The Best Games We Played At PAX East 2024
The videogame industry is not doing great at the moment. Rampant layoffs continue, particularly at irresponsibly run holdings companies (apparently, devs call this effect getting “Embracer-ed”). In some ways, this was felt on the show floor at this year’s PAX East, as the bigger publishers were largely absent, possibly to reduce spending. It also didn’t help that this year’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) overlapped with the show, a fact seen in many a bleary-eyed PR rep forced to hop from one coast to the next.
But despite all this, PAX East 2024 still had an overwhelming number of interesting games. There were so many that even if you were to frantically rush between booths in an attempt to play them all, you still wouldn’t even come close to getting hands-on with everything worth seeing. I know this because that is what I did for much of the show, and as a result, I saw quite a bit of what the convention had to offer. These 10 stood out to me the most and are now safely tucked away on my Steam wishlist.
My Familiar
Fans of independently-produced turn-based RPGs continue to feast, and the latest course in the buffet is the colorful My Familiar. You play as a kid who, in the words of one of its creators, gets “isekai-ed” after getting hucked from a window. After meeting this grisly end, they’re reborn in a world full of talking animals who look like they crawled out of a back alley on Sesame Street. The only way back home is to climb a mountain that hasn’t been scaled in ages; a journey made tougher because the oppressive powers keep others from scaling its heights. Colorful pixel art and ‘90s-infused weirdness combine with witty writing to produce something similar but distinct from AlphaDream’s Mario & Luigi series. Just like those games, this one uses timing mechanics during turn-based encounters, allowing you to deal additional damage if you land your input at the right moment. A nice twist on this is that depending on how precise you are, you’ll receive different stages of damage multipliers, much like a rhythm game. You can also utilize special attacks that expend SP (the equivalent to mana in other RPGs), which is frequently worth doing because these moves deal additional damage and can sometimes even bump foes back in the turn order. Tying it all together is a general visual flair embodied in the flashy UI, creative sprites, and specificity of this dream world, demonstrating a level of polish that’s unusual for this kind of show floor demo. Oh, and according to the dev I talked to, it won’t be a million hours long (instead, it will be somewhere in the 15-20 hours range), making it a nice alternative to the massive time-sucks that usually define the genre.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
Sometimes, it only takes a minute or two of moving around in a game to suspect it will rule. That was very much my experience with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, a top-down action-adventure title that at least partially follows in the footsteps of the old-school Legend of Zelda. But instead of being armed with a trusty Master Sword, you wield a hyper-powered yoyo, a tool that lets you zoom through these screens with freeform fluidity. You can do normal videogame things like jump or parry, but the yoyo is what makes things novel. It can be used to Walk the Dog and propel yourself forward, latch onto surfaces, boost off of terrain, and give baddies the beat down. Most impressively, these movements can be chained together, letting you knock into a wall and change your angle mid-air to fly over a chasm. When it comes to battles, there’s an equal number of moves at your disposal, but my personal favorite is how you can bounce the yoyo off corners to extend its range, each deflection punctuated by an ascending pinball-like chirp as it smacks into foes on the other side of the map (this is very satisfying). The world is laid out in a somewhat open-ended fashion, meaning you frequently have multiple paths to explore at the same time, which is something you’ll want to do so you can test out the previously mentioned techniques. Visually, Pipistrello is deeply inspired by the blocky sprites of Game Boy Advance releases, sporting colorful pixel art and a particular animation style that reminds me of that handheld in the best way possible. I knew nothing about this one going into the convention, but its yoyo platforming has more than caught my attention, placing it near the top of my most anticipated list.
Sorry We’re Closed
We all have a type, and mine happens to be games styled after fixed-camera angle survival horror of the mid-’90s to early 2000s. Sorry We’re Closed very much falls into this camp. But even accounting for this bias, the game feels like it’s offering a fresh spin on this premise. The boldness of its look is the first thing that caught my eye, and the colorful fashion designer fits inspired by queer culture contrast with the harsh browns of rusting metal, resulting in a mixture of industrial grime and neon. You play as Michelle, a woman still reeling from a breakup with her ex-girlfriend, who’s cursed by a demon and forced to travel into a world of giant rats and cleaver-dragging monsters. While its fixed camera angles deliver all the juicy claustrophobia and striking framing you would want from this presentation, an interesting departure from many of these older titles is that things shift to first-person when you take a combat stance. You also have an ability called the Third Eye, which can stun opposing creatures and expose their weak points. Although all this sounds empowering, the Third Eye can only be activated point blank, meaning you’re incentivized to get up close and personal with hideous foes as you frantically try to land an attack before they recover from being stunned. Unrelenting sound design adds to the scares, as scraping, scratching, and footsteps make you feel stalked from all sides. Thankfully, you get occasional reprieves from this anxiety in the form of time outside the demon world, which shines thanks to some sharp dialogue and characterization that conveys our protagonist’s relationship problems. While there are plenty of survival horror throwbacks these days, Sorry We’re Closed’s norm-defying spin distinguishes it from the pack and has made me eager to see more.
Memory’s Reach
While Metroid-mania has swept across the indie space and created a boom of 2D platformers about collecting items that allow you to traverse deeper into labyrinthine spaces, few, if any, seem to lift from Metroid Prime specifically. Memory’s Reach, a first-person experience where you explore a 3D space, looks to fill this gap, letting you piece together the secrets of an abandoned alien world. However, instead of mimicking Samus Aran and her xeno-blasting tendencies, this experience is entirely focused on solving puzzles, and from what I played, these were appropriately clever. First, I had to align glowing circuity on holographic panels, a process that had me scratching my chin before everything snapped into place. Then, things took on even more complexity as I maneuvered to the exit, using elevators and floating blocks in a correct sequence to make my escape. This exploration was marked with a fitting sense of otherness, as mysterious architecture and scannable terrain offered clues about this far-flung setting. There’s nothing new under the sun, but it’s always cool when a developer riffs on a weirdly underutilized format (in this case, 3D Metroid), and Memory’s Reach’s emphasis on flexing your brain instead of a trigger finger helps differentiate it from its point of inspiration.
Fraymakers
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