I’ve just got back from the WASD video-game show at the Old Truman Brewery in London, and once again it was a fantastic event that gave me lots of opportunities to chat with developers and discover new indie games. Here’s my pick of the most interesting games I saw.
Conscript
Conscript developer Jordan Mochi told me that this game has been some seven years in the making, and that he was inspired by the PlayStation 1 games of his childhood, as well as his passion for history (which he studied at university). The game is set in World War I, and sees a lone French soldier navigating the trenches during the battle of Verdun. It takes the form of an old-school survival horror along the lines of the original Resident Evil, but there’s nothing fantastical or supernatural here – the horrors are all very real. The sluggish clunkiness of the aiming and reloading makes for some brilliant tension as you’re chased by enemies: there’s a demo on Steam, so have a go yourself to see what I mean.
Wax Heads
Wax Heads has been co-created by Murray Somerwolff, who was formerly at the Swedish studio Triple Topping, and who worked on one of my absolute favourite games of 2020, Welcome to Elk (which I called an “astonishingly inventive journey” in my review). He told me that Wax Heads is inspired by films like Be Kind Rewind and High Fidelity, and it’s all about the community that builds around a small record store. As a new employee, your job is to find and recommend records for the customers, with higher scores being awarded for recommending music that fits with their tastes. It’s charming and clever, and it looks fantastic – keep an eye on this one, and check out the Steam demo, too.
Turnip Mountain
The Curios section of WASD is by far my favourite part of the show, and along with Wax Heads, I found the brilliant Turnip Mountain nestled in there. The work of solo developer Luke Sanderson, it stars a turnip with two arms, which are controlled by the two analogue sticks. Pressing the right shoulder button lets you grip with the right hand, and likewise the left shoulder button controls the grip of the left hand. You’re presented with a series of walls to scale, which involves gripping with one hand and then pressing down on the respective stick to haul yourself up, before gripping with the other hand and doing the same.
It takes a little bit of getting used to, and Luke was stood behind players all day watching to see whether they could work out how to climb (I heard him quietly shout ‘Yes!’ behind me when I managed to scale the first wall). But pretty soon the controls become second nature, and gripping and hauling is a really fun mechanic. The game itself reminded me a lot of the wonderful Celeste, with a series of puzzle-like clambering challenges that gradually increase in difficulty. Definitely one to watch – and there’s a demo on Steam to try in the meantime.
Sol Cesto
Another game in the Curios section, I found myself playing Sol Cesto for far longer than I meant to, drawn in by its clever take on probabilities and brilliantly oddball graphics. It’s essentially a dungeon crawler where you’re presented with a 4 x 4 grid of squares, some containing enemies or spikes and some containing treasure chests or items. But you can’t click to move to an individual square – you can only click on a row, and your character has a 25% chance of landing on each square. If you land on an enemy, you can defeat them if your attack level is equal to or higher than theirs, but if not, you’ll take damage. The aim is to make five moves, after which the door to the next level will open.
However, you can manipulate the probabilities with upgrades that, for example, increase the chance of landing on a treasure chest square. Plus there are collectible items that do things like wipe out all of the enemies on one row, and there’s a rechargable sun icon that lets you select a column rather than a row. It’s all very clever, and had me scratching my head trying to work out the optimum move, while the element of chance gave a frisson of excitement to every click. There’s a demo on Steam, give it a try yourself!
The Deadly Path
Tim Sheinman has been churning out detective-style games like Rivals and Conspiracy for a while now, but his latest title is a completely different kettle of fish. The Deadly Path is a quickfire, rogue-like strategy game that takes its cues from Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper, where you’re excavating a dungeon and having to defend it from heroes.
The clever bit is that it’s pared back to the bare minimum. You can only do three things: excavate a new tile, construct a new building or place a minion in a construction. Plus there’s none of the ponderous gameplay you might be used to in a strategy title, since everything is done against the clock, and each game might last only a few minutes. Everything you create requires upkeep, whether that’s gold to maintain a building or meat to feed your minions, and that upkeep has to be paid with alarmingly frequent regularity. You can fail to meet the goals once, but fail a second time and it’s game over. This leads to a brilliantly frenetic pace as you constantly monitor the balance of your evil settlement, while frantically weighing up what to do next.
Demonology 101
Yet another brilliant title in the Curios section, Demonology 101 by Ludipe was made as part of a game jam, and it sees you summoning demons and trying to guess their name so you can control them. There’s a list of facts for each demon which you have to match with what they say to you, but it’s made trickier by the fact that some demons always lie, while others only tell the truth, and some will impersonate others. It’s free to download on itch.io and only very short, but well worth a few minutes of your time.
The Holy Gosh Darn
Heaven has been destroyed by an army of phantoms, and it’s up to the angel Cassiel to travel back in time to stop its destruction – but the only way to do it is to find a powerful relic created by God, The Holy Gosh Darn.
In terms of humour and puzzles, this game feels a lot like a classic point and click adventure, but here you have direct control over the character and everything is done in real time – there’s a clock counting down to heaven’s destruction in the corner. However, you can skip backwards and forwards in time at any point, which you’ll need to do in order to, say, convince Saint Peter to tell you his deepest secret so you can go back in time and tell him it in the past to convince him that you’re actually able to travel through time. All very Day of the Tentacle, and all very promising indeed: play the demo for yourself to see what I mean.
Crackernuts
Probably the strangest demo I played at WASD, Crackernuts has been created by scanning and animating hand-made maquettes, giving it a wonderfully creepy feel. It’s based on the Scottish fairy tale Kate Crackernuts, an incredibly odd story in which a magical woman called the henwife swaps a girl’s head with that of a goat.
The demo I played was only very short, and Crackernuts is still in the early stages, but it’s easily one of the most memorable things from the show.
Pieced Together
I found Pieced Together absolutely charming. It had the vibe of something like Unpacking, but here the aim is to create a scrapbook by sticking down various pictures and objects related to a theme – like a trip to the dinosaur museum or the first day at school. By creating these collages, you piece together the life of an 11 year old girl, and the developers told me that the full story explores the nature of friendship and the emotional difficulties of growing up. The simple act of sticking things down is almost therapeutic, and the heartfelt story that you slowly reveal while doing so is the icing on the cake.
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