As you may have seen from the other article published this week, we here at NerdCrash were in attendance at PAX East this year. While the gaming convention is something we like to attend each year, this one was looking a bit different, due to the lack of support from the big three. I can’t help but wonder, between their absence here, the slow death of E3, and the approaching end of the console wars caused by both Xbox Live on Switch and the number of Sony games making it to PC, if the major companies no longer believe they need to compete in the way that they used to. That’s probably a topic better saved for another day, but it certainly seems to be the case. Why else would Microsoft and Sony skip out, leaving Nintendo to make a token effort with a booth focused on the Pokémon Trading Card Game? Regardless, the absence of these companies just meant that this would be a year for indie developers to feast. And feast they did. So without further ado, here are both my top 5 games played at PAX East, as well as my biggest loser.

Biggest Loser: Focus Entertainment

                Boasting probably the largest booth after Devolver Digital, Focus Entertainment had a good six games to show off, and I had the pleasure of trying out three of them. I would be lying if I said the poor management of the booth, obscene lines, decision to combine all of the games into one slowly moving and disorganized line, and only having one setup per game despite the size of the booth, had not left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Putting that aside for a moment, as those things do not affect the quality of the games they were showcasing, I was able to play Aliens: Dark Descent, Void Crew, and Atlas Fallen. The Aliens game was a perfectly decent RTS that I might peak back in on at a later date. Void Crew, however, was the worst experience I’ve ever had with a demo, in which the developers playing with over explained the game’s lore instead of talking about the mechanics we would be interacting with, the camera jiggled in a sickening fashion with each agonizing slow step, and gameplay was ripped out of the game. The obvious alpha had such wonderful mechanics as the spaceship’s turning preventing one player from participating at all times, the need to stop whatever you’re doing and craft ammo n the middle of fights (which takes far too long and kills game flow), and a running mechanic that literally drains your oxygen and kills your character because you thought the basic walking speed was too slow. Atlas Fallen, meanwhile had promise, being an action game where you play as a sand-bender in an expansive desert. As somebody that loves character action games like Devil May Cry, Kingdom Hearts, and Bayonetta, the most important thing to know about this genre is that you don’t want your game space to be too big, else the plyer be asked to just slowly walk between fights for minutes at a time with nothing happening. What I just described was precisely my experience in the empty desert of comically bloated size that makes up the entirety of the game.

Honorable Mention: Sovereign Syndicate

                This one, on the other hand, was much more promising. Clearly inspired by Disco Elysium, this isometric RPG allows the players to pick tarot cards to augment the choices they make in a steampunk setting, in a story that jumps between three different characters. After talking with the developers for a while, I learned that the stat-based leveling system from Disco would not be present here, and that the game was more about just focusing on the choices than on the stats and voices in the players’ head. This wasn’t my favorite thing to hear, as the stat system was my favorite aspect of Disco, but the game still promises an interesting story and what will surely be a unique experience. Now, onto the five games I actually cared enough to wishlist after getting home from the event.

Fifth Place: 30XX

                Inspired by the Megaman X games, 30XX perfectly duplicates the addictive movement options and frenetic pace of its inspiration. Starring two characters the developers themselves called “Not-X and Not-Zero,” the game is a co-op roguelite that tasks players with getting as far into their fast-paced robot destroying missions as they can before finally falling and beginning the whole thing again. I am not a big fan of rougelites, as I prefer a story that I can make sincere progress in, but Megaman X is one of my favorite series due to the way it perfected movement for its genre, and this game delivers exactly that to me once again, in a world where there’s probably never going to be a proper new X game. Furthermore, the co-op mechanics will actually sidestep my typical issues with the genre as a result of offering a worthwhile multiplayer experience, something which makes the “endlessly replay them” genre of games much easier to enjoy. I played through 2.5 levels worth of game before dying on my demo run, and the only major issue I saw was that the Zero analogue automatically does his full three slash combo every time you press the attack button, rather than letting the player do just part of the slash combo. The X analogue, controlled by another random convention goer at the table, seemed to be a perfect replica of the classical jump and shoot style Megaman fans recognize. Should I stop comparing this game to Megaman and focus on it as its own thing? Perhaps, but the vibe I got from the devs was very much “I want more of this, and Capcom won’t make it, so I’ll do it myself.” And I have nothing but respect for that kind of attitude. It also appears to be available on Steam already, so if I can convince somebody else to go in on it with me, I’ll probably be picking this up.

Fourth Place: Alone in the Dark

                Clocking in at a mere ten minutes, this was a particularly polished looking horror title, with an over-the-shoulder third person camera. The demo had me playing as a sweet little girl in a Louisiana apartment building, who is tasked by her uncle with delivering a letter regarding a vaguely defined conspiracy. This would be pretty simple, if not for the non-Euclidean geometry in the apartment, with doors leading to different rooms depending on what angle you walk into them from, and a group of swamp monsters roaming the halls. The player character was delightfully nonplussed by the entire situation, though the ending implied she would not be the protagonist for the majority of the real game. The mechanics were not particularly deep, supporting what was mostly an atmospheric walking simulator that featured aa quick time event or two. That said, it was a horror game, and that’s something that can be sold on vibe alone, since deep mechanics can often make the player a bit too strong for the player to feel scared. Still, I was very impressed by how quickly and efficiently the game built its weird atmosphere, and evading swamp monsters in Louisiana while navigating halls that don’t obey the laws of geometry sounds like it will provide exactly the kind of bizarre scenarios that lead into good scares. I’m looking forward to this one.

Third Place: Wrestle Quest

                With probably the best booth in the convention hall, the Wrestle Quest devs advertised their quirky RPG by setting up an actual wrestling ring and hosting matches on the show floor throughout the day. Drawn in by this ridiculous marketing ploy, I then experienced twenty minutes of what might be the cheesiest JRPG I have ever touched, wherein you play as a pro wrestler who literally worships Macho Man Randy Savage as a god, and who is just trying to boost the network’s ratings while preventing thieves from stealing the wrestling federation’s supply of face paint. Or at least that’s what I got out of the demo. The entire thing was hilarious in just how hard it leaned into its knowingly cheesy gimmick, and the big (if purposefully flanderized) personalities you would expect from a professional wrestler were all over the NPCs. With what looked like a surprisingly large world map for this type of game, it promises a respectable playtime. Most eye-catching for me, however, were the combat mechanics, which harkened back to the classic Mario RPGs, mid-combat action commands and all. It supplements these ideas with great additions from the wrestling gimmick, such as using the ring’s ropes to combo your action commands, or a minigame where you can pin a low health opponent to instantly finish them off. The experience was sufficiently hilarious to appeal to me, and the brief looks at deeper mechanics, such as tag team combos, boosting your stats by giving yourself an absurd ring entrance, and dragging your manager into the fight for status effects suggest that this will have far more depth than its joke premise would suggest.

Second Place: Arcadian Atlas

                This appears to be a fusion of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy tactics, just without the anime in it. I love this concept because I would absolutely love to play a military strategy game with leveling mechanics where I don’t have to feel embarrassed by the character designs. The demo appeared to feature a system where you could recruit randomly generated characters to supplement your small group of plot-relevant medieval soldiers. The map I played through offered a respectable amount of strategy and difficulty, requiring me to quickly learn how elevation affected different attacks, and instantly throwing enemies at me that dealt enough damage to actually outdamage the healer. I didn’t quite have a perfect run through the demo, but I was impressed by what I saw, and will be watching this one with great interest. Also, its mascot is a raccoon with a knife who is also a ranger after being awakened to sentience by a magic potion. Literally how can I dislike this?

First Place: Moonlight Pulse

                And for the game that most caught my attention, we have this Metroidvania where you play as a squad of four non-anthropomorphic animals investigating the sudden invasion of parasites in the region. The game allows you to swap between the four characters (two in the demo) with the press of a button, and the most important aspect of this is that it does not slow down the game by even aa millisecond and allows you to keep your moment as you swap characters, leading to things like using the aquatic-ly oriented character to get through a pond that would kill anyone else’s momentum, and immediately jumping out of it and switching characters in mid air to access an air dash necessary to reach the next area. In a time when developers are pushing realism over gameplay in many genres, meeting a developer who understood how to put the gameplay back into the game was perfect. The movement in this game could not have felt better, and it was unafraid of the fact that it was a videogame, focusing on an ideal gameplay flow over anything else. Some of the other developers I met this past weekend could learn a thing or two from this game. It unfortunately won’t be out until next year, but this felt so good to play that it will be a day one purchase for me.

                This wasn’t the greatest PAX East I have attended, but it was one where the indie developers really got a chance shine. As possibly the only chance for some of these devs to really advertise their games, I’m honestly kind of glad that none of the big three showed up to outshine them. Let those companies work with their digital press releases. Perhaps personal events like this should be for the smaller developers to have their moment in the sun.