Indie Rising is the best part of PAX, and as is tradition, we continue our annual wrap-up of the games featured. As always, this section of the expo hall is bursting with innovation, and is, more or less, also our list of must-play games from the show. That’s always how it goes, PAX-wise.

Creature Kitchen

At the intersection of creepy and cozy, Creature Kitchen gets to do both things, because it does them each well and combines them neatly. We’ve got an old haunted house set in a creepy forest and are charged with cooking for the woodland creatures. Invention, sometimes, is combining common things in a new way, and that’s where Creature Kitchen excels and is worth your attention.

Don’t Wake the Beast

Greed vs. Survival. How deep into the lair will you go for treasure, before setting off alarms and waking the beast? With an implicitly satisfying risk-reward system, Don’t Wake the Beast understands full well the value of a good gameplay cycle. From the demo alone, the hooks are real — there’s something so tense about the light escalation, the building sound which starts calm and turns cacophonous the deeper you explore. The greater the depths, the greater the treasure, in this super promising rougelike.

Dungeon Lurker

The website for Dungeon Lurker will make all millennial web hobbyists say “hell yeah,” with its fiery line objects, marquee under construction signs, and general GeoCities vibes. After joining their WebRing, perhaps also wishlist their game on Steam. Dungeon Lurker is (deepest sigh ever printed online) a roguelike with a difference. The difference is it plays more like a beat ‘em up and is hyper grimy, designed for a make-believe 32-bit console. It’s also meta. But most importantly, it’s dungeon crawling plus something not totally lame, mechanically and aesthetically. Let us know your thoughts in our Guest Book below.

The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham

Full motion video, first-person adventure, and conspiracy boards combine in Causeway Studios’ The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham, a Lynchian oddyssey about a woman searching for her missing daughter. Swapping between the astral plane and the real world, Lilith pieces together the mystery with a multifaceted presentation, bolstering the experiential opportunity within the game to solve the case across varied mediums. Made for Twin Peaks enjoyers like all of us, the genre and form blending are captivating and hopefully combine for a deeply interesting final product.

Fugue Shot

Citing UFO 50 (2024), the folks at Run Dialect have made a mini-game rougelike which spans ten different mechanical experiences, which escalate steadily, as the player progresses and clears each challenge. The team says they were deeply inspired by UFO’s bite-sized approach, which revealed something more expansive and true about the nature of games, the more you put into it. By attaching a progression system onto this template, the result is a fast-paced and diverting treat of mini-games played quickly, with the hope of bringing players back by steadily increasing their toolset and the challenges in the bite-sized experiences.

Giga Turtles

“It’s just me, making a party game,” said the solo dev of Giga Turtles, a super-fun 4-player “party slop” game, as the dev defines it. As rounds go by, the losing turtles upgrade their character, with bigger sizes, dashing abilities, and enhanced weapons, as level geometry shifts, and turtles are splatted against bright neon colors. It’s a delightful and free-spirited little party game, locked-in and focused on multiplayer chaos.

Lazy River

“I’m rich so the game is fully self- funded,” said Mike Boxleiteir, who made millions off the boardgame Secret Hitler a decade ago and has been making passion project videogames since, “so we’ve talked to publishers but we don’t need their money, what other value can they provide?” Lazy River is a resource-scavenging game wherein players float downriver on inflatables and fight off hordes of zombies along the shore. We demoed the game with Mike and a couple developers of other indie games. We had a productive session and got a sense for the game’s vibe and that the creators are simply making the game they want to see in the world. How it should be. And with the right resources, it’s all right that they’ve come into some feature creep, and are keeping the ship afloat until they feel like putting it out.

Remaining Grace

Quentin Pan spent a decade as lead designer at Red Thread Games crafting narrative adventures like Dreamfall Chapters (2014) and Draugen (2019), before setting out to create his own indie studio, Ambedo. The studio’s debut game is Remaining Grace, a story about a mother who died a few years ago and has been brought back as a ghost as a narrative device — recalling the excellent Ghost Trick (2010). Grace explores her house, her experiences of family, grief, and loss, as defined by spaces drawn out of pencil sketches. If the framework of the story aligns with the mechanical concepts, Remaining Grace ought to be a fascinating new adventure that tells a deeply human story.

Stepwell

Up? Down? If you say so. In Stepwell, the ceiling is the floor or the wall, depending on your perspective, as you rotate spaces to help guide our curious adventurer across brightly colored puzzle environments.

Tommyrot

Oh no! The beloved mascot of a children’s tv show finds the facade of his reality cracking as he enters into the dark adventure of LMOP’s Tommyrot, a painstakingly stop motion animated 2.5D adventure game. What’s playable at the show is only a small slice of promising interactivity — hopefully there’s much more here to meet the wonderful aesthetic principle of the game.

Wolfhound

Where did you find this aesthetic? You already know, after watching a few seconds of Wolfhound, whether or not you love it, and that direct appeal perfectly captures a nostalgia built upon developers designing for attract modes in hyper-accessible run-and-gun games that kicked ass and did it with flourish. Wolfhound, not to be derisive, is like combining Wolfenstein themes into a Contra playstyle with Metroidvania level design. Which is to say its appeal is self-evident in the likely case you love all of those things as much as we do. Some concepts just go and Wolfhound is one of those. You’ll know it when you see it.