It’s that time of year. The time when I rattle off ten cool games I saw at PAX West. I’ll admit that in prior years it’s been a bit of a stretch to get this list to ten games. That’s cause some games seem exciting on the show floor, and leave no lingering memory worth spending three paragraphs of words on. So understand how good the games were at this year’s PAX that I struggled just to keep the list at ten entries.
This was a banger year with plenty of strong AAA presence rubbing shoulders with the Indie darlings PAX is known for. By my count, I played close to 30 games and any of them could have made this list. This selection is based on what surprised me. Either a mechanical twist, a standout art style, or it knocked me on my ass without me ever hearing of it prior.
Like last year, I’ve linked the steam page to each game listed. If that game has a demo, then I’ve popped a little ★ next to it as well. Many of these are likely the same demos I experience at PAX, so feel free to give them a whirl to fact-check me
Sucker For Love: Crush Landing
One of the highlights of any PAX West is cruising by the booth of developer Akabaka to see what cosmic horror they’ve made into a cute, smoochable girl. Both Sucker for Love games are tongue-in-cheek, yet oddly wholesome, takes on both dating sims, 90s visual novels, and (depending on the routes you take) survival horror.
This latest tale adapts The Colour Out of Space from H.P. Lovecraft (which was also made into a damn good Nic Cage movie!) It’s arguably one of Lovecraft’s most cosmic of horrors due to the actual indescribable nature of the menace. Cthulhu is a big squid man, the Colour is…a glowing rock?
This is played within the game. Your chromatic space babe is a literal projection of light emanating from a comet that crashed into your apartment. She takes the name Hheily and has no understanding of human, or corporeal, life. She’s kept alive by the fire of the comet, meaning you have to throw items on the flames to keep her alive. This removes your access to the item (some of which are beloved pets) but also influence Hheily’s behavior. More than that, she’s a beacon to all the freaks and weirdos in the city, who will come knocking at your door to steal her.
Prior Sucker for Love games used chapters to break up the branching paths. For Crush Landing, Akabaka told me this will all be one continuous visual novel with more routes and endings than any prior.
Table Tactics
Before I spent money on Paradox game DLC I’ll never use, or MTG cards collecting dust in two drawers of my dresser, I spent a lot of money on Attacktix . For those not triggered like a sleeper agent by that word, Attacktix was a series of collectible action figures drawn from three franchises (Star Wars, Marvel Super Heroes, and Transformers) that were designed to be played in a tactics game. Some figures had spring-loaded melee attacks, others fired projectiles of various sizes. The goal was to knock over your opponent’s figures, which then caused various effects.
I can’t say that the solo dev of Table Tactics was inspired by Attacktix, but in playing it I had a Ratatouille moment where I was launched back to childhood on my knees trying to line up the perfect shot. The combat is all physics-based. The fantasy figurines have various base sizes and weights that affect their survivability, and making successful attacks is about targeting center of mass. Archers fire plastic arrows, Knights lunge, and catapults shoot big ol’ marbles.
The game is still much a work in progress, as anything relying on Unity physics would be. The current roster may look small, but each figure offers a unique role and encourages experimenting to find synergies. I think there’s something real special to this one.
Hank: Drowning on Dry Land
Hank is one of my favorite types of indie games. The kind where the art team and the game design team are building two different games to peanutbutter cup their way to success. In this case, Hank apes the style of Frank Miller comics of the 90s to tell the story of a Batman-esque vigiliante with a scratchy throat and a chronic drinking problem wading through neon nights to contend with crazed maniacs.
The twist is, this isn’t a brawler or otherwise familiar take on the superhero genre. Hank isn’t actually for the streets y’see, but he has a knack for being at the right place at the right time due to his ability to travel through time. The demo presents a puzzle box where you have to set up a victory for Hank in a small 90 second window. You can rewind and fast-forward at will, but the puzzle elements start to shine once you pop in a mirror and create a doppelganger of yourself. Your past lives will play out whatever actions you gave them and if two Hank’s meet, well, the spacetime continuum apparently doesn’t like that.
So it’s an exercise in trial and error. Working out which Hank needs to be where for each tick of the clock. Comic panels down in the corner will alert you to any events happening just outside of your fixed camera on the diorama-like levels. It’s a real brain tickler and I think many passing by My Next Games’ station were surprised to what the game entailed.
PIGFACE
PIGFACE is in the proud tradition of indie games where there’s little greater purpose beyond booting up a level and saying “Oops, here I go killing again!”
A first-person Hotline Miami would be my most immediate comparison, but only in spirit. This is a game about being a grungy psychopath set loose on criminal gangs. Combat is fast-paced and brutal (though not one-hit kill like Hotline) that mixes immersive sim elements ala Thief. Yes, you can get to your objective by blazing a bloody path through all in your way, but you can also stack boxes about it.
This creates a great scrambliness to everything. Once the drug farm I was infiltrating was on high alert I was improvising every step of the way. I started with a hatchet, threw that at a guy and lost it. I took his gun, but it only had two shots. When his three buddies found me I shot two then killed the third with a bottle I picked up. It feels way better to play than it might look, and much like Hotline Miami you’re encouraged to try levels multiple times with different loadouts and tactics.
It’s weird to say, but I think Murder Sim might shoot up my most played genres when this game comes out.
GlitchSPANKR
GlitchSPANKR is a game where you spank glitches. The glitch in question is an ugly toilet named Spunk that sounds like Joe Pesci on the verge of tears. If you can’t get past that abrasive premise, then this game is definitely not for you.
Push past that and you will find the game finds new depths to make you cringe with it’s comedy. What’s unfortunate is it’s such an overwhelming assault that eventually you breakdown and embrace the madness. The gameplay is mostly walk around and take in this funny tableau while Spunk monologues at you, but then it flips the script and becomes a tower defense or a JRPG. The game is a lot and over the course of repeated demo runs I was frankly baffled at the breadth of it’s branching paths.
Oh yes, there are moral choices to be made in GlitchSPANKR, the earliest is whether or not to befriend Spunk. Befriend Spunk and then your choice becomes to betray Spunk, which leads you down a distinct path from trying to kill him outright. This is the kind of game where the secrets have secrets and all the while you’re carrying a plastic flyswatter designed for posterior punishment. It’s a weird Gen Z Rick & Morty, 90s throwback commentary on player action. The Nuveu Stanley Parable, and I frankly can’t wait for the full release.
Jackbox Party Pack 11
Jackbox always has a place at PAX. It’s an institution like the Just Shapes and Beats setup outside the Indie Mega Booth. There’s literally a stage that, from Con close to end, will run constant Party Pack games hosted by the developers.
So it was a boon that they had a new Jackbox Party Pack to show off. I don’t know when we somehow got to 11 of these, but they’ve become the baseline for digital party games. I’d say the key to their success, beyond the accessibility of just needing smartphone to play, is that all the games lend themselves to asymmetrical play. The thrill is all in the reveal of what you and your friends cooked up sight unseen from one another, and most of the games in Party Pack 11 play to this strength.
Doominate is probably the go-to warmup game of the pack. It’s in the vein of Quiplash where all you really need to do is come up with something funny, but here it’s flavored as ruining beautiful and beloved things. Cookie Haus is the new drawing game, built on fulfilling oddly specific cookie design requests. It’s a great game because you don’t need to be a good drawer, you just need to be more on-theme than your opponents. Suspectives might be the standout. A social deduction game where everyone takes a survey, then a crime is committed that matches one player’s answers. The gameplay becomes about testing your knowledge of your friends as you compare their answers to what you really know about them.
Hollow Home
Just looking at any gameplay of Hollow Home and the comparison is easy. This wants to be Disco Elysium, and…yeah. The developers say that’s a direct influence. The bigger influence is that war in Ukraine, where the game is set and all the devs are located. This isn’t a story set in fictional Revechol, this is about real lives.
You play a 14-year-old boy living through the early days of the Russian invasion. The demo starts just the day before your city gets occupied. Tensions are high, but there’s still a sense of normalcy. You play hooky from school and crack jokes with your friend about how bad your FPS matches went last night. Townspeople all know you by name, and you know most of them as “Uncle” or “Auntie.”
There are a few choices to be made, all governed by an AP system that limits how many big actions you can make a day. These actions can be gated by your current stats, but it’s not driven by skill checks like Disco Elysium. Instead, Hollow Home asks the player the more direct question of “When time is a luxury, who will you spend it with?”
Much of the writing of the game feels too real to natural conversation. The developer liaison present at PAX told me much of it was inspired by journals and other testimonies sent in by Ukrainian citizens. Art assets such as paintings, posters, and even the soundtrack, were all donated by war survivors that caught wind of this project.
Black Jackal
This is not a space horror game. At least, it’s not meant to be. Black Jackal is a blue-collar simulator about investigating derelict spaceships for insurance purposes. Space travel is dangerous enough without alien zombies and crazy-causing glowing rocks. Sometimes ships get abandoned due to radiation leaks and it’s your job to scan the vessel from tip to tail to create a credible report.
You don’t board these clunkers yourself. Instead you have a tiny handy drone that can canvass for entry points. You’re piloting completely in 3D space with no gravity, so the slightest course adjustments could send you offtrack if not timed correctly. Much of the demo I played was about avoiding open fires or active security systems.
That last bit is particularly important because while you are here to figure out why these ships became abandoned/killed everyone on board, that’s only part of your paycheck. The other part is about looting whatever floats by. One “moral” choice offered to me was finding a dead scientist floating through a hallway. One of my coworkers called out that he had a really expensive watch on him that might be worth more than the whole mission. I looted the watch, and was met with the knowledge that it had the man’s family engraved on it. Still, I couldn’t deny how my payout for salvage just went up dramatically.
The Secret of Weepstone
Last year I played Might & Magic 6 and Wizardry 6 for the first time and saw the light of the blobber dungeon crawl. Mixing survival-horror resource management with the progression and story-telling of a party-based RPG was a genre I knew had to exist, but I never knew it’s name.
Enter, Secret of Weepstone, one of my favorite games from PAX West this year. It takes all the elements of those classics 90s crawlers, while giving needed quality of life when it comes to clarity of mechanics and ease of control. This isn’t a game you’ll need to consult a wiki to know that you’re not screwing yourself right at character creation. You work with pre-made characters that start in mundane classes like Baker or Blacksmith, but will eventually gain enough experience to become an RPG staple like a Cleric. It offers this tantalizing meta-progression where you become more comfortable with the mechanical depth at the same rate your party does.
This is all tied into a lovely aesthetic evoking the hand-drawn art of an AD&D module. In fact, the game is framed as being a table-top game, with your UI and menus being diagetic pages to the sourcebook this is adventure is taken from. It’s all shaping up to be a clean package hearkening back to the days of high adventure.
Bubsy 4D
Bubsy just won’t die. The snarky bobcat has had more new games in the last ten years than Crash, Spyro, Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, Croc, Blinx, Gex, and Yoshi.
I can only imagine that the license is worth peanuts, given each title has been from a different developer. This latest entry comes from Fabraz, the makers of the Demon Turf/Tide series. Those titles sell themselves on the expressiveness of their 3D platforming and they’ve brought that same “Go Ham” approach to Bubsy.
Bubsy 4D plays really well. Like, shockingly well. Not just cause it’s Bubsy, but because it’s the kind of diverse jumping toolkit we collectively reserve for Mario. Bubsy has a triple jump, a hover, a glide, a lunge that resets your jump when it impacts a surface, a ball form that boosts speed and can cancel into any of the aforementioned while maintaining the momentum created. It’s a lot. Each time the Developer guiding me explained a new feature I had to ask “Is this all unlocked for the demo?” and they gladly answered this is the complexity of Bubsy’s movement out of the box. You can collect blueprints in each level to unlock further move tech.
I think this may be the best game I played at the show and that feels crazy. Cause this game feels deliberately made so that Streamers will deadpan look to the camera and say “They made a good Bubsy game?”
Yeah…uh, yeah. They did.
Love Eternal
Horror comes in many flavors, and for Love Eternal that horror is both quite sudden and also quite still.
The quickness is in the gameplay. This is a puzzle platformer taking a page from indie classic VVVVVV where you flip-flop gravity to make your way through trap-filled mazes. When you reverse gravity there’s this slight momentum that still carries your character their original path before things accelerate in the opposite direction. In play, it feels exquisite, and getting in-tune enough to beat a screen on first attempt made me feel quite MLG, if I do say so myself.
But I did say this is a horror game, right? Love Eternal tells the story of…well I’m not quite sure. One moment you’re a little girl sitting down for dinner, the next your dad’s a spider and you’re altering gravity in the ruins of some spike-filled ruin. It’s not loud about this. Moving from one screen to the next may reveal some unsettling cyclopean statue worn by time, but it won’t give chase. None of the horrors give chase. They just…sit there…while you do your jumping puzzles. This paired with the snappy gameplay created an atmosphere where I’d zone in on a level to beat it, then sit back and realize the shape of what I’d just navigated. It unnerves and unsettles while still delivering such tight design.