PAX East 2020: Indie Games to Look Out For

The video games at PAX East 2020 represented a wide range of genres and story themes, some embodying new visions of old standard tropes, and others being oddly prescient for our current way of life in a time defined by isolation.

No, games will not save us from our election anxiety and our pandemic panics, but as we cope with the reality that social distancing will be the norm for an indefinite amount of time, video gaming has suddenly become an even more palatable medium for us to consume in our daily lives. 

The livelihood of many of the developers behind all of these games will be disrupted, which means that getting the word out for these independent titles is  essential for them now more than ever. Events like PAX East may be on hold for now, but online and remotely, we can try our best to carry the spirit, excitement, and collaboration by raising each other’s voices.

Games as Escape

When it comes to games that provide a means to escape, it didn’t take long to find a couple of titles at the Annapurna Interactive booth. One such game was naturally titled The Artful Escape, a musical platformer game from developer Beethoven & Dinosaur. The visual style is arresting, with Ziggy Stardust psychedelic colors matched by witty and attitude-infused dialogue. In the game, the protagonist of Francis Vendetti copes with the looming figure of his folk-legend uncle while trying to build his own identity as a musician by delving into a world of imagination.

Right next to that demo station was one for If Found…, an interactive visual novel by Dreamfeel. This game also featured a young protagonist who is coming of age, focusing on teenage girl Kasio and dynamics in her family and social circles while also dealing with her social isolation and overall rebellious tendencies. If Found… is framed by Kasio’s diary, with the player’s mouse cursor acting as an eraser that reveals new parts of the story, which is presented in a distinct watercolor-like art style. This too has its protagonist tap into a world of imagination, one centering on space travel and a black hole.

Thinking Inward

Continuing with those themes, it felt like an excellent time to revisit She Dreams Elsewhere, an RPG game from Studio Zevere that presents an adventure that explores mental health and self-identity in a world of the surreal. A young woman named Thalia Sullivan wakes up in what appears to be an environment populated by her nightmares and darkest thoughts, manifesting in monsters that she and her friends must ward off. The gameplay is quite reminiscent of Earthbound while having its own distinct visual style using white and bright shades of purple and blue. What piques my interest are the unsettling appearances of these monsters with names like “No Heart,”  and I am eager to see what those monsters thematically represent in Thalia’s mental health journey.

I had also been eager to try out Spiritfarer, the upcoming adventure management game from Thunder Lotus Games. Upon its initial reveal last year, the crisp 2D animation style instantly caught my attention, but it was the themes I encountered during my PAX East demo that had me entranced. Spiritfarer has the player as Stella, who is ferrying the spirits of the deceased, encountering souls scattered through a number of islands and inviting them onto her ship before finally releasing them into the afterlife. I played a co-op demo with the art director of the game who played as a cat named Daffodil, and we won over a spirit hesitant to join Stella by gathering resources and building a house to their specifications. All of the characters have very expressive animations, but most of all, I appreciated the game’s theme of moving on and transitioning—it was nice for once to have a game centered around death to be inherently optimistic.

Optimism and love are central to A Fold Apart, a game that hit close to home with its premise of depicting a long-distance relationship. The colorful art style helps to distinguish the different locations that both partners currently find themselves in, with the puzzles involving the player “folding” the environment for the couple to find their way back to each other. Gameplay-wise, it was a bit difficult to tell which parts of the environment I was able to interact with or stand on, with the two distinct environments sometimes leading to confusion, but the puzzles were simple enough while still being creative and challenging. And the game is quite queer-friendly too, as the couple can be chosen to be one of any number of gender-inclusive options.

(Queer) Love is in the Air

The epicenter of queerness at the show floor was undoubtedly the Indie Megabooth’s Visual Novel Reading Room, which was curated and organized by game writers including Arden Ripley and Christine Love, and featured three games that had romance in the center. 

Love Shore from Perfect Garbage took place in a cyberpunk world full of S.Humans with artificial bodies. The player will control two different protagonists, Farah and Sam, with intertwining storylines and a litany of possible endings. This game, set in a neon-lit futuristic city, features some light RPG elements, with stats that represent strength, intelligence, and courage, and also each NPC having an approval rating of the protagonists. But more importantly, Love Shore is just exuding bi-sexual energy, with even tense and confusing situations containing some flirtation. 

Someone hilariously described Green Solid’s West Falls as “BuzzFeed Unsolved, but even gayer.” This visual novel has three college students hosting a ghost hunting vlog on the web; it starts off silly and charming, with the characters of Sage and Cole teasing Toma as they record, but the demo featured some moments of tension. This is a game with messy, and sometimes discomforting boy love. One such scene has the three boys trying to make off from an abandoned building when confronted by a police officer with a devil mask, who grabs Sage and asks him to be “a good boy.” The art style is mostly black and white, with hints of bright colors on each of the boys to distinguish them. And yes, they’re all quite cute. The cop? Not as much.

On the other hand, Our Life: Beginnings & Always isn’t as sexually charged, but it still handles infatuation and intimacy in very unique ways. This visual novel from GB Patch Games focuses on nostalgia, as you go through scenarios with the lonely boy next door, Cove, across multiple time periods, from childhood to adulthood. Players can fully customize their character’s appearance, personality, and pronouns, but where Our Life gets fascinating is in between segments, where players can quite literally adjust your character’s romantic and friendly feelings towards Cove. It’s a creative way to express romance in its true-to-life complexities rather than some sort of binary choice, and what results are a number of different variations of scenes between your character and Cove.

The Cyberpunk Fad

Ghostrunner is a game that takes place in a “hardcore cyberpunk world” and involves a bit of parkour. It felt very much like a first-person 3D version of Katana Zero, in that all of your sword strikes will kill in one hit; at the same time, enemy attacks are just as deadly. Like in Katana Zero and in Cyber Hook, the player can enter a bullet-time slowdown mode to help them react against enemy actions. There’s plenty of wall-running and grappling to be done as well, ensuring that there are plenty of options in dispatching grunts. The game will have the player character advancing up a tower, giving it a feeling like that the film Dredd.

Going away from the technothriller look and closer to a dystopian future was Liberated, a product of Polish studio Walkabout. The pitch for the game is a “playable graphic novel,” with the developers telling me that they found direct inspirations from Sin City and V for Vendetta. Taking place under an oppressive regime, this black-and-white game features side-scrolling action with dual-stick shooting. Even with a laser sight, shooting and aiming didn’t feel quite perfect, but dispatching enemies in firefights or by sneaking around felt satisfying nonetheless. I very much would like to see where the story goes thematically, and I hope that this particular studio from this specific country could add a unique tinge to the story.

Weird and Strange Fusions

Some games fused together different genres to create new gameplay experiences—the most explicit example of this would have to be Fuser from Harmonix. Players will mash up vocals, percussion, guitar, and other tracks from different popular songs, with bonus points added for fulfilling requests from the virtual audience and dropping new track elements to the beat. I’m most curious if it’s possible to play the game “badly” and create something horrible and cacophonous, as it felt like the game had a safety net. 

One game that combined fun fantasy tropes with absolutely morbid humor was REZ PLZ from Long Neck Games, a side-scrolling co-operative game that follows two wizard brothers. The two gain the power of resurrection, with many of the puzzles actually requiring one of the brothers to die and use their body as props–perhaps as a platform on spikes, or weight to use on a switch. Of course, only one player can be dead at a time, with the other having to use a limited number of resurrections, which can be replenished with pick-ups. The game requires quite a lot of trial and error and some nuanced timing, but the puzzles were creative and fun to figure out. I am quite curious to see how players will react to the inherently-violent nature of the game, with much of the bloody violence being self-inflicted.

Lucifer Within Us from Kitfox Games provided an intriguing mystery in a world that combines technology and faith. If taking the role of a “digital exorcist” doesn’t already intrigue, then you may already be a hopeless cause. The bizarre, techno-religious world makes for a compelling set-up for some murder mysteries, which are solved by comparing the alibis of witnesses, conveniently displayed like a film editing timeline. Catch contradictions and use evidence found in the environment to form accusations and get to the bottom of whatever the hell (or equivalent to Hell) is happening.

Other Games I Played at PAX East 2020:

• The Red Lantern from Timberline Studio is a rogue-lite involving sled dogs; it plays like a choose-your-own-adventure while also involving resource management, and while I had two failed runs, I remain intrigued by this weird combo of gameplay mechanics.
• Going Under from Aggro Crab Games has the player join a “poorly-conceived” Silicon Valley start-up as an intern, and with very little training, the player is expected to dungeon crawl through the office building and fight off various unexplained monsters, using practically anything in the environment as a weapon.
• Embr from Muse Games depicts a private firefighting service hailed by an app; the gameplay is first-person with a number of tools like a firehouse and ax at the player’s disposal, picking up inhabitants of burning buildings and tossing their ragdolls into outside safe zones; the more rescued victims, the more money you earn.
• Later Daters depicted romance within a retirement home; like other romantic visual novels in this day and age, the playable character is customizable, down to gender and pronouns–it’s a fairly optimistic view of a future with more progressive, inclusive, and open-minded elders, with some levity in the form of some tongue-in-cheek dialogue. 
• Pixel Puzzle Makeout League from Rude Ghost Games combines Picross puzzles with some dating simulator mechanics; the main character is Pixel Girl, a pixel puzzle expert and a rookie of the superhero group “Puzzle League.”
• Tangle Tower by Snipperclips developer SFB Games features their Detective Grimoire character in a point-and-click murder mystery adventure with plenty of Ace Attorney-like investigations and Professor Layton-like puzzles. 
• A Space for the Unbound is a slice-of-life game that also featured young protagonists in a confusing time of their life, focusing on a boy and a girl in late-90s rural Indonesia near the end of their high school days when the pair encounter a supernatural force.
• The Annapurna-published Maquette is a first-person narrative game with a bit of puzzle-solving, with the main setpiece of the demo being an interactive scale model of the world the player was inhabiting.
• Young Souls is a co-op arcade-style beat-em-up game, with players taking control of abandoned teenagers Jenn and Tristan; the full game will have players traverse through over 70 dungeons, but in between, the players will explore a small port town to buy new clothes and weapons, and work on improving their stats.
• Cyber Hook from Blazing Stick was light in story but heavy in aesthetics, being set in a bright and neon “retrowave world”; it’s a first-person parkour game with an undoubtedly cool title, and very cool mechanics to match. 
• Decoy Games’ Swimsanity! is a four-player action game that pits players against each other in underwater combat, using twin-stick controls for aiming and plenty of power-ups; aside from competitive local and online multiplayer, there is also a wave-based survival co-op mode.
• And lastly, while I didn’t have an appointment for it, I just had to play some Windjammers 2. As a huge fan of the first cult classic game, the sequel from Dotemu was exactly what I wanted: more Windjammers, but prettier.