PAX Prime 2014 Day 3 – Indie Games and Insomnia
At the end of PAX Prime 2014 Day 3, this post was very nearly abandoned in favor of the merciful beauty of sleep. All of us here at Dorkadia are all exhausted but we’re pushing through and only whining when there’s not caffeine being poured into our mouths, which is a very small percentage of the time. For me, Day 3 was a day focused on indie games, both at the Indie Megabooth and the illustrious 6th floor. I also got to chat with the very enthusiastic StereoType Studios at the Northwest Press booth as well as the very friendly guys at TicToc Games; please check back later for a more in-depth looks and reviews of their works, the comic Capitol Hillbillies and the platformer The Adventures of Pip. I looked at an absolute ton of games on Day 3, so here are some titles that really stuck out as interesting to me.
I played a few minutes of Tumblestone and spoke with the devs about this fun match ‘em, break ‘em puzzler. I’ll want to play more of it to give it a more solid review, but what I played was fun, polished and vibrant. It was extremely similar in concept and gameplay to Magical Drop, which is one of my favorite games of all time, so I was already pretty pro on the idea when I picked up the tablet. Tumblestone does add a puzzle mode, which I never experienced in Magical Drop, so any game that improves upon something I already love is worthy of a second look. I’ll be waiting to check this one out further.
Jon dragged a huge group of us over to the Xbox booth to play this hidden gem that’s a bit buried among bigger titles. Knight Squad is insanely fun, and the rare game that only gets more fun with the more people you add to it, instead of cruder and more frustrating. You play as a tiny awkward knight, running around the map to kill other tiny awkward knights. There are simple power-ups (longer sword, bow/arrows, drill, speed boots, HORSE) to be picked up, and death is constant. The game has a bunch of different modes – we played two, one where you needed to capture the item in the middle of the map and run it back to your spawn point, and the other that was just King of the Hill. Both modes were pure hella fun and by the time we were finished, the map was littered with tiny awkward knight corpses.
This was a really interesting simulator we passed at the Indie Megabooth that I had to turn around and take another look at. While containing quite a few traditional tabletop games such as chess, checkers and card games, Tabletop Simulator is almost more of a development tool or game improver than anything. Though only in early access, Tabletop Simulator already has almost 1,000 mods in the Steam Workshop. The demo we watched included a fantastically built RPG dungeon complete with minis that could be easily moved around and otherwise manipulated. I see Tabletop Simulator being insanely useful as an online GM’s tool, with the ability to use reality-based physics and a realistic design to mimic the very specific feel of an in-person pen and paper game.
We pretty much had to tear Megan away from this mobile word game and after I picked it up out of the Google Play Store, I can really see why. It’s a simple concept, where you basically complete a crossword puzzle without the grid. Words are given to you in chunks of letters either horizontally or vertically and you’re given a single clue (“Eye of the The…” “Can be Broken…”) to complete the puzzle. I started it playing it just before bed, which was incredibly dangerous considering how exhausted I was and how addicting the game is. There are free basic puzzle packs and a free daily puzzle that is often topical to current events (when I played it was “Back to School..”). While I didn’t get a chance to delve too deeply into this puzzler yet, I have a feeling that my breaks are going to get a lot more wordy in the near future.
I made Jon play Bearzerkers with me because OH MY GOD IT’S CALLED BEARZERKERS. It’s a 3D, up-to-four people competitive game where you are not the bears – oh, no. No, the bear(s) are out to eat YOU, the rolly-polly armadillos! The only real mechanic is the armadillos’ ability to dig a barrier behind themselves, so the point of the game is to escape the hungry bear(s) while stopping your opponents from escaping. It was a ton of fun for such a simple concept and I could have played for another hour, easily. The art is super cute and pretty, the graphics are crisp, the maps we played were fun, especially the cemetery, and the whole idea is just really clever. I’d also absolutely by plushies based off this game.
