Running on fumes, having landed in Boston early that morning, I headed to the PAX East convention centre underprepared for the games that would be present. While a large chunk of the games has demos on Steam (and I’ll mark which ones those are), there’s a different feeling being out on the expo hall floor. I loved walking through the Boston Convention Centre, temporarily transformed into an inclusive space of gamers freely expressing who they are and collectively sharing a passion for our hobbies. The floor represented a microcosm of the gaming landscape, with a game for any kind of gamer.
I was only able to attend Saturday and Sunday, which came with some unique advantages. First, word of mouth had already circulated. Talking with fellow podcasters who had attended the first two days of PAX and seeing where lines got long tipped me off to what games generated the most buzz. A consequence of this meant that there were plenty of shorter lines for other games. There’s a special adrenaline hit whenever you find a hidden indie gem, so knowing that there would be moments where I could hit up a lot of demos without much friction meant being able to find the diamonds in the rough. I planned my time between two lists: must-plays and hidden gems. Below I give you the results of those lists.
Must-Plays:
To clarify, for some of these games I couldn’t sacrifice an hour or so of wait time for. I add them because the temperature read on them was extremely hot from folks whose judgement I trust from within the content creation scene and general buzz from the public.
Tanuki Pon’s Summer
I watched a lot of this game being played, although I didn’t have time to play it myself. The game features much more BMX platforming than previous trailers have shown. There’s also a massive amount of mini-games, but they never looked tiresome or overstayed their welcome. Tanuki Pon’s Summer seemed much more akin to the light-hearted Yakuza moments. Liam, one of the lead developers, was watching folks play, and I had a moment to chat with him about their previous game Cursed to Golf and the transition to Tanuki Pon’s Summer. It’s going to be a big hit when it releases later this year. There is currently no demo available for Tanuki Pon’s Summer.
Nocturne
I’m a simple gamer. I see a highly stylised pixel art RPG, and I’m already moderately interested. The debut from Pracy Studios, Nocturne’s story is about waking up dead and trying to find your brother. The catch is that when people die, they are uploaded into a digital afterlife. While the demo is light on how this all works, it hints at some compelling mysteries. Gameplay is a straightforward rhythm game that borrows heavily from Guitar Hero but with an immense array of accessibility and approachability options. Nocturne has 6 difficulty levels and more fine-tuning for personalising your game experience. Don’t underestimate the game’s difficulty. The highest tier available was as close as you can get to a blur of button inputs. Playing on mouse and the keyboard was not intuitive, but the devs assured me that there will be gamepad and key binding on launch, Q1 2026. The demo is currently live on Steam.
Fretless
Another rhythm game, but one that felt much more manageable while playing due to further developed gamepad controls. Intense music backdrops this, albeit much sillier, game than Nocturne, but Fretless’ charm will lure any gamer who has ever picked up a guitar. The rhythm timing plays out with its own QTE style similar to Guitar Hero. What drew my attention were the over-the-top animations and attacks you unleash against your enemies. There’s such style baked into every moment of Fretless. It’ll be a winner for sure. It releases in about a week on May 22, only on Steam. The demo is currently available.
The Big Catch
The demo for this 3D platformer was a bit strange. Rather than testing out the first few moments of the game, you’re thrown into a wordless tutorial and then allowed to freely roam an open area without much direction. But The Big Catch’s platforming manoeuvres and combats were instantly gripping. You play as some kind of void rabbit in a bucket hat and a massive fishing rod. So, fairly in line with the nonsensical early mascot platformers. I was surprised at how loosely the fishing aesthetic was present in the rest of the game. The area you traversed looked more like something from Dread Delusion. You used your rod to stun enemies or pull items out of them, as well as zip to specific nodes across the map. It was nice to play with so many abilities already given to you from the get-go, which I hope remains true in the final game. There is currently no available demo online.
Mycopunk
Devolver Digital’s most recently announced game, Mycopunk has been described to me as “violent Sable” and “mushroom Helldivers”. It’s a high-octane cooperative PvE shooter. Pigeons at Play, the studio behind the game, have checked all the boxes that Devolver loves with bold and brash personality and tight gameplay. The line for Mycopunk never shortened, despite multiple passes to check wait times over the course of my two days at PAX. I watched a lot of gameplay waiting in lines at other stations and heard endless praise for it. Mycopunk currently has a demo available on Steam.
Gigasword
I’m not sure the folks at Studio Hybrid were ready for the long lines at their booth. Hosted by their publisher, Akupara Games, Gigasword was in a small corner of the expo hall, nestled between other lower-profile games. The crowd it drew seemed to knot and block the hallway, which naturally drew in more of the audience to see what was going on. Again, Gigasword was a game that I passed by many times hoping for a shorter line that never appeared.
Thankfully, it has a demo on Steam right now. Gigasword is a pixel art, 2D platformer metroidvania. That description alone doesn’t really narrow what the experience is, but hopefully a brief explanation of some of the puzzling will. As you can imagine, the protagonist of Gigasword wields an enormous sword. One that rivals the Buster Sword for size. You have to put it down to solve certain puzzles, and when unburdened by the weight of the sword, your abilities will change. This creates opportunities for out-of-the-box puzzle solving, which is a tough feat to pull off in a crowded indie genre. But Gigasword’s charm and stellar bosses more than set it apart from other metroidvanias.
Hidden Gems:
I’d like to think I’m giving you the inside scoop on some of these games. Certainly you’ve heard of some of these, but by and large these were all new for me and stood out against the crowd. I played all of these and found something uniquely compelling about each.
Fresh Tracks
Having recently played Sayonara Wild Hearts for the first time, any game that can be described similarly will grab my attention. Fresh Tracks boasts the most double-meaning title of all the games at PAX. You play as a skier who rides along predetermined tracks and ducks, jumps, leans, slides, and slices your way along head-bopping tracks to rack up points on each level. It’s a lot to juggle. You’ll have to lean, duck and jump tracks almost simultaneously, followed up by directional inputs to slice through trees. The controls are all intuitive, but it’s a lot for the mind to process at once. Regardless, it’s an extremely satisfying game with easy onboarding. There is currently no demo available.
Altered Alma
One of my personal favourites from the show, Altered Alma, was relegated to a single monitor at the Critical Reflex station. While Tanuki Pon’s Summer, at the same location, absorbed most of the audience, I went around back to Altered Alma’s machine, where there was no line, to see what it was about. It’s another highly stylised pixel art metroidvania, this time set in a cyberpunk setting. Again, it’s hard to pitch Altered Alma on the general description alone. However, the game sets itself apart with a teleporting dagger that will zip the protagonist to where the dagger hits. The game has a basic parry, but using the dagger functions like the gun parry in Bloodborne, where you can interrupt attacks for critical damage opportunities. Controls and gameplay felt extremely tight, and platforming and combat offered a good challenge, but nothing too overwhelming. The game has the juice. You can try the demo to get that feel for yourself, which is now up on Steam.
Compensation Not Guaranteed
Most easily described as an iteration of Papers, Please, Compensation Not Guaranteed takes things a step further. The context is a post-revolutionary government that has appropriated lands from local residents. Your job is to sit at an office and make sure that residents who own the confiscated properties actually own them, in which case the new government, with your approval, will compensate them. I love this backdrop to the game, which posits the question of power and authority in governmental transition.
Will the new government fulfil its revolutionary promise to its citizens? Well, you’re a key factor in that. To complicate things, after you go home from work, you dream about your experience with customers from during the day, which allows you to question if you made the right decision or not. It’s looking to be a robust experience with welcome mechanical upgrades to its inspiration. The demo is available on Steam.
Birdigo
Simply put, Birdigo is a word scramble version of Balatro loosely set to the premise of birds migrating south. The game didn’t showcase a ton of spice or personality, but the gameplay loop is tight and extremely polished. Using the Balatro formula for word scrambles was the right call to refresh word enthusiasts who want to flex their Scrabble strategies. It comes complete with a roguelike system to give passive abilities to maximise your point multipliers to make the voyage southward. The demo is available on Steam.
The Merlies
As I stepped up to the computer running The Merlies, the person in front of me shrugged their shoulders and said they thought they were stuck. As the developer came by to reset the demo, the other player said, “This is a cool mashup of Pikmin and a side-scrolling platformer.” He was right. The Merlies features an excellent and memorable hand-drawn art style of little red-capped blackbirds doing silly little gnome things. You rotate between different Merlies that you discover, each with its own ability to make progress forward. While the demo wasn’t well tutorialised, the gameplay felt good, and the puzzling showed immense potential for the full game. There is not currently a demo available.
Gloomy Eyes
There could be some recency bias here with the fresh release of The Midnight Walk, but Gloomy Eyes looks incredible. It has a similar stop-motion, Tim Burton-adjacent art direction but mixed with a chibi style. Gloomy Eyes is an impossible romance story between Nena and Gloomy, a human and a zombie. It’s very much Warm Bodies, aka Romeo and Juliet, but nothing about Gloomy Eyes feels stale. It’s a slower-paced mild puzzler with an emphasis on the story more than anything else. While no demo is available, if you have a VR set, Gloomy Eyes was originally a short VR game that retails for less than $10. I’m looking forward to the traditional version of the game.
PAX East showcased an impossible amount of games to get through. I played at least twice as many of the ones I’ve written about here and eyed dozens more that I couldn’t make time for. The last list of games I’ll rattle off are ones that I am going to wait and see on. Either the demo didn’t play well but had a lot of promise, or I didn’t hear much about the game itself despite it always having a long line. It’s worth your time to look up the Steam page and decide for yourself if any of these are worth wishlisting: Tales of Tuscany, Sincerely, Robin, Cat Secretary, Cornucopia, Bearnard, Letters from the Past: Undusted.
Walking the expo floor of PAX ultimately was such a positive, uplifting moment in the current games landscape of seemingly endless layoffs and studio closures. Seeing the excitement and passion of developers for you to try their games was invigorating. This is an industry of love and enthusiasm, and it was refreshing to walk among so many people excited for the future of games.
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PAX Venue Picture Credit: Dit on BlueSky
