Indie Spotlight - PAX Aus 2014

Somewhere in the pile of long-since discarded documents that I endlessly pored over in the lead-up to PAX Aus – erroneously referred to as 'PAX Oz' by one of the Ubisoft promotional videos, but I suppose you can't blame them for trying to fit in – was a communique that described the event as a 'festival for games'. It’s a turn of phrase that rather stuck in my mind because – even with the cosplay and the tournaments and the stalls hawking merchandise – I was never quite able to reconcile with the real thing. It all seemed too big, too flashy, too – if I might let out my inner teenager for a second – corporate. It wasn't until I actually arrived and took stock of the indie pavilion that the comparison shone. In another time and place, these stands might have displayed painstakingly crafted trinkets or scientific curiosities; the kind of thing that a handful of people might have collaborated on not necessarily because it would bring them fame or fortune – not that that would be unwelcome or anything, I'm sure – but because they were passionate about something and wanted a platform, however small, to share it with the world. Here the situation was near-identical, but with... well, video games. I saw games being exhibited by hopeful teams as small as two people, and before the Razor booth powered up and permanently deafened us all, I had a jolly good chat with some of them too.

And there were so damn many of them. That was what gutted me: I couldn't give every game a fair shake, wait in the crowd around every stand, shout questions at every developer over 2K's thousandth obnoxious Borderlands advert. So I picked what I could. Below you will find a list of games that is by no means comprehensive, or even necessarily fairly selected. Some I never got around to playing, or didn't experience comprehensively enough to confidently describe, while a few – though I hate to say this – simply had me tapping my pen against my desk for hours, struggling to find positive things to say about them. Think of this as a list of games to watch out for, selected not based on any sane metric, but on what I thought looked promising at the time... and turned out to be totally right about.

Gunscape
Created By: Blowfish Studios
Status: Pre-Alpha

Well, so much for providing a critical viewpoint. If there's a game out there more efficient at slapping me with a faceful of sopping wet nostalgia, I've yet to discover it. Just look at it. I told you fools that late-90s polygons would become retro sooner or later, and with Gunscape they damn well have. But it's not the graphics that gave old-school first-person shooters like Doom, Half-Life and Quake II their long-term legacies, was it? Nope, it was their vibrant modding communities, and Gunscape seems dead-set on replicating the same environment by billing itself as an 'FPS creator', focussing on an accessible, constrained toolkit over more powerful and complex mod tools. Sounds fine to me; limitations beget creative solutions.

Is it poised to pull it off, though? Modders are kind of like tropical fish, in the sense that you need to give them exactly the right conditions to live in or you'll come downstairs one morning to find them floating upside down in the aquarium tank. If the base game isn't good enough then all you've done is make a ton of content and a bunch of tools that nobody wants to use (see also: the similarly intentioned and similarly titled Guncraft). Having given it a try, though, I'm cautiously optimistic. Movement isn't quite as swift as the old-school shooters that Gunscape seems to want to emulate, but it's smooth and simple and you can jump high enough to leap over shipping containers, so I suppose I can't complain too much. Levels are built in a block-based format which is to Minecraft what Duplo is to Lego – if you see what I mean – but there's enough variety in the blocks available to prevent it from feeling too chunky. There's supposedly going to be single-player content too, so anti-social pillocks like me will be able to obsessively build levels in it without feeling like we're wasting our time. Didn't get to see any of it, though, 'cause nothing draws a crowd like a split-screen deathmatch apparently.

If anything, my biggest worry is that Gunscape isn't going to come out at all – or at least, not for very long. It gaily skips along the edge of intellectual property infringement, snapping up bits of content from other games and re-creating them with dangerously few changes. Even during my short deathmatch, I spotted Team Fortress-esque textures, the Quake 3 railgun, floor tiles reminiscent of Doom and something that was very clearly the BFG9000. No, I'm pretty sure using red particles instead of green doesn't make it different. Neither does making a new lo-fi weapon model.

Hand of Fate
Created By: Defiant Development
Status: Steam Early Access

Because when the press email touted Hand of Fate as a "card game/roguelike/board game" (exact quote), I had to either turn up at the booth or spend the entire day agonising over what exactly that could possibly mean. Truth be told, I'm struggling to describe it any better than that. It feels almost like a meta-game of sorts; one game nested within another. At first it looks like a virtual tabletop, dealing you out cards in a grid and letting you flip them at will to progress through the dungeon. It feels almost like the polished, grown-up version of something you'd hastily create through improvisation if you brought your copy of Hero Quest down from the attic and discovered that roaches had eaten the game board; each card you flip brings something new, whether it's a trap, a weapon, a monster, a choice scenario, a random encounter, or some kind of— woah, what just happened?

Yep, it's exactly what it looks like. Every now and then you play out the events described on the cards, your accumulated equipment and statistics transferring themselves onto your player character. From what I saw, these sections are usually kept brief and confined to a fairly small arena – representative of whatever the card's 'encounter' describes – so the roguelike elements are presumably wrapped up in randomly selecting cards to deal to you and shape your progression. Not quite as exciting as full-on procedurally-generated levels, but certainly a lot more flexible, eh?

In theory this is all jolly exciting stuff, and judging by the metric ton of cards that the game heaped on me during my short play-time, it's shaping up to be a nice deep experience, but I'm a tad worried about the hack-n-slash mechanics. Without putting too fine a point on it, they seem a bit sticky and unresponsive, like playing Darksiders in a tub of petroleum jelly. Still, it's probably nothing that a bit of animation and control tweaking can't fix, so no worries, eh?