Today, Geoff Keighley kicked off this year’s Not-E3 season with Summer Game Fest, a two-hour sound sample of all the ways you can kill people in video games over the next year or so. It was, frankly, a lot. Fortunately, the folks at Day of the Devs came up immediately afterwards with a show that looked more like a guided meditation than an advertisement.
Day of the Devs, a “fantastic celebration of independent games” now in its tenth year, followed the excitement of the Summer Game Fest company detailing a handful of more understated projects currently under development. One minute, Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann was talking about a remake that leaked hours ago, and the next we were learning about Time Flies, an intriguingly minimalist game about how to make the most of short lifespan of an insect.
The transition seemed like a cool breeze, and not just because everyone at Kotaku was finally free to take a breather from the frantic responsibility of live event coverage. Every game shown on Day of the Devs was something I was interested in playing. And it’s not just about satisfying my personal tastes. Despite its more relaxed atmosphere, programs like Day of the Devs often feature a more innovative game design than any event that scores the latest revelation of Call of Duty.
It has become very clear that games are much more capable of evolving into the infinitely expressive medium that should always be when it manages to divorce the obsessive desire of the mainstream of higher frame rates, resolutions, and body counts. Here are some good examples of this Day of the Devs phenomenon.
A Little to the Left is a “cozy puzzle game” that asks the player to organize a house that needs a good cleaning. Oh, and sometimes a cat comes to mess up what you were stacking or sorting, just like in real life. It will be released later this year and a demo is currently available on Steam if you are interested in this kind of thing.
Animal Well builds a pixelated, old-school adventure with layers upon layers of secrets to discover and solve. It gave me great Nifflas vibes, if you’re familiar with games like Within a Deep Forest and Knytt, and I can’t wait to jump through its lush surroundings in search of hidden mysteries.
Birth puts you in the shoes of a strange creature as you navigate an important city and find a way to alleviate your loneliness. What better way to stop feeling lonely than to create your own partner with bones and spare organs? The distinctive artistic style, creepy but beautiful, really sets it apart from almost everything in today’s games.
Fox and Frog Travelers: The demon from Adashino Island follows the fox and frog headlines as they travel through regions inspired by the Japanese developer background. But while the neon lights and lanterns at the food stalls can give the game a cozy atmosphere, there’s something insidious about it that hides in the shadows.
Goodbye World is a narrative meta-game about the “passion and struggles” of two young independent game developers, with influences ranging from Ghost World to Mother 3. The fuzzy aesthetic is designed to evoke the past times of graphics of Super Nintendo and Game Boy Advance.
Of course, I wouldn’t pretend that the hilarious homogeneity of Summer Game Fest can’t be found on Day of the Devs either. The latter only replaces the explosive shootbanginess of the former with dev after dev gently describing projects in impeccable apartments. But still, the games looked so much more fun and original than the literally half a dozen imitations of Dead Space that Keighley asked us to worry about.
For more information on the games shown on Day of the Devs, be sure to visit the program’s official website.