SXSW Sydney 2024: 10 Exciting Games You Can Play At This Year’s Festival

SXSW Sydney is starting to roll out announcements around its 2024 Games festival. The revolving 2023 indie showcase was one of the entire festival’s great highlights and it’s great to know that it will return this year. The way the showcase worked last year was that it would change over twice a day — you could visit the Grand Central Mercure in the morning and play a raft of indie games from Australia and around the world. The show would close for a couple of hours in the late afternoon and open again with a completely different group of indies in the evening.

And now we know what the first ten titles making their way to the show this year will be. Some of them, like Hyper Light Breaker and Mystiques, might be familiar to you. Others will likely be entirely new. All of them, I am confident, will go extremely hard.

Here’s the full list of games coming to SXSW Sydney 2024, straight from the SXSW newswire:

• Blood Reaver (Hell Byte Games, Australia) | A dark fantasy, wave-based, first-person shooter where you play as ‘The Nameless Blood Reaver,’ a member of an ancient order. It is your duty to prevent demonic uprisings across the world while uncovering the cause of the unholy scourge. Use a combination of blood magic abilities and lethal weaponry to take on hordes of endless demons in a variety of locations spread throughout the world.
• Curiosmos (Céline and the Darlings, Belgium) | Curiosmos is a cute and playful space adventure through the solar system and the wonders of the cosmos. Create your own friendly planets from stardust and give them gravity. Jump from orbit to the planet surface to play with the terrain and atmosphere to create different planetary circumstances. Curio your satellite companion will hand you missions and will give you rewards to play with in return. Encounter all sorts of fascinating phenomena and uncover the secrets of the universe!
• Demon Spore (DinoBoss, UK) | Demon Spore is an intense action rogue-like inspired by 80s monster movies where you have to blast your way through tentacle hell as a failed lab experiment gives birth to a rapidly growing viral horror. Use the lab to your advantage and improvise a desperate escape plan before this deadly organism spreads out of control.
• DICEOMANCER (Ultra Piggy Studio, China) | DICEOMANCER is a roguelike deck-building game. Despite aspiring to live a peaceful life, fate forced you to embark on an adventure. Make the most of your deck and dice in a world filled with swords, magic, and guns, all to restore the tranquility you once knew!
• FRUITBUS (Krillbite Studio, Norway) | A journey of flavors and friendships awaits you in your cozy, customisable food truck! Forage for fresh ingredients to create your own menu, then feed tummies and souls with home-cooked meals. Fruitbus is a cute first-person culinary adventure, set in an open world where taste is everything. Change the world, one apple at a time!
• Hyper Light Breaker (Heart Machine, USA) | Enter the Overgrowth, a new land in the world of Hyper Light. Play alone or with friends to explore massive biomes, defeat brutal monsters, create new builds, survive the mysterious Crowns and overthrow the almighty Abyss King in this adventure from the creators of Hyper Light Drifter.
• Mystiques (Lemonade Games, Australia) | A haunted exploration game about four horrible women, Gem, Aspen, Winnie and Barb, who try to save a failing antique store by adopting a new business strategy: developing psychic powers.
• No Case Should Remain Unsolved (Somi, South Korea) | No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a detective game where players uncover and piece together memory fragments to solve a long-forgotten case. Follow former police detective Jeon Gyeong as she acquires clues and testimony relating to the case of a missing girl. But with each uncovered memory, only one thing becomes clear: everyone in Seowon’s vicinity was lying.
• Rose and Locket (Whistling Wizard, New Zealand) | Rose, a former outlaw, travels through the spirit realm of the Underwest. Take up the once-forgotten skills of the gunslinger in this Action-Platformer adventure, and journey along the breathtaking landscapes on a quest to rescue your daughter’s spirit.
• Window Garden (CLOVER-FI Games, Philippines) | Window Garden is a cozy game that allows you to create and decorate your own virtual indoor garden. With aesthetic cottagecore and wholesome gameplay, learn how to grow plants, succulents, fruits, and vegetables, mirroring realistic gardening experiences.Set the sleep timer and take in the peaceful decoration of your virtual garden while you listen to calming sounds for sleep, work, or study.

I confess, I spent less time than I would have liked there last year, mostly due to the decision to hold SXSW in the heart of the nation’s most deep-fried road network and my being overly booked and busy. I intend to fix this this year—I will be bolting myself to the Grand Central Mercure and refusing to budge until I’ve played everything.

Image: Heart Machine, Lemonade Games, Kotaku Australia