I’ve been attending PAX East in my capacity as a sometimes-professor and always-librarian for a student table there, and this was my first time going to PAX West, despite being from Seattle originally, and attending as media on the job, not just a convention-goer. Over the four days of PAX (plus the MIX), I played 38 video game demos. I took notes throughout the weekend, typed them up in the days after I got back, and have assembled them into this Top Ten List Plus A Whole Bunch More that I Want To Talk About Anyway.
I narrowed down the list with the following criteria: a) no AAA games, b) nothing that has already come out, even if the story is graduating from early access to 1.0 release, and c) nothing from the MIX that wasn’t also at PAX. If you listen to the podcast, I’ll talk about a handful of games that aren’t on this list, and that’s because they fall under one of these exclusionary criteria.
So without further ado, and in no particular order (truly; I rolled a d10 to make it random), here are my favorite indie games of PAX West. (Steam page link in the game’s title)
An awe-inspiringly gorgeous 3D puzzler set in a post-apocalyptic world with stunning gothic architecture. This one is coming out on October 15, just a month away! It’s moody and grim yet so beautiful you can’t look away and makes for a perfect autumnal puzzle game. I enjoyed the mechanic of transporting pieces of architecture from the past to the present (or is it the present to the future?) to (re-)build paths and bridges.
The puzzles ramp up steadily in difficulty, but I never really got stuck. It’s the kind of game where as long as you keep moving around to look at things from a different angle and trying new things, you’ll latch on to the answer eventually. I think that qualifies it as an atmospheric puzzle? Anyway, I just wanted to sit there and stare at it and listen to the lovely minimalist piano score and never move again. I truly cannot wait for this game to launch so I can spend an evening or two wandering this desolate land again.
This game was hand-crafted for me specifically. It’s a music-based life sim set in the grunge era of Seattle. In the demo, you get to write a song, talk to an NPC (choices matter in your conversations!), busk for some dinero, have some band practice, and finally enter the battle of the bands where you get to perform the song you wrote! The demo specifically notes that some mechanics are slightly simplified or glossed over for the sake of time and tutorializing, but there will be more depth or intricacy in the final version.
The tutorial notes that in the full game, your words have consequences, and you can learn about the NPCs to try to win them over (schmoozing, befriending, or flirting are all fair game), or you might blackmail or sabotage them—but that choice will be remembered and changes the course of the game. Each “life” is procedurally generated, so you always start with different stats, settings, and casts of characters. There are multiple ways to be successful in the game, just like in life: you can gain money, win popularity, make the most songs, or more! There are many possible benchmarks. I’m so excited to make some songs and share them with a real-life cast of characters when the game comes out sometime in 2027!
Such a clever premise: what if you were playing a platformer but couldn’t jump? Pick up a ladder, of course! The game is adorably cartoony and silly, and I was grinning from ear to ear the whole time. In the demo, you can climb, tilt, and use the ladder as a bridge, and you can even launch the ladder out of a cannon! The devs informed me that in future levels, there are also going to be pogo ladders and rolly ladders and all kinds of other variations. Steam calls it a precision platformer, so I suspect the difficulty level will ramp up, but I believe I will be ready to step up to the challenge. The team is also considering putting in multiplayer by adding a Ladder Lass for player 2! I can’t wait to climb to new heights in Ladder Lad when it finally releases.
The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham
A supernatural detective thriller set in a modern-yet-old drive-in theater/hotel combination. The game takes place in the same world as Causeway Studios’ previous game, The Haunting of Joni Evers, but the developers confirm that it’s not a sequel, so you do not need to have played anything else in the franchise (they are hoping it’ll become a bigger world with many stories over time!).
As Lilith, you examine clues to learn about the traits and personalities of missing people and use scraps of found footage to cut new scenes into an unfinished documentary that curiously seems to star all the missing people as actors. As you change the film, you change reality and quite literally open new doors by doing so. I love a spooky game without jumpscares that will give me a story that I can’t stop thinking about for weeks, and I am fully confident The Final Cut will give me this!
This game makes me feel like I am playing out the story of an ’80s Disney film with its beautiful art style and utterly incredible animation done entirely by hand. It is based on the fantasy graphic novel series Beyond the Western Deep and is a standalone story that can be played without any knowledge of the rest of the franchise. That said, after playing just the demo, I am already checking out the books from my local library (use your local library for books, magazines, databases, video games, music streaming, movie streaming, 3D printing, and more!) and I’m absolutely in love. The music is so lush and cinematic. The voice acting is absolutely top tier. I’m beyond excited to live out my best life as a squirrel courier with absolutely no business out in the wilderness.
Inspired by gels of Portal 2 and the coloring book of Unfinished Swan (and also reminding me a fair bit of Viewfinder), this puzzle game celebrates spreading color all across the world and using the paint’s magic effects to good use in traversal. Bounce, stick, electrify, and more with the different colors you pick up. Leave no corner unchecked and no path untrodden. Dreampainters is yet another jaw-droppingly beautiful 3D puzzle game that celebrates architecture, color, and the joy of puzzle-solving. I loved every single second of the demo, and anyone into 3D puzzle games will hopefully love it too!
Voidwood definitely wins the award for most stylish and over-the-top booth. It was dark and moody and filled with trees and stumps to make the experience immersive. It’s a co-op survival horror game for 1-4 players, and they put everyone in groups of four to maximize the line movement. They gave us all headsets with microphones to use the proximity voice chat, and the players faced the people in line to give them a show as we ran screaming from axe-wielding cultists.
Here’s the overview: everyone is a 10- to 12-year-old kid who is trapped in a cursed forest. It’s very Stephen King. While the sun is up, you can get your bearings and gather resources for the next phase, but once the sun goes down, the wendigo-esque monster comes out, flanked by cultists who must also be avoided. They can hear you and have the same proximity rules as your companions, so you need to be very careful when you tell your friend to run right while you run left. In the demo we gathered special purple wood for a ritual, performed the ritual, and then fled through a portal—if we survived the monsters. On paper this game isn’t my usual kind of thing, but I had a brilliant time playing Voidwood with three lovely strangers, and I somehow managed to survive, so it gets a big thumbs up from me!
This one is for the cozy crew! It’s a relaxing exploration adventure through the Awry Forest. Your task is simply to deliver a package to the other side, but one gosh darn thing after another goes wrong and you keep getting sidetracked. There’s an element of mystery throughout, and curiosity is excellently rewarded. Based on my experience with the demo, the most important thing is to roll with the punches and keep going—but also remember to take time for coffee breaks and just to enjoy the night sky every now and then.
Sometimes I worry indie game developers will run out of amazing ideas, and then I see games like Rebounder and feel pretty good about things. The game has the most stylish comicbook art style with tough-but-fair platforming and, you guessed it, rebounding mechanics. It also promises to have an intriguing sci-fi story, which definitely furthers my interest. In my 20 minutes with the demo, I was completely wowed by the polish and just tactility of the platforming, and I swear I could stare at the art all day. My only negative comment is that I now have to wait like a year for it!
A bullet-hell roguelike deck builder set in the 1920s with a mystery to uncover and a curse to break! This game has Undertale-esque graphics with an absolutely banging soundtrack and some stellar character design. I love a good deckbuilder, and though I’m generally less keen on bullet hell games, I love this idea that the enemies attacking give you a chance to deflect or dodge damage. In the rooms between battles, you can explore to pick up extra loot to try to find hidden doors and keys. I’m intrigued as HECK, and I hope you are too, as it’s certainly one to watch out for!
Honorable Mentions:
Another lovely entry for the cozy crew (I’m a fan of the cozies, what can I say) that is just too lovely to pass up. Play as a songbird and learn songs that affect the world around you. The music is so beautiful and calming, and I felt like I was wrapped up in a warm blanket while playing. Even though it’s not a snowy game, it definitely gives the vibe that I should be playing it in the winter with a hot cocoa nearby. You explore the 2D world with small platforming sections, but it’s really all about the gentle story of a little birdy adventure, learning new songs to sing to progress through the world.
An adorable 2D platformer set in space. The Steam description for the game reads, “The story of a Space Traveler and a Cosmic Cat, on their journey across the sea of stars to find their home and rekindle a dying universe from a mysterious Galactical Pandemic.” Here’s the thing: this game was already on my wishlist, but the demo absolutely sold me. It’s quite different from the one on Steam (last checked on September 10, 2026). The PAX demo throws you into the story rather than the mechanics and world, but you still get a clear picture of what to expect from the narrative and how the game is going to work.
You and your cosmic cat companion need to travel around a galaxy of Little-Prince-style mini planets to find items and rescue characters and to also heal the galaxy somehow. I got such a good vibe, and I quite literally fell in love with this game in the mere 12 minutes I got to spend with it. They also had a separate demo of just a smattering of the mini-games, but sadly I didn’t have time to try that one out. If/when they update the demo on Steam, I hope everyone who likes this kind of game tries it out and falls in love with it in the same way I did!
This came out in March 2026, but it is getting a console release this fall and also some (likely final) large updates to the story, character quests and interactions, and battle mechanics. This was already one I’m a huge fan of, and they’ve just taken everything up a notch, and the final product is a true contender for some end-of-year lists. If you like steam punk visual novels and strategic battles (with cars), this is the game for you!
Final shout-outs
Two final games to round out the genre representation in the article, starting with Murdeer. This is a first-deer-shooter game in which you, a deer, are escaping an underground lab and are taking no prisoners. The mods for your weapon look silly, and they very literally stack. This is a silly, goofy, fun time game and my personal favorite FPS of the convention. The second one is Blocks for Babies, which features both Tetris-style gameplay in the 2D space and Doom-style gameplay in the 3D space and has some absolutely hilarious writing. This was my favorite arcade game of PAX West, hands down!
Image: Blocks for Babies
So there you have it, my Top Ten List Plus A Whole Bunch I Want To Talk About Anyway! Throughout the weekend, I felt like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his piles of gold, but I was swimming through dozens of amazing indie video games instead. There’s so much amazing creativity in the indie space right now. Video games are such a beautiful and unique medium of art, play, and human experience, which PAX West showed me in abundance.
