What We Saw at SXSW

We made our annual pilgrimage to SXSW this year to see what games would be featured.  Indie titles and VR games were all over the place and there was some great music and a pretty terrific free arcade.  We captured some footage of some of our favorite games and embedded it in the text below.  Hope you enjoy some excellent games despite some amateur cinematography.

Once Upon a Coma is fun and solemn, definitely worth a look.

Familiar but Beautiful and Innovative

One thing you expect to see among indie games is a cool spin on familiar gameplay with unique and amazing graphics, and SXSW didn’t disappoint.  Once Upon a Coma has a great look to it and feels like a traditional 2-D explorer, but I love the puzzles and the way the characters look and move.  You play as a child who awakens in a mysterious version of his hometown; puzzles are pretty nicely done and the artwork is amazing.  Check it out here and here.  Atsa looks like a neat side scroller where you gather up your missing records across a surreal, soft environment.  Take a look at some footage here.  I also really enjoyed the stick figure western West of Loathing.  It’s a fun adventure game with a terrific artistic style, great sense of humor and fun battle mechanic.  Battles play out like Final Fantasy or Stick of Truth, with each side taking turns launching attacks (some really funny ones) to wear down the others hitpoints.  Check out these videos here and here.

West of Loathing has a fun style and cool gameplay.

Lots of Casual Fun

For folks who aren’t big fans of the President or people who are kinda apolitical, Dump Trump provides some quick, Wario Ware-style fun.  Levels are quick and give you just seconds to respond, usually requiring you to complete some kind of act at the President’s expense.  Yoku’s Island Express is really cool, too.  The game is essentially a pinball game as you bat around the ball with the hero attached.  The graphics are astoundingly beautiful; check out the gameplay here.  There is also the super-fun shooter Salad Hunt, where you attack kitchen with vegetables (now I’ve done everything).  Check out some footage here.  Finally, fans of Monument Valley are going to find a lot to love in Where Shadows Slumber.  The game has the same visual flair and introduces an element involving shadows.  Specifically, when you shine your lantern you create shadows and the shadows sweeping over the map create paths and remove obstacles.  It works well and the game looks good.  Check it out here.

See, that monolith will probably let you sweep a shadow over that missing bridge which will create a bridge and…well, you get it.

War, What is it Good For?

Prisoner also looks like an interesting take on the Outlast-style of survival horror.  The game casts you as a POW in a Japanese labor camp in World War II.  You run, hide, and try to escape the live guards and the supernatural monsters that are part of the story.  The game premiered last month on Steam and, while we weren’t able to play it, it looks pretty good.  Another game making use of the war motif was my favorite, My Memory of Us.  It’s a single player adventure of a brother and sister escaping robot monsters in a war torn country.  You play both siblings as they escape robots and sneak through various areas, think Limbo meets NES Mickey Mouse.  The game had a subtle innovation that I loved: you could separate the two and control them individually and then reunite them and control them as a pair.  Maybe I’m nuts, but I’ve never seen that in a game quite that way.  These two videos should give you some idea of the kind of animation and gameplay to expect.

My Memory of Us was my favorite. Platformer, puzzle-solver, and some other stuff too, this game is worth a look.

And My Person Hero

For me, though, the person highlight was meeting Mattis Folkstead, the creator of Milkmaid of the Milky Way.  I was hoping he might have another title on the way but he was cagey about his future plans.  Milkmaid of the Milky Way is premiering on the IOS and Android, and he was there to promote the game.  If you haven’t played Milkmaid of the Milky Way, get to that right away.  And while I didn’t get a video of Mattis, you can read our review of Milkmaid of the Milky Way here.