Staff – November 19, 2019 at 9:17 AM
We live in a marvelous age for gaming. Independent game dev studios have more opportunities than ever to share their creative vision with the world, and it shows: The indie games marketplace is replete with ambitious titles that range from quick, experimental oddities to fully featured, day-absorbing epics. Here are a few of our current favorites.
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is a game where you can nod your head until you die. There’s a moment while talking to your in-game partner, Kim Katusragi, when you can choose to either append the conversation with a new piece of information or simply nod solemnly. When Kim ups the ante with his own nodding, you can choose to keep nodding … and keep nodding, and keep nodding, until the game informs you that you’ve nodded so much you’ve taken damage.
Such moments are the bread and butter of Disco Elysium, a self-described “detective RPG” that’s heavy on dialogue and meaningful consequences for your actions. Set in the fictional, poverty-stricken city of Revachol, the game puts you in the shoes of a hungover detective that’s essentially yours for the shaping. While stats broadly help determine what actions you can and cannot take, it’s the individual, situational choices you make that ultimately further your character development. Whether you want to be a highly perceptive and thoroughly unempathetic cop or a karaoke-loving artist who shies away from violence, Disco Elysium’s freedom and open-endedness surprise at every turn.
Hades
Hades is a roguelite action game and the latest title by Supergiant, the game dev studio behind Bastion and Transistor. It follows Zagreus, son of Hades, as he attempts to make his way to Mt. Olympus. In order to do so, he’ll have to defeat wave after wave of hostile denizens of the underworld.
Fortunately, combat is a joy in Hades. While Zagreus starts with three attack commands — a primary weapon, a special attack, and a magic spells — each of them can be upgraded and modified by “boons,” gifts from Greek gods who want to help Zagreus reach Mt. Olympus. Each of these individual boons encourage different playstyles; Athena’s boon bestows Zagreus with defensive abilities, for instance, while Zeus’ boon grants Zagreus’ attacks lightning that chains from one enemy to another. The result is a fact-paced and inventive roguelite that rewards quick thinking and resourcefulness.
Lost Ember
The beautiful, natural environment of Lost Ember is bereft of one noticeable feature: any trace of living people. Instead, the player switches perspectives across a diverse cast of animal characters, from wombats to moles to armadillos to the game’s primary character, a wolf that was once human.
Every animal in Lost Ember moves differently, and transitions between them are seamless; in a single, elegant motion, you might inhabit a fish and swim through an underground passage only to emerge from the water as a bird, soaring across a vast lake. In many ways, Lost Ember’s player character is the wilderness itself, capturing the fluidity and grace of its animals’ movements.
Super Impossible Road
Racing game Super Impossible Road’s official tagline is “Winning is cheating.” When they refer to cheating, they don’t mean breaking the game’s physical boundaries or using bots; they mean pushing the limits of what their levels can allow players to do. Try a race and you’ll see what they mean; to win in Super Impossible Road, you’ll probably have to jump off the track, flying through the air at a high velocity, soaring above your helpless opponents — fingers crossed in the hopes that you’ll land back on the road.
Super Impossible Road is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat at all times. Its narrow, downward spiraling tracks are so punishing and challenging to navigate that you’ll find yourself improvising much of your adrenaline-fueled descent to the finish line. In lieu of racecars, players select from a roster of “wheels,” spherical racers with different sets of stats that govern things like “steering” and “bounce damping.” But in order to truly succeed, you’ll have to take big risks; the game readily rewards you for them. So when you’ve got the urge to swerve off the beaten path and “cheat” your way to the finish line, remember: Super Impossible Road wants to see you try.
Undead Horde
One by one, the warriors fall to your army, a boisterous cloud of angry, undead chickens. As they drown under a sea of feathers, each warrior takes their final breath — only to awaken again as a zombie under your control.
Undead Horde puts you in the shoes of a necromancer who can build whole armies out of the enemies they slay. Re-animating the corpses of the fallen is (in a way, literally) the name of the game; as you become a more adept necromancer, you’re granted the ability to command a larger and larger quantity or more and more powerful troops, who can range from people to bears to orcs to — of course — chickens. Though the game sports a large amount of RPG-style customization and loot-collecting, its most joyful moments are always in watching your army of minions storm a stronghold with the click of your mouse, sending its every tower crumbling to the ground.
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened
Chromatic Games’ Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is the series doing what it does best: Blurring the lines between the tower defense and action-RPG genres to create a game format with a unique rhythm and unconventional approach to tower defense strategy. This time around, Chromatic Games used Unreal Engine 4 to develop the game, meaning much more richly detailed environments than the previous games in the series.
Players begin Dungeon Defenders: Awakened by placing defenses around maps that they navigate in the third person via their characters. Once waves of enemies start making their way into the map, players take to the ground to defeat enemies with their special abilities and help bolster their defences. Best of all, Dungeon Defenders: Awakened’s multiplayer mode lets you design dungeons with up to three other friends.
