This September began, as it always does, with my yearly pilgrimage to the Emerald City to partake in PAX West. This year switched up from the previous by bringing all game demos under one roof at the Arch building, leading to a more classic (if at times cramped) PAX experience. Quite a few bigger developers were back, like Nintendo, Bandai Namco, and Capcom, but this show still largely belongs to the indie scene. That said, this years indies had a healthy mix of AA titles sprinkled amongst them and led to a show where I was constantly being surprised by big-seeming titles that I had never heard of.
Below you’ll find a list of ten games from PAX West that really fired my neurons off. Due to my supreme lateness in constructing this article, a few of these games have already released. For any like that, or games that are in Early Access or have available demos, I’ve put a★ under their respective screenshots.
Additionally, if you want to hear me speak words about PAX rather than write them, you can listen to the PAX West Special of the Daydreamcast where I and a few other games media folks talk about games we saw such as Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom or Slitterhead.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Video games offer a unique way to engage with the past in the form of simulation. TV Shows and Movies can be just as slavish in their commitment to accuracy, but the broader runtime and format of games means you have time to devote to every nook and cranny of a setting that the developers want to explore.
For this the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance was widely praised. It’s recreation of 1403 Bohemia (that’s the Czech Republic for you modern map people) got exceedingly granular from the direction-based swordfighting to requiring the player to regularly bathe and wait for wounds to heal. The sequel Kingdome Come: Deliverance II offers more of this, but with a honed focus on storytelling with these simulation aspects. First-impressions of the UI and gameplay may lead you to believe this is like a cross of Assassin’s Creed historical settings with a Bethesda western-RPG approach, but it’s much closer to an immersive sim where choices within gameplay can very much effect the story.
The quest the demo led me on regarded a renowned german sword master attempting to defend his honor from the guilds of Bohemia and he enlists the player character, Henry the Blacksmith, to aid him in a bit of skullduggery. Sword Guilds in Bohemia would display their signature blade outside to show that they are accepting any challengers. Henry is tasked with acquiring and posing this blade so that the sword master could get his duel. I admittedly screwed up the actual breaking and entering part of the mission, not realizing how much a factor my heavy armored boots generated noise on creaky floorboards, but I got the sword all the same. Imagine my surprise when I learned that because I was spotted the guild was able to argue that the duel was unjust and therefore were allowed to make alterations to the rules in their favor. I hadn’t failed the quest by any means, but now the second part of it, the duel with the guild would be much harder.
Alterations like these were present throughout the quest line and I felt I could see the paths branching in real time. As someone who loves games as a means to craft my own story, my mind buzzed with the possibilities. It’s that old trick of “If there are this many variations to this random side-quest, how split can the narrative of the main quest get?”
Oneway.exe
Hey, did you know that the famous painting titled “Saturn Devouring His Son” wasn’t actually titled that? It didn’t have a title at all. Painter Fransisco Goya painted it, along with 14 other disturbed paintings, as murals along the walls of his private villa, often painting over much happier, earlier imagery from his career. The paintings weren’t discovered until after his death and thus there came a moment where people looked upon the haunted image of a bearded, crazed giant messily popping the limbs of a smaller body into his mouth and had to guess what on earth Goya meant by it.
So they decided: “That’s gotta be the story of Saturn devouring his children. No other interpretation necessary.”
Oneway.exe, in its own way, puts you in the shoes of the people that discovered the Black Paintings. You awake inside an unfinished horror game built around exploring rooms devoted to different psychopaths and killers. Exploring the rooms tells you the story of these killers, but also the story of the three developers of the game and how they fell out of favor with one another.
I played two rooms in the demo at Oneway.exe, one about a victorian woman who skinned her victims and the other about a lost media radio show that seemingly Candle Cove-d its way into forcing the listeners to commit grizzly acts. Both were incredibly entertaining and had me jumping in my seat from the layered audio design where it always felt the killer was just past my shoulder, whispering madness into my ear.
I don’t think you’re in any real danger.Oneway.exe skews more on the haunted house genre of horror game where its about exposing you to off-putting stimulus rather than any form of combat or running from maniacs. The puzzles were all detail-oriented, often involving you turning around and having to spot what’s changed about the room, slowly approach it, then turn around again to rinse and repeat. I don’t expect this to be for everyone, especially those that like a little more decision making in their horror gameplay, but for me, and the crowd around the Oneway.exe booth, it worked quite well. I think the art direction and horror concepts are solid and I want to know more about the meta-plot the devs teased within.
(When I played it at PAX the game was called >One Way (More than One Way), but the devs have since changed the name to Oneway.exe, which is why I call it such here.)
Let’s Build A Dungeon
Let’s Build a Dungeon was probably my biggest surprise of PAX. Not surprising in terms of quality, I already knew this would be a banger from playing the developer’s prior game Let’s Build a Zoo. No, what surprised me was the content. I had thought, much like how the previous game was a riff on zoo tycoon, that Dungeon would be a similar riff on games like Dungeon Keeper. Instead, the game is actually a sort of game developer simulator.
You are the executive for a major games developer and you’ve just launched your latest project, a fantasy MMO. You are tasked with filling the world of this MMO with things for your players to do. This ranges from fantasy towns for them to trade loot in, to the quest givers, to the titular dungeons themselves. You tweak layouts, potion prices, and enemies health pools to create an ideal experience. But that’s just the game layer, you’re also running the entire studio as well. Programmers and artists will have access to different assets, studio location matters when it comes to taxes and costs, you can even upgrade your servers in order to host higher player counts. The developer I spoke to said he wants to make this the most in-depth and needlessly detailed game dev sim ever made.
The real shocker was when he showed me you can actually log into your own game as a player and play the actual game you’ve built. Let’s Build a Dungeon will even allow players to export the games they’ve made so other people can explore it, with hopes that players could even build their own equivalent to Bethesda open worlds.That last claim may be a bit hyperbolic, but from the rich features displayed in just the demo, I’m intensely curious if Let’s Build a Dungeon can make the leap from game developer sim to full-on game developer software.
WHAT THE CAR?
WHAT THE CAR? is a game about subverting expectations. You play a cartoon car with a doofy expression that wants to be a great racer alongside his team of grizzly bear friends.
At no point do you do any traditional racing, because from the moment you go the car sprouts two trousered-legs and skips their way towards the finish line. In the next challenge the car doesn’t have legs, but it’s wheels have been replaced with four office chairs and you have to scoot to victory. Should be said that none of this involves actual races and instead are obstacle courses where you need to figure out your new movement style and get to the end as quick as you can. It reuses the same assets from the dev’s previous work What the Golf? Which likewise had a wry “wouldn’t it be random if?” humor to it. Across the demo I played more variations of a car than I could count and no two were exactly the same, and each reveal, from long-legged car, to car-tipiller, got a genuine surprised chuckle from me.
WHAT THE CAR? was the last game I played at PAX, scrambling to finish it ten minutes to the doors closing as the devs cheered me on. It left a strong final impression of the show, and meant I left the Seattle Convention Center with a big smile on my face.
Jackbox Naughty Pack
Look, we’ve all seen the Hard Drive article about Jackbox adding a challenge mode that bans the word “cum.” Depending on the crowd you’re with, any prompt-driven game could devolve into a slurry of bodily fluids and the drawing ones could be a cavalcade of limp tubesteaks. So an explicit R-Rated “Naughty Pack” of Jackbox’s famous party games likely feels redundant like an unrated cut of the South Park movie.
At PAX Jackbox held a live panel to try out the trio of illicit games, and it actually did asway a lot of the concerns I had. It has three titles, all variations on known Jackbox standouts. Fakin’ It All Night Long is a social deduction game that acts like a version of “Never Have I Ever,” except one player is being given different questions than the rest and it’s up to the crowd to deduce who’s the faker. The main fun of this seems to be the faker having to justify questions like “Why did you put up 5 for the most sexual partners you’ve had at one time?”
Dirty Drawful is what it says on the tin. If you’re familiar with any of the three versions of Drawful Jackbox has put out, this is the dirty version. I do feel it adds a certain meta-layer where previously joke answers were easy to eliminate because of how vanilla the prompts would be, but now prompts are things like “Chucking Darts in a Butthole.” So it encourages players to get ridiculous to better hide their fake answer amongst the real.
Last, and most intriguing, is Let Me Finish. A presentation/debate game where players are given a prompt like “How do you perform cunnilingus on a train?” and have to give spoken answers (complete with hand-drawn diagrams) while other players can queue to interrupt them to give better answers. The group I watched play had the most fun with this and it definitely got the biggest crowd reactions.
And thus the core issue with the pack: more than other Jackbox packs, you really need a good crowd of funny, sexually open people to play it with. Because I could not imagine having to play this Jeremy, your roommate’s friend of a friend who thinks “woman make sandwich” jokes are the height of comedy. That risk, combined with the low number of games, definitely makes this pack a risk compared to its vanilla peers, but I can attest from playing that when this pack hits, it hits.
Mr. Sleepy Man
I was gonna be hack and say Mr. Sleepy Man reminds me of a mix of Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Untitled Goose Game, but then I realized I could kill two games with one stone by saying it’s in the genre of “Causing Problems on Purpose.”
Cause that’s what you do in Mr. Sleepy Man. That is what you are encouraged to do and that’s what the dev pitched the game as. You are a sleepy man portaled into a slumberland of cereal and pajama-wearing civilians and you are given the task of making the populace hate you so they kick you out and send you home. You are given a checklist of mischief to make, ranging from wrecking a granny’s car to robbing a convenience store. Out the gate you get a pillow for combat and a security blanket to glide with, but your sleepy little guy actually has quite a bit of movement tech for traversing his environment, such as a Mario side-jump or a pillow-slide move that builds momentum until you become a dangerous missile.
The humor and art-direction of Mr. Sleepy Man definitely feels like a dream I had after eating too much pizza and passing out while Rugrats was on. The first NPC met in the demo was a giant head on a sofa chair that never did anything outwardly hostile, but still gave off this sinister, overbearing energy. It helps that no matter how grotesque the characters of this world may come across, all of them fear you and the hjinks that follow your arrival. Currently no release date is set for Sleepy Man, but rest assured that when it does it could well be a sleeper hit.
Pioneers of Pagonia
My favorite types of games are the kind that let you create a story as you play it, a story that feels unique to your playthrough and the choices you made within it. City Builders are a great format for this, but too often I feel they lean more into management and spreadsheets to optimize returns on investment. Pioneers of Pagonia mends this with really strong art and framing.
True to the title, you are the leader of a ship of settlers that have landed on new and strange lands. For the first couple in-game days your citizens only leave their ship to build structures assigned to them. You need to build storehouses so they can finally offload the supplies they brought with them, places for them to work like hunter lodges or stone quarries, and houses, so this wild land can start to feel like a home.
Over the course of my short time with the game, I really felt like I was taming this beachhead clearing we’d landed at, and that I was constructing little internal narratives about the first hunting parties bringing back the first meals of fresh food these people had had in months. The game teaches you the many systems at play in the form of quests to build certain structures and optimize your paths to better control the flow of workers. It felt very gentle in getting me to engage in the kind of spreadsheet gameplay that normally makes me adverse to this genre by still giving me breathing room to make little vain storytelling choices like the ranger’s hut being so far away from the main village because I imagined them being a day or more away as a kind of recon scouting party.
Right now Pioneers is in early access in a mostly playable state, though it’s my understanding that no endgame has been implemented. The road map to full release is promising an expansion on magical elements and mechanics as well as combat, which I did not see in my demo. Personally, I am going to wait for the full release and hope I have enough of a gap in my schedule to find time to just sit down and lose 6 hours to city planning.
Steel Seed
Steel Seed wins the “How have I not heard of this before?” award for this years PAX. It’s a sci-fi stealth/action platformer set in a post-robot apocalypse where you hunt for the keys to humanity’s survival amidst the ruins of a colossal facility.
Nothing about that pitch sounds inherently new to the world of games, and admittedly there’s little amongst the mechanics that I can’t say I haven’t seen elsewhere, but it’s the level of execution that caught my eye. The stealth feels very open-ended, the best kind of stealth in video games. Protagonist Zoe can use a wide manner of take-down moves, distractions, and hacking to catch and isolate her robotic hunters. There’s a good feeling of cause-and-effect and throughout the demo I was toying with chain-reactions to take out the largest number of enemies in the fewest actions possible. The added bonus to this is Zoe is not alone and at any stage you can switch to her cute drone companion Koby to investigate the area from a different perspective. Koby can help out in his own ways as well. He can tag enemies, or make noise to lure them away, but if you’re not controlling him he’s rather helpless and requires assistance if he somehow gets spotted and pinned down.
Beyond stealth you have a healthy amount of movement options to explore this rusted facility in quick, but exciting, platforming challenges. The demo did have some forced combat encounters to show off that Zoe is no slouch in that department, but I will say the combat felt the stiffest aspect of the game, while still offering intriguing options like hacking enemies to fight for you. Because the stealth areas have a good amount of verticality it does mean if you get spotted you can use the environment to your advantage as enemies are keen to just blast you from afar if the alarm is raised. One scrap I got into required a lot of improvising on the fly and it felt like a mad scramble to clear the field.
Stealth games will always be a genre I gravitate to, and Steel Seed reminds me so much of what I like about the genre in terms of giving a power fantasy to players. I think this is very much a game of PAX to keep an eye on.
Techno Banter
Techno Banter lets you refine the subtle art of the vibe check. You’re the bouncer for a small nightclub in a capitalist dystopian, Bojack Horseman-esque, world of animals and humans. Your scottish frog boss gives you clear dos and don’ts for who’s allowed in that night’s party, such as “No Creeps,” “No Salespeople,” or “No One Looking for a Fight.”
After that you have to make your way down the long line of people outside, visually examining, and verbally grilling, in order to pass judgment on whether they get inside. If you turn them away they might get enraged and you engage in turn-based insult battles where your goal is to destroy their self-confidence and turn the crowd against them.
These battles don’t work quite like a normal turn-based JRPG. Your opponent will say a line like “If I was your landlord I’d kill you in your sleep!” And you’re given a long list of responses. Honing in on the perfect counter, in this example being “If you were my landlord I’d kill myself.” Deals massive damage and gives you the upper hand to deconstruct them with an opener of your own. Its a fun system and I hope the writing team came up with enough one-liners to carry the game without seeing repeats.
Beyond that core loop, you manage the club itself. Profits from a banging party of good guests can be invested into better entertainment, security, and other accouterments. There’s also story-lines that evolve with repeat customers. One robed, insectoid patron didn’t even want to get into the club, they just wanted me to pass on a message to one of the waitresses, and it was up to me on whether that was a good call.
All this led to Techno Banter winning me over with its charm and I truly feel it was one of the best indie titles at PAX West 2024 and I’m eagerly awaiting the full release.