages on all platforms," Landon wrote. The same went for Owen Deery, whose notice from WBD about his game Small Radios Big Televisions brought attention to the media conglomerate's actions and who posted that his game, too, will have its ownership and store listings returned to him.

As noted by PC Gamer, the 60-day timeline originally provided to developers for their games to be delisted has passed, and yet most of the Adult Swim Games titles are still up.

Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in. (credit: Goblinz Studio)

You can't buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free "Prologue" demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It's not quite like any other city builder I've played.

Mini Settlers is "mini" like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don't have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don't get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they'll come back if you fix what's wrong.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no "money" to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.