I had the pleasure of attending Day of the Devs, a showcase of unique games made by smaller independent developers, in Los Angeles last week and walked away once again impressed by the sheer creativity and innovation on display in every corner of the room. Whether it was the next great action-platformer, a distinct pair of Latin-American games, a slew of exciting survival horror entries, or the absolute weirdest, outside-the-box titles you could imagine, Day of the Devs had promising games in droves. Here are just a few of the titles I got to see across the show:
Ultros
To be entirely upfront, I knew I’d like Ultros before I ever played it. If your game’s an action-platformer with a unique visual style and a structure like Metroid, I’m going to find a way to love it. Ultros successfully checked those boxes and then some across my winding and dense Day of the Devs demo. My exploration of the Sarcophagus, a ship on the wildest drug trip seemingly, yielded at least one secret path and tense boss encounter that put my burgeoning knowledge of its combat system to the test. The combat, which consists of light and heavy attacks, as well as a dodge-assisted parry system, actually asks players to regularly mix up flashy techniques in order to cut down enemies and get the most nutritional parts of them, not unlike hunting. Feeding on these parts will more or less give you experience to then spend in the Cortex, which will unlock skills proportional to the stats your nourishment bolstered. Additionally, you can feed critters around the ship, causing them to befriend you, and even plant seeds that’ll grow into larger fruit-bearing organisms. Ultros‘ setting feels like an interconnected ecosystem that players need to constantly take into consideration when wondering about the best way forward, and considering what a different journey a friend of mine took at Day of the Devs, it sounds like a game prepared to reward you for precisely that.
Arco
As one of the two games on this list that come from a Latin-American team, I’ll admit there’s an immediate kinship I feel towards Arco. But on top of that, it also manages to be a fascinating little strategy game with adventure elements interspersed between encounters. As I delved into a dungeon of sorts, Arco allowed me to prod the environment for resources, puzzle solutions, and even tucked away secret rooms. At the end of my time there, I wound up doing battle with a mimic chest that exemplified why Arco is a game to keep an eye on. Battles occur from a birds eye view, at which point time freezes and the screen telegraphs the moves your foe will make and allow you to respond accordingly. When time resumes, you and your opponent will move in tandem, making the microdecisions you make in that pause all the more important. Will you rush in for an intercepting attack, dodge your way through an incoming move, or give yourself the space to come back in a subsequent turn? Sometimes, other enemies won’t necessarily adhere to the pause, forcing you to make even more panicked tactical decisions while putting out several fires. Importantly, Arco seemed to understand you can only throw so much at someone under these constraints before the fun of solving the puzzle gave way to frustration, and I’m looking forward to how the developers stretch that to make a game of really tightly paced fights.
Despelote
Despelote, the other half of the Latin-American equation I played at Day of the Devs, has been on my radar for a long time. A uniquely local story of the city of Quito in Ecuador and how the lives of everyone there changed around the country’s World Cup run in 2001, Despelote is everything I want out of bold new developers. After finally getting my hands on it at Day of the Devs, I’m proud to admit that I completely softlocked my demo and eventually passed the controller to a colleague, but not before drinking in the sights and sounds of Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena’s shared vision of Quito. Hearing Spanish being spoken by everyone in the game, kicking a soccer ball around, and making out the soft textures of the buildings that reminded me of the Dominican Republic made Despelote feel like an honest to goodness hug from an old friend. I’d like more games to feel this way.
Sorry We’re Closed
I did not succeed in my time with Sorry We’re Closed at Day of the Devs, and yet having gotten to play it at all feels like a tremendous win. Made mostly by two developers, Sorry We’re Closed is a remarkably stylish take on the survival horror of yore, specifically the prime of both Silent Hill and Resident Evil. After a literal demon slips into your apartment one night, you’re suddenly able to travel between worlds, one more demonic and rotten than the other. On the other side, you learn that you have the rare gift of your third eye, which lets you project an aura that shows glimpses of the normal world, and this ability soon becomes as potent a navigation tool as it is a weapon. Using your third eye around enemies stuns them and shows you their critical spots, allowing you to hit them for more damage. The tradeoff however is that if you aren’t accurate enough and hitting those spots dead on, you won’t do any damage at all. Pair that with a change in perspective—you go from third-person adventuring to first-person combat—and you’ve got the makings of an earnest set of mechanics that causes friction, lending even the most humble encounters in Sorry We’re Closed some tension.
Death The Guitar
Easily the most difficult game I played at Day of the Devs, Death The Guitar asks what if Hotline Miami were deeply metal? A 2D platformer that requires lightning fast reflexes, Death The Guitar drops you into the role of the aforementioned guitar, who’s avenging their guitarist one enemy at a time. Levels start out simply enough and your sole goal is to reach and eliminate your enemies before they take you out. Things get more complicated as you progress, with enemies eventually taking shots at you from afar, bombarding you with homing missiles, and hiding behind glass walls you must first blast through. But as they get more tools, so do you. Send yourself flying or knockback enemies by attacking platforms that look like amps, trigger other platforms to fall and crush wandering foes, and send waves of electricity through certain tiles to zap others to death. Using them all in tandem to get through increasingly hellish gauntlets in one piece quickly became a pastime I had some difficulty putting down.
Xenotilt
By the time I was done with my demo of Xenotilt, I turned to the onlookers behind me and audibly asked, “Does anybody else know what the fuck just happened?” Xenotilt, which lives up to its subtitle—”Hostile Pinball Action!—is almost like the 3D pinball games you remember playing and also nothing like them. Sure, you launch one pinball from the side and have your paddles but then suddenly boss characters straight out of a bullet hell or sh’mup game sometimes occupy a space on the cabinet. You could continue to launch one pinball at them and whittle them down, but why settle for that when you can instead fling something like nine pinballs at them due to a random powerup. At various points, I accidentally flung my ball high enough to ascend into another literal cabinet with even more things occurring on screen somehow. It is Pinball by way of Thumper, with all the trippy visuals and arcade violence one could possibly hope for. Xenotilt is in Early Access now and I cannot recommend enough that you pick it up and just experience its dizzying vision of Pinball for yourself. You can thank me later.
Crow Country
Survival-horror games are in the middle of a wonderful moment right now, and the independent scene wants in on it too. In comes Crow Country, made by a solo developer, which boasts in-game models and textures seemingly out of your favorite PS1 Final Fantasy title to stake a claim. When I think back to what made early horror games from that era so terrifying, it was almost the limitation of the hardware. The monsters and nightmares of the time could only be so explicitly horrific, and it was that ambiguity in their design that lent them so much terror. Crow Country, much like Signalis last year, taps into that, all the while dredging up the actual aesthetic and design choices (i.e fixed cameras) of one of gaming’s golden ages of horror in order to remind a new generation why it once worked so well. Thankfully, Crow Country mostly abandons tank controls, making for a significantly less bumpy ride to the scariest place on Earth.
Cryptmaster
The word to describe Cryptmaster is almost definitely “enigmatic.” A striking dungeon crawler with a haunting vibe and a dash of sarcasm, Cryptmaster drops you into the shoes of an undead party who must essentially relearn to live and embody their archetypal roles to get out. You accomplish this by deducing the functions of the tools you’ll find in chests and boxes, and typing them into your keyboard. Your main warrior Joro, for example, can attack if you type in “hit,” and Maz will reset cooldown timers on abilities with the command “yell.” You can gain letters in battle and through sheer experience, and according to the producer on hand, the sky’s the limit on the game’s vocabulary. My time with the game at Day of the Devs was short, but it was more than enough to convince me that Cryptmaster is worth keeping an eye on.
Holstin
Rounding out our trio of survival horror demos at Day of the Devs was Holstin, another perspective-changing title that managed to creep me out. Made by a Polish developer, and set in their backyard, my demo of Holstin was a bit of environmental puzzle-y goodness. All I needed from the house I was in was a set of blueprints, but everywhere I went, these tendrils connected to an “ooze” in the game blocked my way. Sensitivity to light proved to get rid of these tendrils, but that didn’t make the task of clearing the multiple rooms of the multiple floors any easier. I eventually wound up having to balance a limited inventory of fuses and lightbulbs to power different sides of the house, allowing me to satisfyingly untangle the secrets of this densely packed house. To make things even more unsettling, an unseen kid kept hiding in closets and giving me explicit directions on how to take on a “lady in white” who’d evidently scared them into hiding. While no lady in white ever wound up appearing, the promise of her kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. I already know Holstin‘s action feels great, but getting to see how deep the exploratory half of it could be left me frothing at the mouth for the next time I get a chance to unravel its mysteries.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad aboutra how that turned out.