I have just returned from PAX West in Seattle. The experience involved a lot of walking and waiting in line for 8 hours a day with no breaks, leaving our legs stiff and feet hurting. Still, we got to play all sorts of interesting games, a few AAA, but mostly indie. The lines for the AAA games were extremely long. We couldn’t even get into the Monster Hunter one. Though we heard later that if you did make it in, the line took 3 hours to get through. Instead, we mostly went around and played smaller indie titles as well as chatted with the developers. Below I have compiled some brief thoughts of every game I played (or at least remember) with links to their Steam page (save for the Nintendo ones). If any of these sound interesting, please Wishlist them. It really does help the developers out.

All Systems Dance: This was a weird game. There really wasn’t a ton to do. You did dance battles with robots. These involved doing dance moves to a beat in order to navigate a dance arena while dodging the attacks from robots. I really didn’t get what the game was about from merely the short length of the demo. My friend felt the game needed to feel faster, and I can see that. It almost felt like they wanted that Jet Set Radio vibe without committing.

Away From Home: Another rhythm-based game like All Systems Dance, but this time in the form of a quirky RPG. The writing was cute and had some good humor. The characters and animations also felt pretty good. My only complaint is that the triggers of when to hit the beat seemed visually difficult to read. Otherwise, I think this might be one to watch out for. Also, the music was quite catchy.

Echoes of Mystralia: This is a new rogue-light ARPG. As you progress through the game you get spell upgrade tokens that allow you to modify and customize your spells. As an example, I had a boomerang disk, and I got an upgrade that added a fire trail as it moved around. I could have also added this to my lighting beam spell to instead allow that to place fire as it was shot. Seems like a cool system and I want to see how it’ll develop. Even in the early state that it is in, the game felt polished with smooth controls.

Fowl Damage: This was one my friend played, and I watched enough to get a good idea what it was. It is a puzzle platformer where you are an egg. Like an egg, you crack easily if you fall too far. Unlike a normal egg though, you can jump very high. This creates an interesting dynamic where you actually need to pick your way down slowly to make big leaps up, so you just barely make It over the ledge and not take fall damage. Overall, it seems like an interesting game and I’m curious how the design of it goes after the small demo section they showed.

Herdling: This seems like it’s going to be one of those moody somewhat artsy games. You take the role of a child who picks up a tree branch and finds you can use it to herd strange yak-like creatures. After befriending a trio of them, you make your way out of a decrepit city and into the fields as you make your way to the mountains. Gameplay wise there was a single minor puzzle and most of it was just directing your furry friends about. I’m curious if there’s going to be any deeper gameplay or if it is just going to be a glorified walking simulator. Still, I liked some of the music and the feeling of running your yaks through the gorgeous environments was great.

Inpulse: Another platformer that I merely watched my friend play. If you want a painfully difficult precision platformer, this one is for you. In it you have to ride and shoot out magic notes in order to get through small quick stages. It looked like Super Meat Boy levels of difficulty, for these curious. Not really for me, but I know others like that.

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: After waiting over an hour to get into the Nintendo booth we got to play about 15 minutes of 4 separate titles. The upcoming Legend of Zelda game was the first one. I will say in advance that the top-down Legend of Zelda games are some of my favorites and I prefer them to the full 3d counterparts. So, I am really looking forward to this game and it did not disappoint. The ability to learn how to clone objects is super engaging. The ability to create enemies actually seems like it’s going to be one of the more interesting parts since each enemy has its own attack pattern that you have to learn how to utilize. I’m now even more excited for the game when it comes out later this month. Also, the map seriously looks like Link to the Past’s.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition: Another fun one from Nintendo. It’s basically like a bunch of mini speed run challenges that you play against other players. For our demo, we did all original Legend of Zelda challenges. These ranged from killing enemies, bosses, or even just getting the sword at the beginning of the game. While I don’t think I’d actually get this game, it could be a fun little party game if you actually have friends you play games with.

Path of Exile 2: I personally have never played Path of Exile 1 so I cannot compare it. My friend though is a massive fan and really thinks 2 is going to be a massive improvement. The main thing he mentioned being different is skills no longer being tied to equipment. I played as a Ranger and went through the opening area of the game, doing the first dungeon. I had a good time, despite having no clue what I was doing. He went into a more mid-game scenario and was apparently given a pretty bad build for the demo. This ended up pitting him against a boss he had no chance of defeating since his damage was complete garbage.

Pioneers of Pagonia: This was a cool medieval fantasy town builder. You play as humans who have landed on an island and are developing a new city for themselves. Here, you have to ally with all of the natives while fighting off various villains such as thieves and werewolves. The game had kind of an objective list of what to build that felt a bit overwhelming as I was mostly just looking at what the game was telling me to build rather than making decisions myself. I also never felt like I was avoiding a failure state. While I liked it, I wasn’t sure if the game was going to hold enough depth in the long run.

Rivals 2: I’ve actually backed this game through kickstarter. If you’ve played Rivals 1, it’s that, in 3d. For those who haven’t played it, it’s kind of like Super Smash Bros. Melee with an all furry cast. I played as Fleet (the fox) and spent my entire round trying to figure out my kit. Still, it was fun even though I got destroyed.

Rooster: This was a super cute game. I didn’t actually get to play it but watched other people do so and talked to the artist a bit. She really wanted to try and bring the style of watercolor to the game with all of its imperfections rather than the more digitally perfect art that you see in most games. Gameplay wise, it seemed like some hidden object game, but I believe they mentioned there were more game modes it was composed of, all based on characters of the Chinese zodiac calendar.

Star Wars: Hunters: This was the last game we played at the Nintendo booth. I really hated it. Not only am I bad at shooters, but I am really bad at them on the console, and the controls were inverted in ways I didn’t want. We got destroyed and I had an absolutely terrible time playing it. Maybe if I wasn’t fighting with the controls, it could have been fun. This was not the case though.

Super Mario Party: Jamboree: They had 3 mini games for us to play through. I haven’t played a Mario Party game since the original one. All I remember is Mario Party destroying friendships with how angry it’d make us towards one another. In this case, the mini games were fun. I got to be a giant Bullet Bill and murder all the other players. It felt good.

Tears of Metal: I absolutely loved this game. It was basically Dynasty Warriors as a rogue-light where you play as the Scots destroying the English. You tear through waves of enemies and build up cool special powers throughout your run so you can tear them apart harder. Complete with tons of blood as you slice them apart with your claymore.

TetherGeist: This was a rather fun puzzle platformer. You have a mechanic where you can astrally project your body slightly away from yourself and then teleport to it. Your astral form can pass through some objects, but not others. You also have the ability to use mushrooms to launch your character. Interestingly, both of these require a resource that needs to be picked up. These are placed in a queue that needs to be used in order. This makes the game rather interesting in not only do you need to pick up specific resources, but you also need to grab them in the right order to solve the puzzle.

The Big Catch: this felt like a throwback to old N64 era platformers. While the graphics were a bit better, they were definitely harkening back to that era with style. Here you play a bird who has a fishing rod in the middle of a desert. I really like the main character’s design, and a lot of the movement felt pretty good. The biggest issue with the camera. I just felt like I was fighting with it the entire time and it needs the most work before the game is ready for prime time. A good example of this problem is that there are creatures you can latch your line to in order to be pulled across the desert quickly. As you steer them, the game doesn’t move the camera with your movements, so you end up moving in a direction that the camera isn’t facing. I think if they made some adjustments to get the camera to be a bit smarter at following you then this has the potential to be a great little game.

To the Moon: I hated this. We only sat down at the station because it was open, and we were looking for stuff to play. I am 90% sure it is an RPG maker game. From what we can tell it involves a pair of scientists going back in time to revisit memories. I’m not sure, it didn’t grip me. There was some rather terrible collision issues that really took me out of it where decorative flowers on the ground added like solid objects. It made navigating some of the objects really unintuitive.
Edit: I have been told this game is actually really good. They just gave me a bad demo that started me in the middle of the story.

Ultra Mega Cats: This isn’t something I played, but I did watch someone else playing it enough to get an idea of what it is. Seems like a rogue-light 3rd person shooter where you play as cats and mow down robots. From the run I was watching, they were playing with a cat riding around in a giant mech. I’d have to really give it a try personally to say more, but it seemed interesting enough.

War of the Western Deep: This was a super gorgeous game with an all furry cast. The art is great, and it is all being hand animated. It seems like an adventure game (in the sense of a point and click adventure without the pointing and clicking). The combat looks quite nice and is more about reading your opponent’s moves. While I didn’t actually get to play it, I did have some long chats with the writer and artist of it. The game started out as a comic that they produce that they later decided to create a video game based on. I haven’t read it yet, but I did pick up all three hardcover books (that they so graciously signed for me) of the comic and can’t wait to see what it’s all about. If you want to read the comic, you can do so here: https://westerndeep.net/

Winter Burrow: This is another game that I mostly saw and didn’t get a chance to play, but it looked interesting. Visually it looked like Don’t Starve, but it stars a mouse. I really don’t know much about it, but I figure I’d let people know about it.

Anyways, that’s my con report. If you have any questions about what I played, I’ll can try and answer them below. In any case, back to work in the morning with more art and writing soon.