One of these days I will get to go to a gaming expo in this country for not work. It's been a while :P. On the flip side it's awesome to get to talk to people about Prison Architect particularly with people that have bought the game and are enjoying it. On the down side, bloody hell my legs hurt hell right now. I try not to sit down too much so that it looks like I'm willing to talk to people, but my normal job usually involves sitting on my butt for the entire day so standing up for four days with few breaks hurts. I also got to see some games this year too! Far less than I would've liked, didn't get to check out the indie arcade section which is a separate section that has a bunch of smaller indies but always has cool stuff to show off. Didn't even get hands on with new consoles or Oculus HD which would've been fun to do but ah well. Now I'm going to talk about some of the things I did get to see, unsurprisingly they were all within like a 20 meter radius from our booth.
Volume
I suck at stealth games. Mike Bithell's next game doesn't make me not suck at stealth games. At the beginning of one of the levels I dropped the Beagle noisemaker at my feet attracting a guard who promptly filled me with bullets. It seems like it could be a cool game, it's fairly fast paced as far as stealth games, not quite as fast as something like Monaco but it's not super methodical either.
War For The Overworld
A spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper and it really shows. There are differences between that old game and this one, but the core of digging out tunnels and excavating to make rooms to attract creatures into your lair are very much in this game. They had a pair of levels on the floor but I only had time to get through the tutorial. It's on Steam Early Access right now, it's still fairly early but there's enough of a chunk to see where they want to go with it. Hoping for great things from them.
Frozen Endzone
Similar to Mode 7's previous game Frozen Synapse. Turn based game but the turns play out simultaneously. Thematically it's robot rugby, I don't know the rules to that game. Similarly I didn't get time to figure out how you really play and I was there in the morning before the Mode 7 guys were at the booth so I ran the ball into my own end zone by accident. Oops.
Redshirt
As someone that uses Twitter and not Facebook, this game is super weird. It takes the idea that you are on a space station and you spend most of your time on Spacebook to make friends, relationships and also schmooze your way into the good graces of other people. Unfortunately for you, you also happen to wear a redshirt so if you value life you wish to avoid ever being on an away mission. It's really interesting. Also when I put the headphones on I burst out laughing because the opening music is all kinds of perfect.
And because I can't end this post on a positive note, I did hear that there was a transphobic incident on the last day of the show which is super shitty. Eurogamer were made aware of it and it seems like they've been good about it but the damage is kind of done the second it happens. The folk at Eurogamer have done their best to make it a welcoming show so it sucks to hear that awfulness manages to creep in despite that.
Not super in depth on anything in this post but I got back earlier tonight and just sat down and did nothing for an hour and that felt lovely. Wanted to write something just to wrap up the show. And now to sleep.