The heart of PAX lies in its most charming indie darlings. It’s not about the shiniest AAA game with a two hour line and a 15 minute demo. It’s about connecting culturally with gamers and game makers of all walks of life. Really, it’s not the games that keep us coming back, but the communal celebration of them. That’s what Indie Rising is all about — PAX’s yearly selection of ten up-and-coming developers with fresh visions of the future. Just as we did in 2022, 2023, and 2024, we’ve explored this year’s PAX Rising selection and interviewed the developers.

Arcane Eats

Andrea and Bob Roberts are Wonderbelly Games, Redmond-area indie devs with a knack for delightful design. For a decade, the duo worked in AAA games: Bob led the design team at Monolith for the innovative Middle-earth games Shadow of Mordor (2014) and Shadow of War (2017) while Andrea worked on Fable and other properties at Microsoft. Now, they make “deliciously cheeky indie games,” which is exactly what Arcane Eats feels like. What cheeky indie devs do these days is they craft deckbuilders. That’s Arcane Eats — blending the world of competitive food competitions, restaurant management, and strategic rougelike deck management. There are hundreds of cards and by employing the right thoughtful combos, you can keep your customer base of ravenous monsters happy and well-fed. Nobody wants an angry horde of monsters but all of us want compulsively well-crafted deckbuilders.

Beatdown City Survivors

After Shawn Alexander Allen left the ossifying big games space, having crafted levels and missions for Rockstar Games, he founded NuChallenger, a “games x culture” studio focused on clever game concepts and marketing for underground rap artists. Beatdown City Survivors (2022) is the second game from the studio, following Treachery in Beatdown City, a beat ‘em up with refined RPG mechanics. Survivors, as the name implies, is rooted firmly in the Vampire Survivors (2022) mold, but with some eclectic differences. First off, the music slaps, pulling from Allen’s cross-promotion interests, highlighting some cutting-edge hip-hop from the underground. Secondly, the game is a twin-stick Survivor-type, meaning attacks are aimed directionally with both sticks. The game sports an eccentric cast of wrestlers with different move-sets and is about dynamically using the world to your advantage. Blow up a fire hydrant so water floods the streets and then bring down street lights to electrify a pack of enemies, while skirting away from the hoard, dragging a line of gasoline with you, which you’ll lead to a car and trigger an explosion filling the screen with fire. Then there’s the weapon variety, keyed into wrestling concepts. You’ll employ boots, 2x4s, and foldable chairs, and by combining those weapons, come up with all manner of chain reactions. By crafting something more bespoke and interactive out of a typically laissez-faire game design style, Beatdown City Survivors feels different and new. This is exactly the sort of videogame folks leave big studios so they can finally make: something not constrained by the calcifying expectations of a brand and “how games are meant to be designed.” What it feels like is creative freedom. That’s thrilling in itself.

Blocks for Babies

Do not be deceived. Blocks for Babies is different. Get this: it’s not even for babies. It’s for adults! The subversion doesn’t end there. Blocks for Babies combines the two everlasting models for good game design: Tetris (1984)… and DOOM (1994)? Then it’s also Balatro (2024), as if a drop-puzzle game crossed with a block-shooting FPS isn’t enough. The impetus for the game came from videogamedunkey’s “Big Mode Game Jam,” where dev Bunksoft Interactive created an appealing cross-genre experiment which placed as a finalist in the competition. Blocks for Babies has since been expanded with a Rougelite wrap-around concept which allows the player to choose modifiers, for both puzzling and shooting segments, alongside factors like width of the board and number of tetromino lines required to clear each level. And it has boss fights. Good luck to babies.

Draco and the Seven Scales

A pirate’s bounty in all its perfectly pixelated Game Boy-era glory, Draco and the Seven Scales is deeply committed to its retro aesthetics, on which it frames a double-sided premise of dungeon exploration and maritime amusement. Ice Goat Games have kept their vision tightly focused around a limited scope and in doing so, have mined their greenscale dot matrix approach for all it’s worth. Draco and the Seven Seas offers diverging paths and clever mechanical invention for its on-ship segments, offering a modern, sea-faring slant on The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1994).

Hank: Drowning on Dry Land

“Think Batman but he’s drunk,” said the developer, as though this cleared everything up. Hank: Drowning on Dry Land is the permutation of bizarre comic book abstraction and off-the-rocker game design, a hard thing to demo at a show, but also brave. My Next Games, developers of… Tales from the Arcade: Fart Mania (2024) comes to Seattle all the way from Częstochowa, Poland, and feels like a true original in both approach and presentation. It’s about a drunken vigilante who slips so far into his drinking problem that he starts having delusions spurred by his nemesis, the Unraveler, who puts Hank through stages of hellish and deeply stylish puzzle trials with time travel and parallel reality solutions. The time-bending mechanics match Hank up against past versions of himself as he tries to solve a timed riddle, which involves rewinding and entering paradox gates, presenting a game that is restless and fiercely brave in its new ideas.

Never’s End

The world is ending in Never’s End and the very fabric of nature and free will must be harnessed to preserve what’s left after the cataclysm. Never’s End is an inventive tactics game where the grid-based battlefields connect to one another and form a larger, explorable world. Each tile set has its own material conditions, such as its durability, cover, and climate, presenting a multi-factor battlefield which can then be utilized with magic that keys into the elemental resources of the land. Rendered in striking 3D while using the font of 2D tactics as its expression, the game also looks fresh, and as neatly animated as it is well-conceived at a systems level. The developers at Hypersect have combined strong industry experience at studios like Bungie with the indie novelty of forging out on their own path and making something that pushes the tactics genre forward. If the world has to end, the least it can do is allow us one more great adventure, using its natural resources for one final push to save it, and everything we know, from extinction.

No Stone Unturned

No Stone Unturned is a point-and-click murder mystery that literalizes the question “why did the chicken cross the road?” As Detective Cox, a squirrel with a magnifying glass and fedora, you’ll have to crack the case, seeking clues just as you would chase after so many acorns. The game attempts to blend humor with throwback point-and-click comic ethos, while bidding its time with various minigames along the way. London based developer Wise Monkey Entertainment are trying to do a lot with few resources, and thus far, the results are and charming.

Rogue Eclipse

Rogue Eclipse offers a new perspective on classic spaceflight videogames, blending the frenetic fun of bullet hell shmups with the 3D play style of games from the Star Fox and Rogue Squadron franchises. Like most games coming out, as the title implies, it borrows a rougelike structure and bolsters it against a known mechanical framework. What works fundamentally is the fluidity of the spaceflight, with clean and crisp pick up and play onboarding, which reaches into arcade space shooters for its bonafides.

RollerGirl

RollerGirl is deeply cozy, an autumnal rollerblading game about a gal whose car has died and now she gets around on skates, doing chores for the locals, and vibing to her environment-shifting playlists, which impact the world and the conversations with the characters. There is some level of self-insertion here which is so pleasant and warm-hearted. We spoke with Pushing Vertices’ Creative Director, Indigo Doyle, who has direct passion for rollerblading to music round Ontario — “I am Rollergirl,” she tells us — and so, the game unfolds as a narrative adventure reflecting a coming of age story particular to a black woman gamemaker. It’s pure magic, a vibe-based exploration of moving through a space and what it feels like to experience its streets from blades. Charming as all get out.

Sashimi Slayer

Used to be games were sold on weird peripherals. That sort of ended with the Dreamcast and the move toward console development as a priority ahead of arcades, but don’t tell Shrimp Fried Rice Games that. They had some katanas around and wanted to make a Rhythm Heaven style music game so they envisioned a sword controller which, when unsheathed, acts as a trigger to go with the music. If there’s a way to play it with this unique peripheral, you’ve gotta try it, cause it’s super fun and cutely designed around such a novel gameplay mechanism.

Table Tactics

Table Tactics is a table top strategy game about toppling the opposition with your own force of figurines. Each toppled miniature rewards the player coins, as waves of enemies approach the castle, routed for attack, and it’s up to you to launch and shoot your way to victory. We played this one a couple times, because it’s just so simple and fun. The first round, we didn’t buy any figures, and still almost won, but the second round, we littered the map with low-value little game pieces, and flung all manner of knights and dogs toward the infringing forces of goblins and dragons, and it was an absolute blast. Satisfying design goes a long way, which proves itself out in Table Tactics, which showed so well in demo, and ought to be a ton of fun with further variables added, and in local multiplayer.

Terrible Lizards

Terrible Lizards is a first person horror game set in a museum full of… terrible lizards. Our car breaks down outside the museum and we go in to seek shelter. The name of the game is platforming and survival. We are running and escaping. We cannot much fight back against these terrible lizards. It’s all about navigating these spaces and evading some dinosaurs on the loose, and the game blends first person action with the adventure horror aspects of a game like Alien: Isolation (2014). The team launched a massive YouTube channel, where they were able to amass enough funding to inspire their game development dreams, which are coming to fruition right in front of us.