Games
The highlights of the major gaming expo PAX West are from indie developers, demonstrating the talent ignored by major studios – and offering some hope for the future. By Katherine Cross.
Indie developers light up PAX West gaming expo
In the world of videogames, PAX – or Penny Arcade Expo – is a distinctive mix of sincere fandom and cynical marketing. These are dark days for videogaming, with nearly 23,000 jobs lost since the start of 2023, and it can feel as if things will never be the same. But hope blossoms in the cracks.
In the case of PAX, the smallest booths and the cheapest spaces on the expo hall floor usually have the most to say. Three forthcoming titles I saw at PAX West in Seattle this year, demoed in such modesty, made me feel a little better about the coming year in gaming. They’re also a reminder of the talent that major studios are ignoring in the name of squeezing out fractional profits or chasing generative AI fantasies.
It’s often observed that the future is much dumber than we were promised. Against all odds, Only By Midnight’s ctrl.alt.DEAL charms us with that fact. This fascinating game, which has a demo now available on Steam, is a bric-a-brac of genres, combining elements of visual novels, puzzle games and card-drafting games to tell the story of your character, SCOUT, a newly sapient AI that is trying to liberate itself from a cyberpunk megacorporation. The only way to do this is by making deals with the more metaphorical office drones: the humans.
In this turn-based game, you collect cards that allow you to deploy your various office AI powers, from brewing coffee and flushing toilets to turning lights on and off, in a bid to subtly influence the behaviour of specific office workers to be well-disposed towards you. Or each other. In the demo I played, an especially memorable encounter saw me resolve a feud between a human office worker and the office Roomba – a robotic vacuum cleaner (called a “Groomba”). I did so by using subliminal advertising to influence the Groomba so it learnt to love one of office worker Laura’s special interests: stairs. I was in stitches.
The game oozes a uniquely dark charm with its sly satires of office life and a retro-futuristic take on the actual future we were promised. In these times, it’s also a relief to return to sci-fi where AI isn’t the bad guy, despite the obvious preoccupations of our very real dystopia.
As a journalist at these events, you often wander the show floor in various states of exhaustion, caffeine highs and hunger, cramming in as many demos as possible before it closes and you hit the nearest bar. I generally like my demos short and sweet. But, like ctrl.alt.DEAL, I could have played Upstairs Games’ Possible One: Lunar Industries for hours.
Possible One is a lunar city-builder with a twist. The game’s creative director, Asaf Baitner, told me that it’s meant to focus on the most realistic aspects of building a lunar base. Less Star Trek and more For All Mankind mashed with SpaceX (minus the unintentionally combustible rockets), it allows you to create what amounts to an oil rig in space – a habitable, if spartan, platform that facilitates resource extraction.
The result is shockingly addictive and beautifully done. The score, by the legendary composer Inon Zur, adds to an ethereal, airless atmosphere that feels at once suffocating and engrossing. If you enjoy games such as Tropico, you’ll almost certainly love this. Possible One allows you to make staffing decisions as well, and follow the exploits of your various specialists – scientists and engineers, among others – as they perform an ever-expanding variety of tasks on your mining station.
In this game, you turn pitch-black Shackleton Crater at the moon’s south pole into a bustling, self-sufficient mining hub, first mining water and eventually metals. Your job is to keep it all going and growing. It is perhaps another bleak future – this is another look at the triumph of capitalism, after all – but it remains a damn fun infrastructure game. If the final product is as polished as this half-hour demo, this game might actually go to the moon. And back.
Montreal’s Folklore Games has programmed a testament to the human spirit with its just-released Spiral, now available on Steam. In this gorgeously rendered third-person narrative, you take on the role of Bernard Penfield, an elderly man whose memory is slowly failing him. How this is realised throughout the game is truly heartbreaking and remarkable – pastoral landscapes slowly (oh so slowly) fade away into broken, darkened islands in an endless, eventually starless, night.
For those who have struggled with the gradual loss of a loved one through the stages of cognitive decline, this game is an elegy, evoking the painterly verse of writers such as American poet Maggie Smith to explore the beautiful bones of loss.
The gameplay is like so many “walking simulator” games, where you poke around through the slowly accumulated matter that builds up a life: letters, drawings, diaries, keepsakes and tchotchkes. Sometimes you step inside the memories they represent, helping Bernard relive them in one form or another.
One of the most intriguing mechanics is that you can delay Bernard’s memory loss by exploring slowly. Speedrunners will be rewarded with more sadness, I suppose. But it’s an interesting way of making a will to remember and deliberation a diegetic force in this game. Like so much about Spiral, there’s an unpretentious beauty here. You’ll cry at things like a tabletop role-playing game or flying a kite, and wonder where all your time went.
I have to give some credit to one of the more impressive pavilions on the show floor: Infold Games’ Infinity Nikki, the latest and largest in the expanding Nikkiverse. The vast convention palace that showed off this game was well-attended and its sweet, aesthetically driven cosiness was an oasis in the busy convention. While all good RPGs are dress-up games, Nikki embraces this truth with glittering, gallantly girly gusto.
Speaking of city-builders, Pioneers of Pagonia, by Envision Entertainment, is fulfilling my desire for high-fantasy SimCity. With resource-gathering and manufacturing mechanics redolent of the Caesar series of games, Pioneers has as much to offer fans of spreadsheets as it does D&D nerds. It’s a gorgeous, oddly relaxing affair – and I find myself grateful that you can (and must) regrow the forests your workers chop down.
This year has been a bloodbath for the people who actually make the games we all enjoy. Conventions such as these are a reminder of why their work matters – the sheer joy you can see on attendees’ faces, or the nerdy revelry of musicians belting out ballads from Baldur’s Gate 3, or families dressed as their favourite characters. They’re also a reminder that, even in the industry’s darkest hour, great work can be done, especially outside the confines of corporate behemoths. The industry is down but not out. If these games are any indication, there’ll be a morning after.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 12, 2024 as "Lights in the dark".
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