Just ahead of the Game Awards, another showcase that typically coincides with the Summer Games Fest has dropped us some brand new indies and some new trailers for some great old ones for 11 years now.
It’s usually a place where they’ll highlight the devs of each game and show us how they do what they do, and it is generally pretty packed with content as well.
We’ve just gotten one in preparation for the Game Awards. It’s an hour-and-a-half-long presentation full of different indie titles that wouldn’t have gotten space in or around a big event otherwise.
Many of them are really exciting, great indies you might know and love, so let’s dive into every indie they’d shown at The Day of the Devs.
Day of the Devs Presentation At A Glance
I’ll cover everything this presentation had to offer in bullet-point style, so you can learn about each thing they’d shown and learn more about anything cool they’ve announced here.
I can’t cover everything here in excess detail as this is a pretty long presentation, but let’s get into the presentation at a glance.
- Oxenfree 2 takes up the entirety of the opening preshow, mainly filling the space with its trippy visuals and beautifully haunting piano music. I don’t think they’ve announced anything here; it was just a good opener.
- Militsioner is a psychedelic simulator where you play as an ordinary citizen in Russia, trying to escape after being wrongly convicted of a crime. It’s incredibly open-ended, letting you do whatever you wish, including befriending the giant police officer trying to grab you whenever you leave.
- Loose Leaf is a super in-depth tea brewing simulation where you carefully craft cups for your guests as you slowly unlock new ingredients and recipes to make the best cup of tea possible. You’re also a witch, reading tarot cards and talking to your guests with long conversations about witchcraft.
- Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a hand-drawn, super stylistic sidescroller and isometric exploration game where you play as a salesman, arriving in a quirky town to meet the mayor. Still, since you’re early, you might as well kill time and explore around, climbing up buildings or down in holes and getting up to shenanigans.
- Kind Words 2 (Lofi City Pop) is a sequel to the original game, which can be summed up as “listening to lo-fi while you vent to strangers,” and it’s a great time. This one has open exploration, letting you roam around a big town, whereas the first game kept you confined to your room the whole time. It also incorporates poetry, wish-making, and whatever else you want to write.
- Flock is a beautiful, open exploration game where you fly around as a leader of a flock of flying creatures, flying on your big bird, coming across a ton of natural wildlife, and maybe seeing your friends along the way. You fly around, try to charm new creatures into your flock, and work out what each animal is and how to charm them.
- Hermit and Pig is a quirky pixel-art RPG focused entirely on comedy and a dynamic between an old man and his pig. They get into a bunch of shenanigans with strange, aggressive creatures, and the game has a combat system similar to Undertale, where you have to time your attacks on a meter.
- Dome-King Cabbage is a visual novel that is sometimes done in a stop-motion animation style and then transitions to a 3D pixel art style after getting quirky and weird with all the concepts it introduces. This game is almost entirely made out of the dreams of the developer, a stressed teacher who’d often take naps in the supply closet, making something extremely trippy.
- Ultros is a Metroidvania focused on action combat with a nigh-undescribable, beautifully vibrant art style. It’ll have you exploring huge environments and using your weapons to combo enemies to death, with incredibly satisfying visual and sound design to back it up. There’s also a ton of different skills you can unlock, items to find, and enemies to fight, all wonderfully weird.
- Holstin is a game similar to Resident Evil 4, but in an isometric setting where you can go into close-up, behind-the-back camera view at any time, practically playing two different styles of horror game simultaneously. Every object looks carefully hand-drawn and is still rendered in 3D, letting you rotate and move the camera and change perspectives seamlessly.
- Oddada is a roguelite rhythm game where you experiment with different musical levels, instruments, and fun toys to mess around with and create songs. Each playthrough of the game gives you new, randomized levels to play and different unlocks, changing things up, like the temperature or tempo of each song.
- Cryptmaster is a puzzle game where you go through a monochrome dungeon full of terrible creatures and traps, all rendered in beautifully inked style, and you help out a dungeon master who needs you to spell out a word by the end of it all. It’s got a ton of different, wacky characters to find and a big crypt to solve.
- Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is an interactive historical art piece detailing the games and life of Jeff Minter, showing his life and the mind of the man who made a ton of games with giant Llamas in them and some of the more influential games throughout history, one of the most influential men in British gaming history.
- Drag Her! is a fighting game where you play as real-life Drag Queens, duking it out to find out who’s the best, with a hand-drawn style and fast, high-level fighting gameplay, an arcade mode, a 2v2 tag team mode, and everything you’d expect in a traditional fighting game of this style.
- Braid Anniversary Edition was announced quite a while back, and we’ve already covered it in detail. Still, it’s a remaster of the original game from years ago, with completely re-done, higher quality visuals, an in-depth developer commentary, and everything being remade entirely from the ground up.
- Open Roads is a game about exploring the countryside and your heritage with your mother, going across desolate environments and beautiful roads lined with trees, and exploring locations with history and life, ultimately exploring and visually focused.
- Janet Demornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch) is a somewhat comedic horror game where you dodge your landlord, trying to avoid paying your rent as you fix up your barely held-together apartment. Your room is held together by magic and duct tape, and since your Landlord is a witch, she’ll be pretty good at chasing you down.
- Home Safety Hotline has you taking the place of a home safety expert, taking people’s calls and learning about their tragic, horrific experiences over the phone on your 90’s desktop. You’ll have to piece together everything as you read through your emails, trying to learn about strange creatures and answer calls to the best of your abilities.
- Resistor is a racing RPG where you can customize your character, race across the wasteland with a turbo-charged car, and try to win while flying across massive tracks and jet-boost past your opponents to win, leveling up and getting upgrades, and walking on foot across huge cities to do sidequests and talk to everyone you can find.
- The Mermaids Tongue is a new game from the team behind Snipperclips, this time it’s a murder mystery detective game where you explore these lovely hand-drawn locations, like a shady town with an ominous green light or a submarine at the bottom of the ocean and you point-and-click your way to cracking the case on this mystery, similar to Ace Attorney.
- Nirvana Noir is an adventure game with a distinct 1950s vibe and a beautiful hand-drawn, limited-color aesthetic. You’re exploring these cities, trying to live both your lives, playing the detective as you read between what people tell you, and following leads by clicking through each bit of evidence you can access.
After that, the showcase wraps up with a trailer for Vampire Survivors, its new crossover with Among Us, and a sizzle reel of every game that’ll be at the physical, in-person Day of the Devs showcase at the Game Awards.
This includes 1000xResist, Aikode, Antonblast, Arco, Art is Rifle, Bits & Bops, Combo Devils, Crow Country, Crowsworn, Death The Guitar, Despelote, Echo of the Waves, Give Me Toilet Paper, Go Mecha Ball, Horses, Judero, Last Time I Saw You, Leximan, Mars After Midnight, Nyaaaanvy, Oberty, Simpler Times, Sophia the Traveler, Sorry We’re Closed, Sulfur, Two Strikes, Valley Peaks, Whisker Squadron: Survivor, and Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action, as well as every previous game.
Further Reading
If you want to hear more about the best new games coming from the indie scene, stay tuned for more!
Braid Reborn: This Indie Classic Anniversary Edition Hits PC Consoles in April
Vampire Survivors 1.8.0 Adventure Update Introduces Story Mode
Indie Horror Showcase 2023 Wrap-Up – Everything Announced
- Penny’s Big Breakaway Review – A Swing and a Miss - February 27, 2024
- Ultros Review – Psychedelics with Substance - February 17, 2024
- Amazing Indie Games With Huge Campaigns - January 30, 2024