The Best Indie Games Of PAX East 2018

PAX East has slowly grown in to one of the biggest shows one of the biggest gaming shows in the industry, rivaling even its progenitor PAX West in terms of attendance and notoriety. This gives indie developers the opportunity to come to the public-facing show and let players get direct hands-on with titles and even receive feedback on their games.

This year, we got to try some known and unknown indie games across the show floor and picked out some of our favorites below.

Games are listed alphabetically.

Blazing Chrome
Platform: PC
Developer: JoyMasher
Release: 2018

Described as a hybrid mix of Contra and Metal Slug, Blazing Chrome definitely hews closer to frustrated memories of Hard Corps than anything else else. Players can co-op with a partner or go it alone in the demo we played, fighting against hordes of alien menaces through a ruined city. In typical Contra fashion, a single stray bullet means death and the loss of whatever special weapon you're using. Alien bugs pick you up and carry you off screen, foot soldiers shoot at you from elevated positions, and a multi-form boss waits at the end of the level with mouth-lasers at the ready. It's a pitch-perfect Contra homage, feeling almost identical in look and feel to the 16-bit incarnations of the series, and I am excited to play through the full game when it releases later in 2018.

Fatal Velocity
Platform: PC
Developer: Range Plus One
Release: TBA

The developer of Fatal Velocity explained the game in simple terms, saying he had always wondered why no one had ever made a first-person webslinging game. At the heart of its competitive multiplayer gameplay is that core design philosophy of the thrill of swinging around at high speeds. Players grab each other with grapple hooks and try to throw them off the stage or force them into walls at a high enough speed. The aesthetic tries to channel Mirror's Edge and the gameplay tries to channel Smash Bros. and it all somehow works together into a fun experience. The game is still fairly early, but it shows a lot of potential from concept alone.

Mothergunship
Platform: PC
Developer: Grip Digital
Release: 2018

Mothergunship is a game being designed by Tower of Guns' sole developer Joe Mirabello and continues a lot of the same ideas with some new mechanics and a hell of a lot more polish. Mirabello and the team at Grip Digital are focusing on crafting to your gun with ton of permutations as you travel through procedurally-connected pre-built rooms blasting enemies away. In these rooms, players can find shops to buy parts and attach them to left and right guns, modifying them to include things like shotguns hanging off the side or add properties like ricocheting bullets. Mirabello used an example of stacking recoil mods on a rifle until it functioned as a makeshift jetpack. I was surprised how much fun I had playing Mothergunship and can't wait to try out different mod combinations.

SCUM
Platform: PC
Developer: Gamepires, Croteam
Release: 2018

SCUM is a departure for indie publisher Devolver Digital, as the open-world multiplayer survival game looks like a dime a dozen at first glance, but there are layers of details below the surface that actually might be overwhelming. The game positions players as prisoners pitted against each other as part of a TV show where they survive and compete to get off their prison island. The survival aspects are deep, down to counting your character's caloric intake if you want to take it that far. A smattering of charts and graphs can cover your screen as prepare an egg breakfast ahead of your objective-based multiplayer match. Players can choose to engage in survival and try to escape the island or try to win their way off through battle or do both, but the developers insisted that you only have to go as deep as you want to regardless of which path you choose. It was astounding to see how deep you can go, even though I can't imagine most players will dive all the way down.

The Swords of Ditto
Platform: PlayStation 4, PC
Developer: onebitbeyond
Release: April 24

The Swords of Ditto looks and feels like a retread of A Link to the Past at first, but deeper exploration of the game reveals it to be a culmination of lots of ideas from the Zelda series married to modern rogue-lite ideas. The developers previously worked with Nintendo on other projects and made it their mission statement to bring that company's quality to their own games, creating The Swords of Ditto. Players take the role of a legendary sword that makes adventurers heroes for five days every hundred years. The heroes try to get as powerful as possible before taking on the ancient demon on the island and then doing it all again a hundred years later. Winning creates a stronger, happier island for the next run, while losing depresses and oppresses the island. Or, Breath of the Wild-style, players can just head straight for the demon's castle and try and beat it without any dungeon power-ups. The Cartoon Network-like graphics and fun premise make Swords of Ditto seem like a real blast.

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