My primary complaint about the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (aka PAX West/PAX Prime) used to be that a bunch of big companies always stole all the oxygen. They’d set up on the fourth floor of the Washington State Convention Center with big-ticket demos and booth decorations left over from that year’s E3, while all the smaller publishers and indie studios got banished to the insufficiently-ventilated kids’ table that is the WSCC’s sixth floor.

Then COVID hit, PAX went virtual in 2020, and came back in 2021 with a dramatic vibe shift. Few big publishers seemed willing to jump back on the post-COVID American convention circuit, so an assortment of smaller studios and tabletop companies showed up to fill the gap.

Since then, PAX West has been more of an indie expo than anything else. A few AAA publishers made a comeback in 2024, like Capcom, Nintendo, and the Five Nights at Freddy’s team, but they were confined to their own side of the 4th-floor expo hall. The other half, separated by a skybridge, was devoted to an assortment of smaller games from all over the world. On top of that, there were, as usual, two separate off-site indie shows during the convention.

No one person could have seen everything that PAX had to offer, but I did the best I could. Here are 12 of the most interesting indies I saw at this year’s show, presented in alphabetical order.

Awaken: Astral Blade – Dark Pigeon Games/ESDigital Games

I had a weird experience with Awaken: Astral Blade, in that everything I tried to do in it worked immediately. It’s a fluid, fast-paced 2D Metroidvania that directly rewards you for styling on your opponents, with a combo system that’s more like Devil May Cry than anything else. You’re rewarded for taking an aggressive, freeform approach to each new fight, in a way that’s felt like it’s been out of style in action games for the last few years.

In Awaken, you play as Tania, an android who’s been dispatched on a rescue mission to the Horace Islands. A team of investigators has gone missing in the rainforest, due to a strange form of energy that’s transformed the local animals into hostile mutants.

According to one of its PR reps, Awaken is a Chinese indie game that was made with a grant from Sony. I’ll be the first one to tell you that it looks like it’s ripping off Nier: Automata, with its own white-haired, half-naked android swordswoman, but Awaken’s high-speed 2D combat sets it apart from its obvious inspiration.

Beastieball – Wishes Unlimited/Kiei Entertainment

“Volleyball really is a turn-based game,” Beastieball director Greg Lobanov told me at PAX. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but he has a point.

Beastieball reunites Lobanov with artist Alexis Dean-Jones and composer Lena Raine, who previously made Chicory: A Wonderful Tale and Wandersong. Their newest game is something that even they will tell you is essentially Pokemon, but volleyball.

You’re an unnamed trainer who’s stumbled onto an island where all the native fauna love nothing more than to play their local sport Beastieball. Naturally, that means it’s time to recruit several monsters for your team and coach them to the championship, in non-lethal, adorably violent matches that play out like a turn-based RPG. It’s tongue-in-cheek, sure, but Beastieball has some real tactical depth to it, alongside its own host of collectible, adorable critters.

The Chronos Event – Superjump Games

The Chronos Event is an action roguelike made by a small team in Texas, with the help of Epic’s Megagrant program. There’s a lot about it that got my attention, but the first thing was how it revives the lost art of the crotch-first action slide, as perfected in the 2010 Platinum game Vanquish.

In 2039, Dr. Alicia De Leon invents time travel, and in so doing, ruins the world to such an extent that armed mercenaries instantly appear to kill her. Her only ally is a future version of herself, who teaches her how to use time travel as a tool for self-defense, so Alicia can survive long enough to stop herself from creating her greatest achievement.

Those tools include the aforementioned knee slide, which lets you slip around every battlefield at three times the speed of anyone else. Every fight in The Chronos Event plays out like Alicia’s the only one for whom this is an ice level. You can also enter slow motion at will, and use short-duration time hops to enlist your own past self as a distraction or additional firepower.

Heartworm – Vincent Adinolfi/Dread XP

I’ve had several conversations lately about the storytelling potential of fixed camera angles, which were all the rage in early 3D game design, but fell out of vogue by the time the PlayStation 2 had hit its stride. If you’re a fan of that type of visual presentation, allow me to introduce Heartworm, which is Fixed Camera Angles: The Game.

A photographer named Sam has gone in search of an urban legend, about an abandoned house with a room in it that lets you speak to the recently deceased. When Sam enters that room, it drops her in a surreal liminal space that’s based on her childhood memories. It’s also full of ghosts that want her dead.

The graphics on Heartworm are straight off the original PlayStation, with an additional filter to make them even fuzzier. It’s obviously got some DNA from the original Silent Hill and the first couple of Resident Evils, but much of Heartworm is a deliberately personal story about memory, time, and grief.

It’s also got a spider the size of a city bus, so don’t worry. It’s not that subtle.

Inpulse – Shelljump

When I say “kaizo” to people, if they recognize the term at all, they usually associate it with an infamously sadistic series of Super Mario World ROM hacks. Those hacks became the basis for a fan community for demanding platformers such as Celeste.

Inpulse is a new kaizo game by Nate Sievers, a long-time member of the scene. His goal with Inpulse is to make kaizo-style games more accessible, through outreach, thorough testing, and providing solid visual feedback to the player.

In Inpulse, which Sievers describes as a “prog-rock album,” you run, jump, and collect special musical notes, each of which allows the protagonist Flute to use a new aerial movement option. The Guitar Hero-style note progression on the right side of the screen is there to show you each level’s intended solution, in a process that Sievers compares to learning how to play a new song.

Inpulse made its official public debut at last year’s show. For this year’s, Sievers and his crew were showing off Inpulse’s new level editor, which is set up to allow just about anyone to create their own musical kaizo gauntlet. According to Sievers, “anything I can make in Unity, you can make in the level editor.”

Love Eternal – brika/Ysbryd Games

Speaking of kaizo: Love Eternal is a creepy platformer that plays like it’s inspired by the later, weirder levels of Super Meat Boy. I’d walked by it a dozen times at PAX before someone said offhandedly that it was their game of the show, so I finally played it right before the end of the convention.

Maya is an ordinary teenage girl who’s sitting down to dinner with her family when she’s abruptly pulled into a dark labyrinth. As she navigates it, her primary tool for getting past its traps is the ability to reverse her personal gravity, so she can turn the floor into her ceiling while she’s in mid-air.

The demo at PAX had a surreal power to it, with one of the most memorable opening sequences of any game at the show. You can get an idea of what’s actually happened to Maya by reading Love Eternal’s description on Steam, but you might be better off not knowing. Just go in as cold as you can.

Nitro Express – Grayfax Software/Playism

Every so often, I play a game that feels like an adaptation of something that never existed. If somebody had told me that Nitro Express was a remastered version of a TurboGrafx-16 game from 1992, which itself was a licensed tie-in to an obscure ‘80s action anime, I’d have believed them. It’s like a community theater production of Dominion Tank Police.

Autonomous drones are an inescapable part of life in Nitro City, but every so often, they go rogue. When the normal cops can’t handle murder robots, they call in the Atypical Vehicle Response Squad: a couple of total dorks who are somehow still allowed to bring all the guns and explosives they can carry.

Nitro Express is a 2D pixel-art shooter that mashes up a lot of different arcade and console influences. It’s intense, but it’s more about high scores than survival. If you’re into dopey anime action-comedies like Dirty Pair and/or old-school shooters like Metal Slug, Nitro Express was made specifically for you.

Pizza Bandit – JOFSOFT

Pizza Bandit features a variety of exciting new ways for the randos in your pick-up group to not focus on the god damned objectives. It’s a 4-player co-op shooter where you’re trying to run a restaurant and a firefight simultaneously. Imagine Overcooked if less of the aggression was passive.

It’s the future again, and your main character just wants to run a pizza shop. In order to keep that shop in the black, however, you’re forced to go back to your old job as an illegal time-traveling bounty hunter. In each mission, you enlist the help of 3 time-lost duplicates of yourself and go on culinary-themed strikes in the past and future.

In my demo on the PAX floor, we went back to 1985 Japan to keep a sushi restaurant running, where we had to simultaneously fight time cops and make tuna rolls. It sounds silly, and it absolutely is, but it works better than I thought it would. You’ll absolutely want to bring a crew for this one, though.

Puzzle Depot – Laughing Manatee Games

I played a lot of Space Quest as a kid, which predisposed me to like Puzzle Depot. It’s set in the same kind of broken-down, blue-collar science fiction future, where all the big space opera adventures are happening far away to someone else. Meanwhile, you’re crammed into a maintenance shaft fighting mutant roaches.

Exhibited off-site during PAX at the Seattle Indies Expo, Puzzle Depot is one of several locally-made games at this year’s convention that felt like it was tapping into some well-earned anger at Amazon. It starts off as a simple block-pushing puzzle game, but rapidly introduces more features, mechanics, and complications until you’re on an epic journey across a planet filled with decaying infrastructure, killer insects, and mismanaged toxic waste.

Scholomatch – Dire Kitten Games

Imagine Hogwarts, but the student body consists exclusively of hot polyamorous, pansexual college students. That’s Scholomatch, a dating sim/puzzle game which warns you in the tutorial that nobody in the game is monogamous. Frankly, it might’ve been the funniest thing I saw at PAX, and it wasn’t exactly trying to be.

You’re one of the few human students who gets to attend the Horizon Wizarding Academy, an interdimensional college for magic-users. Here, you’ll learn magic through collaborating with the other students, in a system based on match-3 puzzle games. You’ve also got an open license to befriend or romance any or all of the other students at Horizon, in an arrangement that the developers describe as having “a lot of heart and a little spice.”

The dating sim elements of Scholomatch are hilarious from the jump, but when I played its demo at SIX, I found myself getting really into its take on match-3 games. From the start, you’re given a lot of tools to rearrange, defy, or break the system’s rules, and knowing when to use them is key to pulling off some of Scholomatch’s trickier challenges.

Whisper Mountain Outbreak – Toge Productions

This is another proud entry in the “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves” school of indie game design. Valve won’t release Left 4 Dead 3 and Capcom won’t port the Resident Evil: Outbreak games to modern systems, so Toge Productions (Coffee Talk) mashed them together and made a 4-player co-op isometric shooter.

An unspecified but distinctly Lovecraftian catastrophe has hit Jakarta, and many of the locals are now bloodthirsty zombies. As a small team of survivors, your goal is to investigate locations within the city and figure out what the hell actually happened.

Whisper Mountain Outbreak knows exactly what it wants to be. The maps and puzzles are pure Resident Evil, as is its emphasis on ammo conservation. Melee’s a decent option, but you’ve got a limited stamina pool, so it’s easy to get caught by zombies when you’re exhausted. On occasion, the game gets bored and hits you with floods of monsters from every direction, and that’s when the Left 4 Dead comparisons kick in.

Yars Rising – WayForward/Atari

I’ve yet to play a WayForward game that I didn’t like. I’m still a little annoyed about that 1-point Xbox achievement on Double Dragon Neon, which is why my gamerscore has been an odd number for the last several years (it shouldn’t bother me; it bothers me a lot), but the studio’s got a solid track record.

Yars Rising, at least in its PAX demo, didn’t break that streak. It’s ostensibly a reboot of a classic ‘80s Atari franchise, but like Lunar Lander Beyond from earlier this year, it doesn’t have that much to do with the original source material. Instead, it’s a Metroid-style adventure game from most of the same developers that made the River City Girls series.

You play Rising as Emi, a hacker who’s taken a job at the QoTech corporation as part of an infiltration job. When the job goes wrong, Emi has to use stealth, cunning, and illegal “bio-hacks” to fight her way through QoTech’s underground empire of advanced military hardware. It’s just silly enough to be funny without going all the way over into self-parody, with some big boss fights and clever minigames.