Welcome to GTOGG’s May 2021 edition of Promising Indie Game Releases, where we highlight indie and non-mainstream titles that we believe deserve your attention – in other words, “look at all this potentially cool stuff you might’ve missed otherwise”. That would’ve been too long for a title, though.
Do you like games that tell stories? Well, so do we! Which is why we're very pleased to talk to you about LudoNarraCon 2021, a digital convention hosted on Steam that celebrates narrative games and the talented people making them – it runs between April 23-26.
Naturally, we browsed and browsed until there was nowhere left to browse, and tried our hands at some of the more interesting-looking titles on offer – some of them proved to be just as pleasant as they seemed, while others were… well, disappointing, to say the least. But hey, such is life, you know? Box of chocolates and all that jazz.
The weather is getting chilly, the leaves are turning yellow, and the Steam Game Festival is back – and so are countless intriguing demos waiting for you to try them. Here are our personal picks:
When United States president Theodore Roosevelt is kidnapped by mysterious forces, it’s up to you, a stalwart little robot agent, to head out and save him – that’s the basic premise of Bartlow’s Dread Machine, a charming twin-stick shooter that’s just launched via Steam Early Access and is ready to take the mechanical world by storm.
The ratio of indie versus AAA games has seemingly shifted in the past few years, at least judging by the recently-held Steam Game Festival. However, a numerical advantage in itself – no matter how much gamers longing for an indie renaissance desire it – is hardly a guarantee that the majority of the games we end up getting will offer more than a regurgitation of the easily marketable formulas so prevalent in the industry. With that said, our staff set out to fish out some of the more promising titles from the crowd – below are my brief impressions of all the games I’ve personally tried, from best to worst.
As a result of the ongoing global pandemic, a new trend has emerged in the game industry: digital events taking the place of actual, physical trade shows. One such digital event is Steam’s so-called Game Festival, which essentially allowed everyone around the world to try out early demo versions for a large selection of upcoming games – needless to say, we felt compelled to dive right into the thick of it and take several promising titles for a spin. Here are our quick thoughts on each of them:
The Waylanders, developed by Gato Studio, is a party-based RPG with an ambitious mission, to say the least. According to its Steam store page, it’s a project that the supposed veterans of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises have worked on, and a game that very much tries to live up to that illustrious legacy. Needless to say, this carries with itself a certain set of expectations...
Set in the same universe as Blackwell with an even greater emphasis on the supernatural, Unavowed follows a protagonist freshly liberated from the clutches of a demonic possession that lasted a whole year.
The game industry has told the tale of valiant heroes time and again – determined warriors fighting to save mankind, eradicating all the monsters and all the evil that dare stand in their way: because, as we know, good always prevails. But not this time…
