Big studios move like glaciers in this industry. The pandemic could end tomorrow and we'll still be feel its impact for years. But, smaller games from smaller studios don't need to move glaciers. A lot of those companies were already working from home and could easily adapt to a closed offices. Some might have had no pause in development at all. Video games were also indisputably the safest bet for entertainment investments last year. This was the only entertainment industry to do better under plague conditions than worse. There's a lot of money out there all of sudden, especially when Microsoft needs their Netflix model to be flushed with content. Indie games are looking great.
This reflected in the shows themselves. The really big events like Summer Games Fest or Microsoft would show the bare minimum of their games. I know about as much about Starfield today as I did before that trailer played on Sunday. MS and Bethesda would rather you know nothing about Starfield for another year and please stop asking. Meanwhile indie devs got on camera and told their story. They were here to sell you, not fit some huge billion dollar company's grand strategy. That made the big games seem boring and their events dull. Meanwhile, I was thrilled constantly watching streams like Days of the Devs or The Tribeca Games Showcase or The PC Gaming Show. AAA games at E3 2021 were a cruel starvation diet. Indie games were a feast.
Plus, no AAA game was playable this year except that Final Fantasy CHAOS thing. Tons of indie games are out now on Xbox or PC. You still have a few days to try all this out.
Let's start. I have a lot of games that look great to go over:
Sable
I’m going through a very serious love affair with Japanese
Breakfast right now. Their newest album, Jubilee,
dropped on June 4th, and I’ve listened to the entire thing about a
dozen times. It’s a great new direction for the band, a warmer and summer-y vibe compared to the colder more moody stuff from their past. Is the best
track on the album Be Sweet? Maybe it's Paprika? Still, I'm worried at some point Apple will notice band artist and ruin these songs by using them to sell laptops. Apple is the death of music.
Anyway, Japanese Breakfast are singing the main theme for an
upcoming indie game called Sable. Michelle Zauner performed it at the Summer Game Fest and promptly won E3 as far as I'm concerned. Actually, Sable’s reveal trailer is what got me into Japanese Breakfast in the
first place. I talked about that during my E3 2018 reaction. There’s a lot of
games that are very pretty, but few knocked me straight to the floor as
successfully as Sable has. It looked mind-blowing three years ago. And three years later, the game still looks unbelievable.
There is a demo for Sable out right now on Steam. I was able to check that out, which is real cool. In a different E3, maybe that doesn't happen.
Sable is definitely more of a slow game. The demo seems to be set in the very first are of the story. It's all very gentle and soothing, which often can feel boring, but not here. It feels like the first few tutorial quests of a much bigger game, though I don't think Sable will ever pull towards a combat focus. In the demo, you play as a girl named Sable, living in a desert town, who is just on the cusp of adulthood. In this valley full of masked people, coming-of-age involves learning how to magically glide and getting your first speeder bike following a series of fest-quests. Sable has some Breath of the Wild on the mind with its focus on climbing and exploration. But it does not have a life bar. There's no bad guys. It's just you and world, and all the friction that entails.
I have to come back to the art-style again with Sable. They are doing something really special with the art in this game. It's a lot of intricate line-work. You can stare up at the mesas and see Bill Watterson's alien landscapes in Spaceman Spiff storylines from Calvin and Hobbes. Sable herself moves at a deliberately choppy framerate, evoking older eras of animation, which traditionally ran "on the twos or threes" (12 or less FPS). There's a texture to that movement. There's a ton of color in the sunsets and light moving. I was deeply moved walking back to my town, seeing puffs of smoke from a chimney full up the orange sky in the distance.
Surprisingly too, the writing is great. There are only a few characters in this demo, all of whom are older adults living in your village. And learn a lot about their characters, a lot about this world with a few choices in lines. Sable is one of the best games I've played all year, and I only put in 45 minutes.
Sable releases on PC, Series X, and Mac on September 23rd.
Unbeatable
I love me a good rhythm game. Unbeatable is that. Get it?
Un-“beat”-able? See, it’s “beat” like music? It’s a pun? Get it? Also, the main
character is named “Beat”, so it’s a double-pun. Get it?
Unbeatable could not be a more fashionable product. I’d compared the art style something like Promare with the fashion of The World Ends with You. (Which also
has a character named “Beat”, come to think of it.) Big Studio Trigger vibes. It’s
a jerky off-kilter punk energy, which fits the story. The graphics have a layer of artificial film grain just for more grunge. It’s a dark future where
the dystopian government has banned music. Think of every rock band’s fantasy from
the 80s. Notably, despite the winking B-movie irreverence of that premise, our heroines seems to have a lot going on as a person. Beat is not a good place in the few minutes I played of this game. She seems to be deeply troubled, and music may only be a temporary escape.
Ultimately though, all the story is all just the excuse to pull out the rhythm
sections. Unbeatable features some solid punk tunes. There's a demo up on Steam and I played a few songs. It all sounded like they could have been OPs for My Hero Academia seasons. I rock out to that music. However, I can't say I love the controls just yet. It's some mixture of face buttons and the D-pad on a controller, and I never got used to that. I assume eventually that will be customizable or I'll just learn to deal.
At some point this game will come out and I will play much
more of it than I ever expected. Unbeatable has a demo called "UNBEATABLE [white label]" available on Steam. No release date, no mention of other platforms.
Norco
I’m not sure why Norman Reedus introduced this game
at the Tribeca Film Festival. He does not seem to be officially involved with
this project in any way. I don’t think the game is even using actors, let alone
celebrities. But wait. Norman Reedus, why he was going to be in Silent Hills! Silent
Hills confirmed! Kojima pranked us all again!
...Yeah, as far as I can tell, Norco is a real game and not
some elaborate Sony prank. There's even a demo out on PC right now. Which is disappointing to me personally because I did not know I could play that. Well, too late now. I'll get you next time, Norco.
Norco is a dark SciFi mystery point and click adventure game.
The devs referenced things like LucasFilms’ old Monkey Island games to describe their vision. But instead of slapstick
comedy, they’re calling Norco “hauntological” (which is a real word, to my surprise, Jacques Derrida coined it). The game is set in Norco, Louisiana, a real town which is the director's hometown. If you're wondering what kind of place this is, "Norco" stands for "New Orleans Refining COmpany". This town was built for oil, not people. It’s the True
Detective Season 1 creepy bayou setting mixed with smoke stacks, petroleum tanks,
and industrial rot. It’s a lot of poverty on display, but hopefully not in an
exploitative way. And there are robots. And is that Marxism I spy?
This game has a look. There’s a brown depressed edge to everything you’re looking at. Louisiana Southern Gothic horror is a classic at this point. But it all looks great in Norco’s pixel-art style. A late-capitalist adventure game story sure sounds very Kentucky Route Zero to me. I’m down for anything that reminds me of Kentucky Route Zero.
Vokabulantis
There were two different stop-motion indie games this E3.
One was the claymation Harold Halibut, which seems great. But since we’re spoiled for
choice, I’m going to pick the one that caught my eye just a bit more.
That’s Vokabulantis. This one looks a bit grungier and
rougher. The characters do not even have mouths. This fits well because the
game is set on this scrapyard tower of junk and abandoned robots. Vokabulantis involves two kids exploring the ruins in a sidescrolling adventure. It’s
the usual of pushing objects to solve simple puzzles.
But it isn’t gameplay that really matters here. It’s just the sheer technical achievement of Vokabulantis existing at all. You could replicate a stop-motion aesthetic with 3D animation. That would be a lot easier than doing it for real. But that would lack the richness and texture that comes from doing it. Every object and character in Vokabulantis is a real thing the developers crafted, posed, and filmed. Every action your character does was hand-made and purpose-built. It is rare that a video game, a digital product creating a fantasy world, actually has a physical reality to it. But Vokabulantis will.
Vokabulantis is so far from completion that the devs believe it will take them all the way to 2024 to finish. They have yet to confirm any platforms.
Solar Ash
Solar Ash (previously “Solar Ash Kingdom”) is the second
game from Heart Machine, developers of the fantastic, Hyper Light
Drifter. The newest E3 trailer actually is one of the worse looks at this game
they’ve yet shown. It was only a few seconds of a boss fight. It failed
to show off everything Solar Ash can do. Instead I would watch the more substantial and
impressive gameplay trailer from three months ago.
Solar Ash is set on a beautiful fantasy world with a striking color
scheme. But that is dime a dozen at this point. Every indie game looks incredible
now. For me, what sells Solar Ash is that is a very impressive 3D platformer. Your
character moves quickly and seems to have a lot of movement options to keep up the flow. I’m a big sucker for platformers and speedy ones too.
Most of what we’ve seen of Solar Ash involves jumping
through the clouds onto a red world with jagged geometry. Your
character, a girl named Ray, seems to enjoy jumping onto top of huge monsters flying through the world. She also have really cool shoes. She has some power to run on clouds. And the entire world is about to get devoured by a black hole. That is sub-optimal for everybody involved, I think.
12 Minutes
There is blurry lined about what is indie and what isn't. That has been blurry for years now, ever since Sony made No Many's Sky their major summer game of 2016. “Indie” at some
point meant “independent”. And I thought that also meant, "made without publisher
oversight and resources". Annapurna Interactive is, in theory, an indie label. But it throws a
lot of marketing and money behind its games. Annapurna is planning to publish nine
games this year, which means it is anything but small. And a lot of those games
are getting big name actors behind them.
12 Minutes, for example, has an all-star Hollywood cast. The three main characters will be voiced by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. That’s not exactly a game made in somebody’s apartment, now is it? Annapurna has a lot of film connections thanks to its sister company, Annapurna Pictures (who are themselves are hardly indie anymore, since they’re distributing the next James Bond movie). Very few games of any scale manage to land three big star names like that. And was James McAvoy originally part of the development's vision? Was this cast thrust on the team by Annapurna?
Who could say no to America's Sweetheart, Willem Dafoe, however?
12 Minutes won’t be Death Stranding with big cameo after
cameo. This game is a very minimalist experience despite its maximalist star power
cast. The entire game is seen from a bird's eye view of a single room in a single apartment,
as three characters play out a twelve-minute drama. This drama repeats over and
over, as you, the man (McAvoy) have to find a way to save your wife (Ridley)
from a vengeful killer cop (Dafoe). Every loop you’ll discover more and more
about who you are, who your wife is, and what secrets have been hiding in this
marriage. Things weren't going great before the cop walked in, to say the least.
This all sounds like a very simple little puzzle drama game. Apparently not, since 12 Minutes has been in development since at least its reveal in 2015. Indie games also have AAA development times now too. I bet that time will be worth it though, as 12 Minutes is a real cool idea. It launches on August 19th for PC, Xbox One, and Series X.
Road 96
Annapurna are not behind this game. They are publishing a road trip indie game based largely around dialog choices, Open Roads. Road 96 is a road trip indie game with dialog choices, but a completely different one. Also, "Road 96" is a terrible title and I can never remember it. Road 46? Road 69? Rt. 66? Fuck.
Road 96 is from a company called DigixArt, who have two games in their portfolio, Lost in Harmony and 11-11 Memories Retold. (I haven't heard of either of those, but Lost in Harmony looks really cool, and is only $2 on Switch. I might check that out.) This is a studio that is trying for big things. Road 96 is an artsy narrative game, but also one that is procedurally generated. It seems to be aiming for a loop system. That's all very ambitious. Things like Life is Strange and the Talltale Games all promised actual consequences for your actions, but all that was mostly a pose to tell one narrative. Road 96 actually will have branches. No two journeys or relationships will be the same.
You play a refugee teenager on a road trip to escape an alternate universe America of 1996 where the Trump-era landed twenty years early. The world is full of political ads for the presidential election. In a horrifyingly familiar scenario, the Democratic candidate doesn't exactly fill me with hope. You're running to the border with whatever means you can find. I played two loops in the demo, both about ten minutes long. In the first loop I had a car and was driving along with this nerdy game developer who really wanted me to try out their tank combat game. At some point I lost my car and very nearly was arrested by this world's version of ICE. In the next loop, I was traveling with two bank robbers and only escaped jail by paying off the cops who caught us.
In both loops there were tough choices. I had to watch another refugee teenager get hauled away by the state, unable to help and thankful that the pigs did not want me too. In the second loop, I only could pay off the cops because I stole some of the thieves' loot when they were not looking. I have the sense that Road 96 can go very poorly very fast. But also, I notice that every scene increased a percentage point with characters. The real point of Road 96 might not be winning or losing, it might be discovering this world and its people.
I'm worried how well this game can cover subjects as intense as illegal immigration and the slow descent of a nation into fascism. This could all end up feeling inauthentic or preachy rather easily. I still applaud the ambition. Road 96 reminds me a lot of Life is Strange 2, another game about homeless immigrant children. Life is Strange 2 ended up too bleak for me to finish.
Road 96 will be out sometime in the summer for Steam. A Switch release is also officially planned, but I bet you everything on this page will end up on the Switch eventually.
Death Trash
This game is gross.
Death Trash is the 2021 answer to the old pre-Bethesda Fallout games. Some people still worship Fallout 2, all these years later. I still can hear arguments about how Bethesda betrayed the franchise and its satire roots. (And counter-arguments that Fallout was never a satire.) But if you want a top-down post-apocalyptic game, it won't be a Fallout game. Death Trash instead wants to fill that void.
All of Death Trash is pixel art. That's good considering this game is all about flesh and gore. The game exploded my character into chunks early on in the demo when I dared not listen to a tutorial. After a classic D&D-style character creation segment, you play as a lone survivor living in a Vault after the apocalypse. The robots that run the shelter tell you that you're contaminated and must leave immediately. They go as far as to formally revoke your citizenship with an official document. That drops you into the outer world full of dangers.
Instead of retro-futurism and nuclear scares of Fallout, Death Trash uses its pixels to depict a world full of flesh. The first two NPCs outside the shelter are a regular human, and the Fleshkraken. This is a huge tentacle mass with a whale's face that has grown to the size of a tree. The Fleshkraken is looking for friendship. Everything else are either bloody masses crawling on the ground or zomibified horrors, and they're looking to eat you. Death Trash really wants to push the nastiness of its world. There is a dedicated puke command. If you kill enemies, you can collect the bloody pulp left behind and it eat it.
Last year's Carrion was able to use pixel-art and grotesque meaty gore to a great effect. I'm curious if Death Trash can do the same with a full CRPG. This is hardly my genre, but Death Trash was fascinating. I don't know if this game will ever transcend its exploitation concept to tell a proper story. Maybe all this gore is going somewhere, maybe it's just a grotesque burlesque. All I know is that the demo eventually led me to a portal of flesh, and I chickened out instead of going further. I'm sure whatever was inside was fucked-up and amazing, however. The Fleshkraken will have to wait a bit longer for friendship.
Death Trash has a planned Early Access version coming this August on Steam. They do not know when there will be a full release.
Replaced
Remember The Last Night? I talked about that game at my E3
2017 post four years ago. It made a big splash at the Microsoft show, being one
of the first titles to attempt the Octopath Traveler “2D in a 3D world with cool
depth of field” effect. Then The Last Night turned out to be a legendary Milkshake
Duck moment, when developer Tim Soret was revealed to have made statements in support of GamerGate. The game's story felt very much like a libertarian's idea of dystopia. Universal Basic Income apparently destroyed society?
Then in 2018 the entire production seems to have slowly fallen apart, facing "business,
legal, and funding issues" according to Soret.
And that was the last anybody heard from The Last Night. Tim
Soret tweeted a gif on June 14th of trees and lightning. I can barely even see that gif, and I have no idea what it is supposed to mean. The Last Night, I guess, still exists in some form. But do we even need it anymore?
In 2021, Microsoft had a new indie cyberpunk game with a mix of 2D and 3D graphics. Replaced quite literally is replacing The Last Night. It is uncanny how similar these games look. Only maybe Replaced will actually come out? This new game comes from Sad Cat Studios, a Belorussian team. Sad Cat’s website doesn’t tell me much, except that maybe they really are cats. If you believe that Eastern European cats can do a better job than conservative Americans, get hyped for Replaced.
I also think the Replaced trailer looks like more fun than The Last Night. There's ambition for actual side-scrolling combat. This looked a bit like Katana Zero.
Replaced will launch in 2022 for Xbox systems. Or maybe it too will fall into Development Hell and in 2025 Microsoft will unveil a third cyberpunk indie game.
Tunic
Tunic has been one of my most anticipated games now for years now. And I finally got to play it! The demo was everything I wanted this game to be. If there were not self-imposed deadlines, I would still be playing the demo. I want to play that demo five times in a row. Tunic is my other Game of E3, tying with Shin Megami Tensei V.
Turns out Tunic plays as good as it looks. The game is deeply inspired by Zelda, obviously. It's the Zelda Fox game, we all know that. But specifically Tunic wants to be the original NES Legend of Zelda. The game is full of menus and hidden documents drawn in the style of old Nintendo instruction manuals. The one dungeon I found had a hand-drawn cartoon map of the area. The game opens with the Fox boy not having a sword at all. You have to find a branch as your first weapon in a nearby cave. Then upgrading from branch to sword was an arduous process of exploring and fighting enemies.
Now NES Zelda is ancient, so merely replicating that is not going to be very satisfying. Tunic, thankfully, has other influences. The combat is very challenging, including a Dark Souls stamina meter for your dodge roll. Most enemy encounters involve finding the right time to dodge away then returning to punish. I was swamped by three knights with shields, whose attacks needing parrying, and that was beyond my abilities at this point. Tunic also has Souls influences in the way the game loops back around, leading you to ladders and bridges to open shortcuts. You earn every one of those shortcuts with blood and toil. Your poor little Fox boy is going to die a lot. I let him down.
Of course, Tunic also looks incredible. There's a softness to every texture and every creature in this world. Everything looks like its made out of modeling clay. It could all be edible, and it all looks delicious. I love the little spikey triangular shrubs. I love the jaunty bounce in the Fox boy's step and how his tail bounces with in his walking animation. The whole game is bright, happy, and wonderfully inviting. But also, legitimately hard.
This all might seem very simple. But clearly Tunic has deeper ambitions. Most of the text in the game is written in an indecipherable language. One of the first things you do in this game is answer "Yes" or "No" to a dialog choice without knowing the question. There could be a deep Fez-like mystery to this world beyond the main game. In the demo I found a number of items like a gold coin with a triangle on it. Who knows what puzzle that solves? I expect there is much more to discover in this game.
Tunic is set to release on Mac, PC, and Xbox One. It is a "console-launch exclusive", meaning Tunic will come to other platforms at some point. This is a one-man game, which is incredible considering the quality on display. It's been years and years of waiting for Tunic already. This game might win Game of E3 here a few more times. But I really hope we're in the last stretch and Tunic will be out soon.
And The Rest
There's way too many games to discuss at any length. They all looked cool. Let me quickly shout a bunch of other stuff that caught my eye:
Tales of Arise, Citizen Sleeper, Life is Strange: True Colors, The Wandering
Village, Loot River, FAR: Changing Tides, Immortality, Signalis, Soup Pot,
Death’s Door, Stalker 2, Somerville, Mario + Rabbids 2: Sparks of Hope, and etc. etc. etc. If your favorite upcoming game was not mentioned here, no insult implied. (Unless your most anticipated game is Far Cry 6, in which case, you probably should demand more from your entertainment.) I wish I had a countably infinite time to talk about all these games. And I wish I had an uncountably infinite time to play all these games.
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