We’re back at PAX and have played this year’s round of Indie Rising games — and they’re utterly fantastic. Here’s our preview of ten indie-charmers you’ll want to watch out for.

Ascent: Rivals

When a game is tuned just right, you feel it. You feel it at an intrinsic level. Where the mechanical expression pulses through the controller and the interaction feels just right. When it’s a joy to play the game because it is systemically built around systems that are joyous to interact with, it’s such a simple thing and the hardest thing to get right. The enthusiastic team at Genun Games got it just right with Ascent: Rivals, a Star Wars podracing aspirant multiplayer racing/combat game sporting dual-engine mechanics mapped to the control sticks, while the shoulder buttons roll and yaw the craft back and forth across alien-looking terrain. It moves crisp and fast and plays well at a high speed. On show was a time trial mode, as network access wasn’t quite sorted out for the show floor, but this allowed for a cleanly polished demo without any issues. Ascent: Rivals is a pure concept executed purely. It is a job well done and a promising take on an older model of arcade-racing games with sci-fi aspirations.

Ctrl Alt Deal

Heady game concepts are hard to communicate on a show floor. Take, for example, this smart turn-based strategy game called Ctrl Alt Deal, which features an interface, and writing-forward design. This requires focus. You’re navigating well-written and quippy dialogue and learning about characters and the spaces they inhabit. Each turn, you’re dealt a series of cards, and as a Sentient AI gone rogue, you exploit the inner workings of a nefarious megacorporation from the inside, by spending your cards and learning about the people who reside within it. It’s clever stuff conceptually, as spirited and playful writing leads the player through fun scenarios and provides small logic puzzles for how you are monitoring and interacting with the environment. The interface design is so smart and so efficient that the concept sells itself in playing it, but it may be something you’ll want to check out on your home computer, and not necessarily on a crowded convention show floor.

Desktop Explorer

You’ve inherited a computer. An old Windows-esque operating system is running. Buried within the computer is a world of secrets and puzzles. There’s a note: Install this program called “Desktop Explorer,” and you’ll be able to unpack the mystery of what’s on the computer. Using a Microsoft Clippy-stand-in digital assistant called Pizarro, you’ll navigate files, images, and text documents, combing the computer’s memory banks for more information. Each piece you go over will point to something else inside the system. It’s such a clever concept, using our understood context-of-use for a Windows ’98-styled operating system to do some archeological digging into the past.

Drăculești

Eroticism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is already there in the prime text. So, in Drăculești, it’s not a wide jump to consider adapting that text into a romantic visual novel. You are lawyer R.M. Renfield and you’re trapped in Castle Dracula. Stood next to the booth was a coffin with a straightforward message inscribed on it: “GAY DRACULA,” and that’s what you need to know about Drăculești. Australian studio Fine Feathered Fiends has created a sweetly gothic retelling of the classical horror story and has applied a lavish art style and steamy text to go with it. It’s a cute idea that makes a lot of sense as you click through the dialogue trees. Nothing fancy but does exactly what it says it will and does it well.

Fowl Damage

Simple concepts are good concepts. That’s Fowl Damage, where you’re this cute-as-hell little egg who’s own jumping range is enough to splatter him on landing. In this pretty little sprite platformer, you’ll be managing short jump distances and softly navigating a world that just wants you to crack. It’s all so cute and well-defined. Simplicity wins out in the end, with a premise that contextually speaks for itself and pays out in its fun mechanical engagement.

Just Crow Things

There’s a growing corner of indie games concerned with cute little animals who ruin everyone’s day. So it goes in Just Crow Things, like Untitled Goose Game, the Goat Simulators, and the slew of other like titles, you’re just wrecking havoc as a crow. It’s lightweight and the appeal is obvious. In this very-titled Crow game, you can also fly around and relieve yourself all over the humans. Silly stuff.

Let’s Build a Dungeon

Call it Game of the Show, Let’s Build a Dungeon is an ingenious bit of meta-layered game dev simulation from Springloaded, creators of Let’s Build a Zoo (2021), extrapolating that game’s fine-tuned sim mechanics into a wide-ranging game-making title. The nuances are deep and intricate, as you’re tasked with creating an MMO environment that will keep players subscribed to the service. The Springloaded team told us they wanted to take all the components of game-making and render them accessible and more fun for everyone. This entry-level course on the parts of making a game will allow you to design down to a granular detail the characters, environments, stories, even objects and animations, and design logic, of your own meta-videogame. Genius stuff executed at a macro level, this is for sure my must-play pick from the year’s Indie Rising selection, and all of PAX.

SacriFire

Aesthetics are everything in SacriFire, spiritual successor to the Star Ocean role-playing games that looks the part and is scored by series composer Motoi Sakuraba. Looks absolutely terrific in motion. Moves fluidly and presents like the best of role-playing games from Japan. This is loaded with promise and shines among this year’s stock of indie games, with terrific aesthetic value and a great score.

SULFUR

Wildly placed between the realms of Doomer Shooter, the world-immersion of the forthcoming Escape from Tarkov, and the classical deconstructed design of the King’s Field games, SULFUR bridges all sorts of gaps until it renders something new and enticing out of these components. The art is so low-fi cool and aesthetically it reaches back to the past while feeling modern and new. The score also goes hard. SULFUR is deeply promising and once it gets its hooks in, ought to offer a lot of depth in this uniquely designed world, and plenty to explore.

Tears of Metal

Maybe you caught Tears of Metal at the Summer Games Fest but playing it is another thing. Call it Scottish Dynasty Warriors but it’s cooler than that. There’s a fluidity to the art style and a totally unique feeling to the stripped-down combat. As you clear your land in the name of Scotland, joined by a battalion of warriors, you’ll slash through hordes of invading enemies as you retake control of your camps, and gain rougelike-esque progression through upgrades. Tears of Metal looks, plays, and feels great — you’ll want to watch out for this. Sometimes good ideas simply coalesce into a great overall design.

The Chronos Event

The impassioned developers at Superjump Games are a seasoned team of industry veterans and their expertise is obvious when you play their name game. This feels like the work of a collective, the vision of a group of programmers who have played the good games and brought the best ideas with them. We had a lovely chat with the team, where names like Doom (1993) and Vanquish (2010) were casually asserted as influences for the fast-flowing action and these elements were immediately felt in the mechanics. Fantastic time-melding mechanics also add plenty of new feeling to the game, as you can rewind time, Vanquish-slide around the level, and cause time-bending layers of damage to the spawning enemies. It feels so damn cool. Like that era of Platinum Games core design philosophy that seems to have inspired it. Stay tuned for more from Superjump Games; we believe they have some stories to tell and we want to share our love for this game.

Winter Burrow

COZY, cottage-core vibes are instilled down to the metal of the code in this sweetly saccharine mousey survival game. Winter Burrow previously showed at the Xbox Games Showcase but seeing it in action feels like a wondrous realization of the promised aesthetics. Cutest and coziest game of PAX and it isn’t close. Think Deeply Wholesome Don’t Starve (2013). Winter Burrow feels like a sure fire thing.