Gamescom 2014: The Indie Games Roundup
At a trade show with more than 340,000 attendees it’s hard for a developer to get noticed, especially if you don't have the budget to build a booth large enough to house a tractor.
We scoured high and low to find these developers around Gamescom. Some were easy to locate — they’d bought a stand on the Indie Megabooth or set up a shop in the business centre — others had ninja’d into the convention, building pop up meeting spaces in the cafes or out in the smoking area. Wherever they were we tracked them down and inspected their wares.
We can’t write a full preview for everything we saw but, to make sure as little as possible slips through the cracks, here’s a rundown of the games that stood out.
Don't Starve Together closed beta planned for September
Perhaps starvation isn’t so bad with friends. Maybe one chum can tap out a tune on the xylophonic ribcage of another.
A select group of Don’t Starve players are going to find out within the next month. That’s the timeframe Klei have given themselves to push multiplayer update-cum-sequel Don’t Starve Together into closed beta - just as they sneak Invisible Inc. onto Steam Early Access.
So many tears: here are seven minutes of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth in co-op
McMillen and co. are nearly done transplanting The Binding of Isaac from its restrictive Flash trappings to a new engine. Somewhere between A and B, the gorecore Zelda-like has picked up 16-bit graphics and local co-op.
Let Edmund and Danielle McMillen lead you through several of its dank and, frankly, disgusting rooms.
Some new Star Citizen stretch goals
Having just reached a mind smearing $50 million in funding, Star Citizen is now far and away the most successfully Kickstarted game project in history, easily surpassing the Dizzy, Bomb Jack and 3D Monster Maze fundraisers. With the money he's amassed, Chris Roberts could buy a T-rex skull and still have enough cash left over to buy a dinosaur-sized crown for it to wear. He could build a house and then knock it down, for a laugh, every day for a thousand years.
Luckily for Star Citizen backers however, Chris and his team are instead hard at work developing all new $350 spaceships with barely functioning interiors and no means to actually pilot them. Hey, one day perhaps!
But since hitting their most recent milestone, developers Cloud Imperium have seemingly run out of stretch goals to offer players. Reaching $50 million rewarded players with three unique alien languages for the game's three unique alien races, each one designed and crafted by professional linguists. But what will we get at $60 million? And what will drive loyal backers to $70 million? Cloud Imperium haven't yet decided, so here are some suggestions, from me!
ESL One Cologne: 856 years of Counter-Strike was watched by nearly half a million people
EMS One Katowice was a pretty big competition, pitting Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams against each other in one of the largest eSports tournaments at the time. But that was back in March, and ESL One Cologne recently broke records for Counter-Strike viewership, outdoing Katowice by almost 160 percent.
Viewership, both in-game and through Twitch, reached a whopping 409,369 people, all watching world-class teams compete for the $250,000 prize pool.
Sienna Storm: a spy thriller and digital card game from Deus Ex and Knights of the Old Republic 2 devs
Kickstarter pitches are often a bit like CVs, but I suppose when the lead writer for Deus Ex and Invisible War, senior designer for Knight of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and the designer of Magic the Gathering: Tactics and Star Wars Galaxies: TCG join forces, it would be silly not to their pasts.
Sienna Storm is what they are creating, a spy thriller and digital card game. Interest piqued?
Celebrate Final Fantasy XIV's anniversary with free game time
Final Fantasy XIV is celebrating its anniversary, and Square Enix isn’t content with just the existing subscribers partying. From 11AM GMT on the 22nd until September 1st, anyone who has purchased the resurrected MMO can jump back in game for free.
Hellgate is quietly attempting a comeback through Steam Greenlight
You might remember Hellgate: London as the online action RPG built by ex-Diablo devs back in 2007. There was a big build up, but when it launched there was no bang. It just fizzled out. In 2008 the developer, Flagship, closed its doors and by 2009, the US and EU servers had been shut down.
But then in 2011, new owners HanbitSoft brought it back. It was being played in Korea and was relaunching - with a name change to Hellgate London: Resurrection - in the US. But nobody seemed to notice, and it fizzled out again. But after seven years of not quite grabbing players, it’s making another attempt. Hellgate appeared on Steam Greenlight yesterday.
Overkill's The Walking Dead takes place in the comic universe, but with new survivors
During a Reddit AMA with Overkill producer Almir Listo, a few details about the Payday 2 studio’s recently announced Walking Dead game managed to escape.
The co-op survival horror game was revealed last week. “We are staying true to the original, gruesome storytelling that Robert is famous for and that we know that the fans of The Walking Dead love,” said Overkill.
Hitting the bottle: Brainiac gets his own Lego Batman 3 trailer
Classic Superman villain and intergalactic arsehole Brainiac is the big bad in Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham - which at this point really should just be Lego DC - so it’s only fair he get a trailer introducing his particular brand of Galactic domination.
It’s bottles, by the way. That’s his thing. He likes putting cities in them, most notably the Kryptonian city of Kandor. But now he’s getting greedy and he wants to put worlds in bottles. It all probably started with putting ships in bottles, but then his hobby took a dark turn.
Resident Evil: Revelations 2 box art and screenshot make a brief appearance
Resident Evil: Revelations is great. It went a different direction from the last two core games, putting a focus back on horror and enclosed spaces. Initially developed for the 3DS, it spawned enhanced ports on other platforms, including PC. While there were some control quirks, it was an otherwise excellent port.
So it’s good news, then, that it looks like Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is in the works.
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