realm walk of soul

PAX South attracts a number of small indie studios to showcase their wares. This year saw a number of really cool ideas from even cooler people.

Screencheat

You know when you were playing Goldeneye with your friends and two of them knew the drill — no screen looking. But then there’s that third guy who always claimed to be cheating, BUT HOW ARE YOU GOING TO PREFIRE IN A LOCAL MULTIPLAYER GAME, BRADLEY? WE ALL HEAR THE SAME NOISES, BRADLEY. YOU’RE FOOLING NOBODY.

This game is either a giant middle finger or pat on the back to all the Bradleys in the world. The game is a simple enough multiplayer death match with various weapons, but the catch is that everyone is invisible. You can only find out where your opponents are by looking at their screens to see what they see. There’s also other cues like gunsmoke or particle effects, but mainly, you’re just looking at everyone else’s screen.

The result is a frantic, sometimes confusing, always entertaining competition to see whose spacial reasoning is the best, or who has the most luck. The only flaw is its local multiplayer only status, since there are some of us who don’t go over to friends houses anymore because when we punched Bradley in the teeth for Klobbing us one too many times, we don’t get the invite anymore.

You can pick this game up right now on Steam.

Knight Squad

Ever wanted to play Bomberman capture the flag with 8 players?

Me too.

Now there’s Knight Shield! Up to 8 players are in a top down maze structure all struggling to get a chalice in the center of the map and bring it back to their spawn point. First to X amount of points wins. The map also has powerups like bow and arrow or drill about to make the game more interesting.

Inevitably you have a tangle of deaths and it somehow winds up near a little dweeb like me who just spawned, so I grab it and score a point pretty easily. Then I do this:

It’s great fun, especially with the max of 8 players. Luckily, you don’t need any real life friends to get that since this game has online multiplayer. It’s definitely more satisfying to do the laugh in real life though.

You can get it right now on Steam.

The first thing you’ll notice about this game is how striking it is. It’s aesthetics are equal parts Tim Burton, Madoka, and the random scrawlings on the walls of horror games. In it, you take control of Iris who wakes up in a mysterious, bizarre world just begging to be figured out. You’ll solve puzzles, meet weird characters, and feel slightly unsettled the whole time.

The gameplay is kind of like an action/adventure game. It’s nothing revolutionary in that it’s a puzzle game and there’s really only so many puzzles one can put in a game. What is really interesting, though, is the world the game is set in. It’s not necessarily scary, but it is very offputting and unnerving, like a fever dream after watching Corpse Bride. It’s also not necessarily not NOT scary either — there’s definitely times in the trailer where I question whether or not I should play this in the dark. If the full game is anything like the demo, it should be a really interesting ride.

The game is coming out in the first half of 2016. You can find out more about it here.