It's not just any pirate who's willing to share treasure freely, but Nelly Cootalot is one such buccaneer, as a playable demo of her second adventure is now available for download.

The Fowl Fleet is a commercial sequel to Alasdair Beckett-King's popular freeware adventure Spoonbeaks Ahoy!. This time around, the "pirate heroine and defender of endangered and adorable creatures" must once again oppose the nefarious Baron Widebeard, who has "kidnapped a fleet of birds and hypnotised them to do his bidding. What is he planning? Can he be stopped? In what way is a frozen volcano involved?" Nelly's pursuit of the Baron will "take her from Port Rubicund in the South Seas to the lonely isle of Gloomholm in the icy north," where she'll "meet outlandish characters and face perplexing challenges in her quest for the Treasure of the Seventh Sea."

The demo starts players off aboard the Mailship Undeliverable, where Nellys is soon informed of her new quest by the ghostly Captain Bloodbead. But before she can set out on another swashbuckling adventure, she'll first need to get herself out of the mailroom.

The 85 MB demo can be downloaded for PC, Mac, and Linux from the game's Kickstarter page, where The Fowl Fleet is heading into the home stretch in hot pursuit of its £15,000 goal by June 29th.

The success of titles like Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire didn't lead to a flood of new big-budget adventures like we'd hoped, but there's at least one AAA adventure on the horizon in the form of Square Enix's Murdered: Soul Suspect.

Players control Ronan O’Connor, a "detective with a checkered past, whose life is brought to an untimely end by a brutal and relentless killer. Unable to move on and stuck in the limbo world of Dusk, he won’t find peace until he can bring his killer to justice from the afterlife." Being a ghost, O'Connor has both special supernatural abilities and physical limitations. As he explores a fictionalized version of Salem, Massachusetts, he is unable to communicate directly with detectives investigating his death or make any substantial physical impact on the world, but he can freely walk through walls and "read the minds of the living, influencing their thoughts and actions."

While much of Murdered: Soul Suspect's gameplay involves investigating clues and interrogating the "ghosts of Salem’s past citizens to piece together the puzzle", there will also be occasional stealth action elements involved as O'Connor must battle "demonic spirits to save his soul and uncover the shocking truth about who is responsible for his death."

There is no firm release date scheduled yet for this game, but Murdered: Soul Suspect is currently on track for release early in 2014 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

It may be a slow time for big-name adventures right now, but that hasn't stopped the indies from cranking them out this month, with no fewer than four new releases in recent days.

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2

After leaving us scratching our heads but desperately craving more with its surreal debut installment, the five-part Kentucky Route Zero picks up right where it left off in Act 2. This "magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in Kentucky and the mysterious folks who travel it" once again casts players in the role of Conway, an antique furniture deliveryman simply seeking to make his final delivery, along with his rail-thin old dog in a straw hat and a TV repairwoman he picked up along the way. But nothing is as it seems on Route Zero, and the group will find themselves navigating a bizarre new set of dream-like environments and obstacles.

Available exclusively as part of a full-season purchase for PC and Mac, Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2 can be found at official website, which offers both DRM-free downloads and Steam keys.

Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds

Adventure gamers know better than anyone that being dead isn't the end of the world. In fact, it's often the start of a glorious adventure. In the lighthearted '50s-era supernatural pulp mystery Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds, players will control the eponymous character, a long-dead ghost who now has just one night to "unravel the house’s ghastly tale, discover whodunit, raise the dead, find your remains and live out the fantasy of being a dime-store novel detective. And if you can’t find your body before the sun goes down? Then it's lights out for good for ol’ Jack the Private Investigator."

Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds can be purchased for $5 from the developer's website, exclusively for PC.

Nancy the Happy Whore and the Perfidious Petrol Station

Leisure Suit Larry may still be dragging his heels, but the titular star of Nancy the Happy Whore and the Perfidious Petrol Station is already out prowling the streets. No, not like THAT! All Nancy's really trying to do is tank up on her way to the "Big City", but she quickly "discovers more than she bargained for in this gruesome gas station. Relying on her wits and the help of her best friend and crack-fiend, Susie the Drug Addict, things start to go from 'bad' to 'weird' as she must not only find vital fuel for her car, but also put a stop to an armed robbery, defeat an ancient and evil (but extremely polite) cult, and show a young man that becoming a hippy is never the right answer."

Originally released as part of last summer's Summerbatch indie sale, this comic adventure has now been upgraded with full voice acting and released as a standalone adventure. You can download Nancy the Happy Whore and the Perfidious Petrol Station for PC from Desura or FireFlower Games for $4.49 or €3.99, respectively.

Alone in the Park

The adventure genre is full of games starring likeable characters who meet memorable characters on epic, heroic quests... Alone in the Park is not one of those games. Promising a "slow-paced, low-octane blend of text and graphical adventure gameplay", here players control "a rather misanthropic gamer who finds herself lured away from her computer to embark upon a real world quest: finding hidden treasure in a National Park. Annoyingly, doing this requires her to locate and reassemble pieces of a treasure map. And instead of being populated with cool creatures like giant vampire squid bats or something, the park's forests, lakes and mountains are home to the lamest NPCs imaginable."

Originally released as a browser-based freeware adventure in 2011, Alone in the Park has received a "major revamping" for its commercial release for PC, Mac, and iPad. The iPad version is available now for $3.99 on the App Store, and the $5 PC/Mac versions will be launched shortly on the official website.

Being one of the select few survivors of a plague would be a horror of (literally) epidemic proportions in real life, but it sure makes for great gaming fodder. At least, the indie developers at Crashable Studios are hoping it does, as they've recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance their retro indie adventure, Alum.

Alum is the game's titular star, who has lost his loved ones to the deadly plague and now seeks to discover where the disease came from and whether a cure exists. His investigation begins in the city of Cosmos and eventually leads Alum on a "grand quest of discovering love, evil, deep truths, conspiracy, rebel factions, friendly monsters, and monstrous friends."

As demonstrated in the game's crowdfunding pitch video and early screenshots, Alum is an old-school pixel art adventure with verb-based interaction icons intended to resemble the classic games that inspired it (Quest for Glory, Space Quest, and Monkey Island are among the influences cited by the developers). Rounding out the traditional 2D presentation, the graphics promise to feature "completely hand drawn characters, backgrounds and animations".

In order to finish the game no later than April 2014, a Kickstarter campaign has been launched to finance the remaining production of Alum, seeking $10,000 by July 4th. If successful, the stated goal of the three-man development team is a game with approximately 80 diverse backgrounds, original music, and full voice acting to complement its far-reaching storyline and "sinister puzzles that will keep you on your toes." A minimum pledge of $10 will reward backers with a downloadable version of the game exclusively for PC.

For complete details about Alum and its fundraising campaign, visit the Kickstarter page to learn more and support the project.

You just can't keep a zombie adventure down. Of course, in the case of Telltale's The Walking Dead, that's a very good thing, making today's video teaser and announcement of an upcoming single episode downloadable expansion welcome news indeed.

In 400 Days, players will grapple once again with both the undead and mankind's own inhumanity as they "struggle to survive the first 400 days of the apocalypse." The stories are distinct but connected, playable in any order, and are "centered in and around a Georgia truck stop, where players will be thrust into horrifying situations that will test their morals and control the flow of the story through their decisions and actions."

Although not directly tied to the full first season of The Walking Dead, 400 Days is a downloadable expansion to the original series that will require "at least Episode One of Season One to be installed on a user's game system in order to play." The new game will be sold for US$4.99 (or equivalent) on a wide variety of platforms, including PC, Mac, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and iOS. Both the full first season and the upcoming DLC will also be released together on PlayStation Vita for the first time.

There is currently no firm release date set for 400 Days, but you can expect The Walking Dead's zombie horde to rise again sometime this summer.

Providing gamers with a little late-night entertainment, the indie creators of Lune have just launched a browser-based alpha demo for their unique moon-based puzzler.

Lune strands players alone in a tower on an island in the middle of the ocean. Rather than simply controlling the abandoned protagonist, players can also manipulate the moon itself to influence tides, reflect light, and modify gravity in various ways to overcome the many environmental obstacles in your path and avoid the island's stone guardians.

Rather than creating a traditional adventure, Team Lune claims that the game is "about experiencing things" in a very personal way without any words to tell the story or offer instructions. As advertised, the playable demo is available now directly from the official website, thrusting you straight into the action with no preamble (but I'll give you a hint: keyboard controls moon, mouse controls character). 

There is currently no firm deadline set for the release of Lune, but the developers are targeting completion for Windows, Mac, and Linux sometime this fall.

The word "harvest" may bring to mind pastoral scenes of farms and fields, but it takes on a whole different meaning in the upcoming futuristic detective mystery by that name, currently seeking funds through Kickstarter.

Indie developer GondeFire's Harvest (not to be confused with Michael B. Clark's 2002 adventure) takes place in a future where chemical war has left "99% of the Earth's population unable to produce offspring. The remaining fertile humans are crucial to the survival of mankind, however they begin to disappear mysteriously." Players will control a detective working in Detroit as he attempts to "solve the case and help save the world from human extinction."

Described by designer Kevin Gondek as a stylistic mix between Snatcher and Phoenix Wright, the gameplay in this first-person adventure is largely conducted through action menus with basic commands such as "Look, Investigate and Move", while useful tools needed for your investigation can be accessed through the item menu. Along the way, players will need to contend with periodic action sequences throughout the game as well.

Harvest promises to be hand-painted in high resolution, as teased in the early concept artwork and trailer. In order to polish the game with rich animation, full voiceovers, music and sound effects, however, GondeFire is seeking $10,000 by July 1st through Kickstarter. A successful campaign will result in the game (ideally) being completed in February 2014 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with other platforms possible if stretch goals are reached. A $20 contribution will result in a downloadable version of the game upon release.

To learn more about Harvest and the crowdfunding campaign, visit the Kickstarter page for the full scoop and pledge options.