Each year a panel of game industry experts grant free floor space at Penny Arcade Expo to ten indie games they deem worth of the attention.
This year the panel picked through 100 titles to settle on these 10, the PAX 10. Some might look familiar if you keep an eye on the indie scene, or saw this year’s Indie Game Challenge.
Word Fighter (iOS & Android) – Feel Every Yummy – A one-on-one word battling game that mixes rules from popular word games like Boggle and Scrabble and wraps them around a competitive fighting environment. Think “Street Fighter” meets “Words with Friends”, or word games mashed together with “Super Puzzle Fighter”.
Antichamber (PC) – Alexander Bruce – Journey through the depths within a non-Euclidean labyrinth where geometry and space follow unfamiliar rules, and many obstacles are a matter of perception. Players must create, destroy and manipulate matter in this mind-bending psychological exploration game.
Atom Zombie Smasher (PC, Mac, Linux) – Blendo Games – The zombie apocalypse is upon us! Take strategic command of mercenary forces to conduct massive rescue operations using military forces such as snipers, artillery crews, and orbital bombardments to hold back the undead while the civilians escape.
Fez (XBLA) – Polytron – Guide Gomez, a 2D creature, on a voyage of discovery into the mysterious third dimension. Change his perspective and look at the world in a different way.
Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony (PC) – Final Form Games – A neo-classical top-down shooter for up to 4 players set on 17th-century British Colonial Mars with a new twist on the genre. There are no shared pools of health or lives; so long as any player survives, the team can be brought back from death.
Snapshot (PC) – Retro Affect – Pic, a robot camera, can actually absorb objects into photographs, removing them from existence! By pasting pictures back into the world, captured objects – everything from doors, light, even copies of yourself – can be used to solve puzzles.
Solar 2 (PC) – Murudai – In this open-world, sandbox game set in an infinite abstract universe, players are the planets. Play constructively: grow your system, nurture life and attack enemy life in huge battles. Play destructively: crash into objects and cause chaos, use orbiting objects like wrecking balls and steal planets.
Splatters (PC) – SpikySnail – You play as a group of semi-suicidal, liquid filled Splatters that get their kicks by igniting in colourful confetti bombs of liquid. Crash into spikes, ride the slides, Air-Strike into bombs or do just any stunt-combo you can think of. With every new manoeuvre learned, each show becomes more spectacular.
Vanessa Saint-Pierre Delacroix & Her Nightmare (PC) – Bad Pilcrow – Standing between Vanessa and freedom are platforming mechanics. The twist? Her two-dimensional world lies on the surface of a three-dimensional cube, and players must rotate each face to find clever solutions to a wide variety of problems.
A Flipping Good Time (PC) – Digipen Institute of Technology – Players will have a flipping good time in this fast-paced free-flowing 2D platformer as they flip and fly through an expansive underground world using the fluid nature of gravity to avoid hazardous terrain.
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