Earlier this month, PAX West 2023 was well attended by an international cast of game developers and publishers. And as usual, the show was a big draw for the Pacific Northwest’s ample development scene.
Some of the biggest players in video games, like Sony and Microsoft, once again skipped the show, and Nintendo was effectively self-quarantined behind its separate Nintendo Live event in the Arch.
It was a great show for indies, however, with teams from Washington state, Oregon and Vancouver, B.C., all turning out. Washington is the second biggest state in the U.S. for video game production, and PAX is effectively its hometown show.
Read on for a recap of some notable titles and other news of interest out of PAX:
The highest-profile local game at PAX this year might’ve been Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive, which made a big public debut at the PlayStation Showcase back in June.
It had an open demo at PAX, and as weird as you might think the game is from a trailer, it’s weirder in play. Pacific Drive is set in the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a version of the rural PNW that’s undergone some unexplained disaster.
You’re trying to navigate the Zone in your old rust bucket station wagon in order to figure out what’s happened here. That splits your focus between keeping your car running, with whatever parts you can find, make, or steal, and trying to find your way through the impersonal, constant hostility of the Zone. I left my car for a minute to pick up some vital materials, and a UFO immediately tried to steal it.
It’s not as simple as the usual video game post-apocalypse where a bunch of Mad Max rejects are trying to shoot you. The Olympic Exclusion Zone simply wants you gone, and is willing to violate as many laws of physics as necessary to get you out.
Imagine the most surreal late-night road trip you’ve ever taken, then double it. That’s Pacific Drive. It’s due out later this year as a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5.
On the other end of the spectrum, three locally made games made it into this year’s PAX Rising showcase, and one of them has been on my radar for a while. Spirit Swap: Lo-Fi Beats to Match-3 To is a colorful, musical puzzle game from Soft Not Weak, a worker-owned studio that’s split between Washington and Oregon.
“It was important for us to show joy,” Réjon Taylor-Foster, the game’s UI/UX lead, told me at PAX. Spirit Swap features a diverse cast of characters who are all comfortable in their own skins, with low-stakes conflicts — a bad breakup, a miscommunication — that don’t define their lives.
In the meantime, they all help spirits find their way back home, as performed via a head-to-head match-3 game. You can dispel spirits by arranging them in rows of three or more, as well as use your characters’ unique spells to tip the scales in a close match.
More than anything else, Spirit Swap reminds me of small-press comic books or webcomics. In motion and in play, it feels like its creators made it for themselves more than anyone else, out of a little of all the things they love. It’s not desperately trying to find an audience; it’s just here, and if you like it, that’s cool.
The best of the rest
Counting the Seattle Indies Expo (which is going to have to get its own story), there are usually around 50 locally made games at PAX in any given year. This can range from explicit nostalgia grabs to expensive mainstream productions to incredibly niche indie productions. If there’s one thing PAX always highlights, it’s how much is really going on in the games industry if you’re willing to take even one step away from the mainstream.
Here’s the rest of what I saw at this year’s show, live from the Seattle Convention Center’s expo hall. (Not counting Galvanic’s Wizard With a Gun, which was simply too popular to get anywhere near on all four days of the show.)
A Corgi’s Cozy Hike — Scalisco Games, Seattle
“We saw Candy Crush make so much money,” Daniel Scalise told me, “but where did it all go?”
That led Scalise and his partner Johnson Do to found Scalisco Games, which makes games in order to support Seattle-area animal shelters.
They were at PAX to promote the Kickstarter for their third project, A Corgi’s Cozy Hike, a non-violent, “bite-sized” adventure about a dog that’s out to climb a mountain despite its stubby lil’ legs.
Twenty percent of the money that Scalisco raised via selling merch at its PAX booth will be donated to Dog Gone Seattle.
Another Crab’s Treasure — Aggro Crab, Seattle
The Seattle-based creators behind Subway Midnight and Going Under are back next year with Another Crab’s Treasure, an action game set on the ocean floor. You’re a hermit crab who’s lost your shell. In order to raise the funds to buy a new one, you’ll head out into the hostile regions for salvage, fight sea creatures, and fashion temporary new shells out of whatever you can find.
Aggro Crab’s setting new standards for user accessibility with ACT, but the memory I took away from the PAX demo is a gut punch. ACT has the animation style and color palette of a children’s cartoon, but the tough-but-fair difficulty of an Elden Ring. More to the point, it’s explicitly set in the aftermath of human pollution.
Your crab will use bottle caps and soda cans as a shell, smash through abandoned bottles, and gather microplastics for use as currency. It didn’t hit me just how dystopian this setting really was until a couple of minutes after the demo was over.
Black Jackal — Bad Galaxy Games LLC, Seattle, Wash.
In Black Jackal, you’re the new guy on a crew of salvage specialists, who earn a living on the fringes of spacefaring society by piloting a drone into wrecked starships. While you’re there, grab valuables, dodge security systems, and don’t get caught.
This is the debut project by solo dev Cole Gehlen, a former software engineer at Amazon, who built it out of several of his failed past projects. Black Jackal is a relatively hard science-fiction game that also takes a few satirical potshots at corporate doublespeak and bureaucracies.
“Ships don’t fail in stable situations,” Gehlen told me. “If a spaceship’s organization fails, you all die.”
Black Jackal was one of the three PNW-made games to be included in this year’s PAX Rising showcase. Gehlen is currently looking for a publishing partner.
Clam Man 2: Headliner — Sideby Interactive, Vancouver, B.C.
Solo dev Martin Hanses describes his narrative RPG Clam Man 2 as a game “about what happens when you get everything you wanted and you’re still not happy.” Hanses, who directed last year’s Tails: The Backbone Preludes for Vancouver, B.C.-based Eggnut, is the solo developer on Clam Man 2.
You play as an office worker who discovers there’s a new comedy club being run out of his workplace’s first floor, which leads him to try his hand at stand-up. In the spirit of the recent indie hit Disco Elysium, Clam Man 2 does not feature any combat to speak of. Instead, it’s about the choices you make while you play, and how those change the overall experience. No two players will see the same version of Clam Man 2.
Fae Farm — Phoenix Labs, Vancouver, B.C.
Phoenix Labs’ follow-up to its monster-hunting multiplayer game Dauntless is a relatively non-violent “cozy” farming game, where you and up to three friends start new lives as homesteaders on the magical island of Azoria.
You can take up a role as a peaceful farmer, or if you’d prefer, go on an adventure to investigate the strange forces that are penned up inside the island’s mining tunnels. There’s probably more to Azoria than meets the eye, but you can completely ignore all that mystery drama in favor of peacefully growing turnips and raising livestock.
Described to me at PAX as a passion project for Phoenix’s leaders, Fae Farm launched on Steam and the Switch on Sept. 8.
Journey to Foundation — Archiact, Vancouver, B.C.
The latest project from the makers of 2018’s Evasion is an open-ended, choice-based VR action game based on the Foundation series by Golden Age sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, but is “doing its own thing” compared to the recent HBO TV adaptation.
Its executive producer, Ken Thain, spent 11 years at Bioware working on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, and describes virtual reality as “the next level of storytelling, puzzles, and combat.” Journey isn’t a simple shooter, but instead, is a full choice-based narrative RPG in VR.
Set almost 200 years into the Foundation timeline, you play Journey as Ward, a secret agent in the Galactic Empire. You’re initially out to rescue a kidnap victim, but end up in the middle of a conflict between the Empire and the nascent Foundation, and can choose which side to take. Journey to Foundation is due out later this year on Quest 2, PSVR2, and Pico.
Leaf Blower Man — Unbound Creations, Seattle
The small indie team behind games like Headliner and Rain on Your Parade hit both the PAX Rising showcase and Seattle Indies Expo this year with two separate projects, both of which continue the company’s theme of games about being “adorable jerks.”
In Leaf Blower Man, inspired by creative director Jakub Kasztalski’s experience with obnoxious neighbors, you get to rampage across formerly peaceful neighborhoods with a gas-powered leaf blower. You earn points based on how obnoxious you are and how much destruction you can cause, including a stage where you disrupt a town meeting about how they need to ban leaf blowers like yours.
Mirthwood — Bad Ridge Games, Seattle
Described by its developers, Brian Hecox and Daron Otis, as “cozy but not too cozy,” Mirthwood puts you in the role of a war refugee who’s arrived on a smaller continent to start over. That includes starting your own farm, building a house, and other farming-sim staples.
The big difference between Mirthwood and other “cozy” farming games at PAX is largely down to tone. It’s a sort of dark medieval pastiche — the name is intended to be ironic — that takes inspiration from games like The Witcher and Fable. Even in the PAX demo, Mirthwood feels like your character’s fresh start is hanging by a thread, with new dangers and mysteries at every turn.
Rift of the NecroDancer — Brace Yourself Games, Vancouver, B.C.
Back in 2015, Ryan Clark’s Brace Yourself Games got on the game industry’s radar with Crypt of the NecroDancer, which uniquely combined a dungeon crawler with a rhythm game. Since then, BYG has diversified into other projects, including the 2019 spinoff/crossover Cadence of Hyrule, and begun a new business as an indie games publisher.
With Rift of the NecroDancer, BYG goes full rhythm game, as well as moving its setting to the modern day. You’re still fighting monsters to the beat, but also have to make time for your friendships and your surprisingly demanding yoga class. Like Crypt and Cadence before it, Rift‘s soundtrack features a couple of new tracks from Seattle-based musician Danny Baranowsky.
Rivals 2 — Aether Studio, Seattle
Since its founding in 2021, Washington’s Aether Studio has been working on a follow-up to founder Dan Fornace’s “platform fighter” Rivals of Aether. That follow-up was playable at PAX, alongside the announcement of its brand-new, story-based single-player mode, which will be released one chapter at a time after the game’s release in late 2024.
Rivals 2 is being built in Unreal, and features new mechanics like grabs and shields that weren’t possible with the original game’s pixel art. Fornace told me at PAX that the company’s plan involves continuing to expand the Aether universe with spin-offs like this year’s Dungeons of Aether, in order to bring Aether‘s universe up to par with long-running franchises like Street Fighter.
Long-term, though, Fornace’s ambitions are simple: “We want to take Rivals 2 to the main stage at [the Evolution Championship Series],” the largest professional fighting-game tournament in North America.
Wild Country — Lost Native, Portland, Ore.
Made in Portland by a crew of transplants from the U.K., Wild Country is a competitive strategy deck-building game where you try to build a better city than your opponent. The old mayor is retiring, and the potential successors must determine who’ll replace him through an elaborate competition.
Lost Native describes itself as making “approachable games for adventurous minds.” More specifically, its CEO Becky Matthew told me that what Lost Native does is to try and “Nintendify” its projects, in order to make potentially complicated rules simple and approachable. A lot of companies would make a city-building card game intensely complex, but Wild Country is less complicated than it looks. It’s like if Mad Men got recast with characters from Winnie the Pooh.
Returning projects
Perhaps the biggest story for regionally made games at PAX was the surprise reappearance of the Seattle-set horror RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.
Originally announced in 2019 as a horror RPG from Seattle’s Hardsuit Labs, Vampire publisher Paradox Interactive subsequently parted ways with Hardsuit in 2021. Bloodlines 2 has been running dark ever since, with many fans convinced the game had simply been quietly canceled.
On Sept. 2, Paradox announced the new developer on Bloodlines 2 was U.K.-based studio The Chinese Room (Dear Esther, the forthcoming Still Wakes the Deep), and is aiming at a 2024 release. Players will take the role of an elder vampire who wakes in 2024 during a once-a-century snowstorm, who must navigate both the confusing modern world and the cutthroat occult politics of Seattle.
Other PNW news out of this year’s PAX included:
- Redmond, Wash.-based Studio Kumiho announced that it’s signed a deal with Los Angeles publisher PM Studios to bring its RPG Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game to digital storefronts in 2024. Cricket, an Earthbound-influenced story about a kid on an adventure to reach the moon, has been a regular exhibition at PAX West since 2021.
- Similarly, Seattle’s Unwound Games will publish its slightly-less-cozy-than-most farming game Echoes of the Plum Grove through remote-first indie label Freedom Games. Echoes exhibited at both Emerald City Comic Con and the Seattle Indies Expo in 2022. It was also one of the 13 games in Freedom’s showcase at this year’s MIX Next show at Block 41 on Sept. 1.
- Seattle cartoonist Phil Foglio was at PAX during the mornings of the show to celebrate the launch of Girl Genius, a new adventure game based upon Foglio’s webcomic of the same name. The game, Adventures in Castle Heterodyne, was released on Sept. 5 on Steam and GOG.
- Vancouver, B.C.-based indie developer Max Trest announced on Sept. 6 that his indie game Astrolander will be exclusive to the PlayStation 5, following a meeting Trest had last year with Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida. Trest, 13, began exhibiting Astrolander at several events in 2022.
- 30XX was at PAX to celebrate both its Sept. 1 release on Switch and its recent departure from Steam Early Access. Developed in Seattle by Batterystaple Games, 30XX is a procedurally generated action game that pays homage to Capcom’s Mega Man X series. Now in 1.0, it comes with a level designer, as well as two new stages and a proper finale. According to lead developer Chris King, sales on 30XX are strong, and Batterystaple plans to continue supporting the game “as long as we aren’t wasting money to do so.”
- Festive Vector’s Sail Forth was selected for this year’s PAX Rising showcase, after its full release late last year. It’s preparing to release a major free update that, according to project lead David Evans, will remove all of the game’s loading screens, which allows players to explore its oceans as a true open world.
- Portland-based Doinksoft was at the Devolver booth to announce the official launch date for its pixel-art “noirpunk” action-adventure Gunbrella, which hit digital storefronts on Sept. 13.
