BitSummit 2023 is a showcase of Japanese indie developers that’s been a bit of a sleeper hit for great indies over the last few years, and this year will be no different. Starting on July 14th at 6:00 PM PT or 9:00 PM ET, the event boasts a long lineup of presenters to showcase a bunch of new indies, all from Japanese game developers.
DANGEN Entertainment is one of the names on the extensive list of indie publishers and developers set to reveal things around the time of the BitSummit 2023 event. Having published games like Bug Fables and OneShot, they’ve revealed three new games 48 hours ahead of the main event, which will be streamed live at https://www.twitch.tv/bitsummit.
Pry Into The Void
Here’s a look at the first of three trailers they dropped today.
Developed by Ernest Placido, this trailer showcases some excellent metal music, scoring footage of a new “Bleak Monster-Taming RPG” that closely resembles the Shin Megami Tensei series by Atlus.
In this footage, we see snippets of the retro-style overworld gameplay and the battles involving four party members fighting a single foe.
You can get these enemies to join your party, like Shin Megami Tensei or Pokemon. This seems like it’s inspired by the former series, with the overall aesthetic and vibe of the game being extremely dark and gloomy, with its anime-inspired visuals and having to converse and negotiate with the monsters to recruit them into your party.
While much of this trailer is cryptic and unclear to match the Shin Megami Tensei games’ general theming, the description of the game promises a bleak and depraved story, as well as an extra difficulty mode inspired by Pokemon Nuzlockes and a soundtrack by Jun Mitsui, who primarily does metal covers of music from anime and video games. An excellent lineup of features overall.
RoadOut
Another game announced by DANGEN today is RoadOut, which looks similar to games such as Hotline Miami or the older GTA games.
It features some overworld car driving gameplay, where you can go to structures and play the game from a more top-down perspective, which looks similar to that of Enter the Gungeon.
The trailer gives the impression that this is a post-apocalyptic wasteland setting where you’ll have to fight and scavenge locations to survive, even using your car to shoot down or race others in the streets.
It’s going for a similar 80’s synth-wave aesthetic to that of Hotline Miami, with gameplay that significantly resembles the older GTA titles.
The game promises crafting for new moves, weapons, and drugs, character upgrades in body mods or cybernetics, and an entire skill tree. Everything in this game seems progressive and upgradeable, meaning you’ll have to explore the dangerous wastelands to survive and scavenge for new materials.
Umami Grove
The final game announced by DANGEN Entertainment today is a VR cooking and exploration title. It looks inspired by the calmer parts of Breath of the Wild for its exploration aspects while having an intricate cooking system where you need to cut, buy, and cook all of your ingredients by hand rather than just throwing them in a pot.
It’s currently Steam exclusive and has many creatures you’ll have to cook meals for, similar to the gameplay of Bugsnax but with less hunting and more foraging.
We can see that things like trees are climbable by jumping up and grabbing your ingredients, and you can get a pickaxe later to help you scale large mountains for mushrooms.
It’s one of the more content-rich VR and cooking titles. It promises an extensive cast of characters, a ton of recipes, and a robust physics engine that requires you to get (literally) hands-on with the ingredients and do puzzles or challenges by using the environment around you and your few abilities, which all seem incredibly ambitious.
Overall, despite the fact BitSummit 2023 hasn’t even started yet, DANGEN Entertainment has shown some up-and-coming and exciting titles that any fan of creature-collecting RPGs, Apocalypse survival and driving games, or cozy cooking and exploration games should look into whenever they release.
Further Reading
You’ll find more coverage of these titles here when they release, but while you’re here, check out some of these great articles about other indies:
Cult of the Lamb Interview: A Chat with Massive Monster
One Lonely Outpost Review: A Little Too Lonely Up There
Streamer Asmongold’ Blows Up’ Indie Gem Halls of Torment
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