E3 2017: Best indie games

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      I’ll confess that there’s never enough time to properly look at all the independently developed games that have a presence at E3. I always take some time to visit the Indiecade space to see what’s going on, and the energy there is always positive and palpable. But the indie titles that caught me this year were in bigger booths.

      Ashen

      A single-player experience, Ashen nevertheless wants you to play with others. The open-world, action role-playing game, coming out of the ID@Xbox program, is being developed by Aurora44 and Annapurna. In the world, light is provided by the illuminated ash that drifts down from a rock formation in the sky. The environment in this place is meant to be explored. There are nooks and crannies and things hidden in corners, and there are secret passages to be discovered.

      Some of the dungeons require two players to access, and this is how the developers are trying to get strangers to play together. When you’re in the same world space as another player, your game will automatically connect to them and they will show up on your screen. You’ll only ever be connected to one person at a time, and you can choose to work with that other player to open and explore dungeons. There is no voice chat or personal information about other players revealed; you remain strangers, communciating nonverbally with emotes and actions.

      A Way Out

      This game comes from Hazelight, the studio started by Josef Fares, who was part of the team responsible for the clever mechanics in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Set in the early 1970s, A Way Out features two men who escape prison together and end up on the run. Supported by EA Originals, this game requires two people to play. Fares said the game will support online cooperation, but he wants people to play it together on a couch.

      The two players have independent controls, to the point where one can be in a cutscene but the other player can be doing whatever they want, even wandering in and out of the cutscene. The game is being built with a fully branching narrative and uses myriad control schemes. The idea is, Fares explained, to make sure that players never feel like they’re repeating the same mechanics over and over. Expect it in 2018.

      The Darwin Project

      Montreal’s Scavengers Studios have come up with an interesting twist on the battle-royale game genre with The Darwin Project. Eight players begin the game, which takes place in a winter forest that has been cordoned off. The goal is to be the last player standing at the end of the round, and to do so you need to build fires to stay warm, find food to eat, and craft weapons with which to kill the other players. Kinda like the Hunger Games.

      To make sure you don’t get too comfortable, as the round time counts down, areas within the game space start “closing”, forcing players into smaller and smaller spaces, until there’s only one small area left in which to kill or be killed. Making things more interesing is that anyone watching the game on Microsoft’s Mixer can interact with the players, providing boosts and buffs in attempts to alter events.

      Minit

      Coming this summer, Minit is a game you play in 60-second segments. Every minute, you die, but you respawn with the items and powers you alrready acquired. So the goal is to—in one-minute increments—learn the map, solve the puzzles, and work out the sequence of events. Ultimately, after hours of trial and error and practice, you’ll be able to defeat the final boss and win the game in 60 seconds.

      The Swords of Ditto

      This adventure RPG is something of a throwback to the first Legend of Zelda game in terms of perspective and mechanics. But the whimsical art style—it looks like a Saturday morning cartoon—the clever, referential weapons, the procedurally generated backbone, and the drop-in, drop-out co-op set this game apart.

      If you die, you have to start the game over again, but you can save your progress. And if you die, you get to keep some of your experience and gear from your previous incarnation, but the map and all the levels are regenerated randomly, so every time you play you’ve got a new game to play.

      Tacoma

      From Portland’s Fullbright, which gave us the sublime Gone Home (2013, 2016 on console), comes this solo space adventure that is, like that first game, a curious adventure in which a narrative and a host of characters unravel as you explore the environment. The protagonist is Amy Ferrier, and we’ll finally get a chance to step into her shoes on August 2.

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