With E3 coming up next month, we’ll soon be gearing up to bring you word on the glitziest, biggest-budget blockbusters that the major publishers can currently cook up. Before that happens, though, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the smaller, possibly overlooked titles we’ve been enjoying at festivals and elsewhere within the past year. The 20 independent games that follow show what the smaller, more inventive side of the industry has in the works. If you ask us, it’s every bit as promising as what we expect to encounter during the summer’s biggest blockbuster games event.

Aboard the Lookinglass

Developer: thehen
Platforms: Rift/LeapMotion
Available: TBA
Website

Developing natural control schemes is still the big question mark for a lot of virtual reality headsets. Leap Motion is trying to solve that problem, hosting a recent game jam to show off its Kinect-like tracker as a way to let players put their hands into VR simply by holding them in front of their face.

Aboard the Lookinglass uses that clever control solution for some inventive time-bending gameplay. Looking through the translucent, red-tinted image of your left hand creates a window into the past, while looking through your blue right hand lets you see into the future. This lets you work out some intricate puzzles by viewing an intact version of a broken picture in the past, for instance, or reaching into the future where a barrier is no longer in your way.

It’s all in service of a story based around solving the mystery of the abandoned spaceship setting, complete with a Portal-style disembodied computer voice guiding you. While there are probably few people with the Rift and Leap Motion setup needed to play it, those with the means will get a puzzle adventure unlike anything else out there.

Anarcute

Developer: Anarteam
Platforms: Xbox One, Windows
Available: Summer 2015
Website

You can count the great games for the Wii U on one hand, but you’d probably relegate Platinum Games’ Wonderful 101 to a pinky. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, but this control-a-crowd game’s wonky use of the Wii U Gamepad and otherwise thin action made it hard to fall in love with as a major retail game. We might’ve liked it more as a slimmed-down downloadable game—and we’re getting pretty much that with Anarcute.

Players must lead and enlist a growing mob of protesters—wearing cute animal masks in colorful cities, at that—by running through streets and alleys to find new converts. Once you have a pack of rioters, you then use the city’s resources, from benches to traffic cones to entire buildings, to take down oppressive riot cops. As the game progresses, the cops get stronger (watch out for choppers and laser tripwires), but so do the 99 percent’s battle options and powers.

This is an immediately inviting game, thanks to its “cute rioter” aesthetic, simple combat controls, and bubbly animations. Its full-screen chaos evokes the best memories of Rampage’s arcade city-destruction system.

Bit Ball

Developer: CJ Kimberlin
Platforms: Windows, Mac
Available: TBA
Website

The 8-bit sports renaissance is in full swing, and we couldn’t be happier. We’ve already written about a few modern takes on the days of NES Ice Hockey, including Videoball and Hokra, and we’ve added a few more gems to our growing pile of couch-friendly indie sports.

We’ve already shined a spotlight on Rocket League, which is now in a semi-open beta on PS4, and while that game’s great, we like two other games that revolve around putting a ball into a goal: Super Slam Dunk Touchdown and Bit Ball. Our fondness for the former comes mostly from its resemblance to Arch Rivals, the arcade predecessor to NBA Jam. Players dress up as one of many sports archetypes, including basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer, to tackle each other and attempt to either kick a ball into a giant goal or shoot it into a hoop. We love its sense of humor, but we also appreciated the arcade action and teamplay challenges required to win a match.

In terms of pure gameplay, however, Bit Ball wins out by adding just enough juice to the formula that Xbox One indie gem #idarb tried to get right last year. Like that game, players hop around Smash Bros.-style inside of a small 2D arena to grab a ball and aim it at a goal, but Bit Ball refines the “shooting” process by having players transform into a turret whenever they touch the ball—or when they land on top of a foe, at which point the winning tackler shoots their opponent in whatever direction they want. This simple, mechanical tweak, plus a very small, choice number of power-ups for speed and power, made us bug-eyed in delight after our first match.

Close Your

Developer: Goodbyeworld Games
Platforms: Windows
Available: TBA
Website

The story-first, text-driven gaming genre has exploded in recent years, and while we can always make room for a good bit of Zork-ian adventure or Twine-powered fiction, we always prefer a creative twist on clicking through text. Quite frankly, we don’t know that we’ll ever see anything as creative as Close Your ever again, at least in this genre.

Players proceed through an average person’s life, making decisions as they age that fork the story in wildly different directions, but the decision-making process is stressful for a major reason. The game requires a webcam, because it watches your real-life eyes, and every time you blink, the game fast-forwards an indeterminate amount of time. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few years—the flash depends on your age in the story, and the developers have made some fast-forwards extreme on purpose.

If you’re looking for a game that ruminates artfully on the ways work, family, and love wither in the sands of time, look no further.

Donut County

Developer: Ben Esposito
Platforms: Windows, Mac
Available: 2015
Website

Boing Boing captured this game perfectly with the headline “What’s it like to be a hole.” Yes, in Donut County you control a hole, moving underneath bright, candy colored environments and swallowing up anything that will fit inside you. The hole’s size increases every time it swallows something, allowing you to slowly build up from swallowing tiny things like carrots and spare tires to big things like cows and entire houses.

There’s more than a bit of a Katamari Damacy vibe to the proceedings, and there’s a similar sense of satisfaction to be found in simply gobbling up everything in sight. But there’s also a puzzle-y twist to each level. In one area, for instance, you need to figure out how to fill the hole with water, so you can hydrate another portion of the map and set off the events that you need to continue. It’s a brief moment of thought and reflection… then you can get right back to swallowing up everything in sight!

Downwell

Developer: Moppin
Platforms: Windows, iOS, Android
Available: Q2 2015
Website

Downwell‘s website describes it as “a game about a young man going down an endless well with gun-boots.” It’s hard to beat that direct description.

The game stands out partly for its stark, three-color visual style, all black and white with occasional flashes of red for accents. The game’s aspect ratio is also taller than it is wide (PC players will probably want to turn their monitor to the side). The minimalist style fits with the minimalist controls, which feature only a single button that serves as both a downward attack and a jump/hover function. Navigating the randomly generated, endless caves with those limited abilities is an equal mix of twitch reflexes and quickly planning elegant paths through the maze-like structures and enemies that quickly surround you.

There’s a bit of character advancement in picking up money and items from shops. In the best tradition of games like Spelunky, though, the real advancement is in the player, who gets a little bit better with each avoidable death until situations that once seemed overwhelming become routine and manageable. I much preferred playing on a gamepad to trying to manage on a smartphone, but either way Downwell has that addictive, one-more-game action down pat.

Flip

Developer: Ryan Juckett
Platforms: TBA
Available: TBA
Website

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRuUGYMYco

There’s something to be said for a versus game that has players operate turrets while facing severe movement limits, and we’d never seen anything quite like that since 2010 iPad gem Shot Shot Shoot. But lo, a single man coded its spiritual successor—all during his off hours, no less, when he’s not at his full-time gig as an engineer for the games studio Bungie.

In Flip, two players face off as a white ship and a black ship, and they can only move on like-colored blocks on the playfield. Their bullets flip the field’s colors, and they can use their bullets to either directly attack their foe or to reduce playfield movement—surround a black ship with white tiles, for example—in order to corner them and pull off a sinister final blow. The flow of battle is smartly tweaked with a bullet limit, meaning players must wait for shots to regenerate after shooting their first five bullets; they can also charge each shot, giving them the strategy option of strength over speed if they so please. Watch the preview video, and you’ll be a convert, too.

The Flock

Developer: Vogelsap
Platforms: Windows
Available: 2015
Website

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggJp25gyYNc

We still think Evolve is a mighty fine asymmetrical team-battle game, but its big-budget sprawl made the final product feel a little unwieldy to enjoy and master. Too many classes, too much fluff. For our money, we prefer the far more focused and simplified asymmetrical battles of The Flock.

Five players start out as super-fast monsters, all hunting for an orb in a dark, gothic landscape; whoever grabs the orb first starts racking up points, but that person becomes a slow human with a bright flashlight—visible from all over the map, at that. There’s a give-and-take with how the human and remaining monsters face off. The flashlight becomes a weapon against monsters, but it loses power when players stop moving or run backward (and the human dies if the light goes out). Monsters, conversely, can turn into immobile statues to avoid being burnt by the flashlight (and lie in wait to pounce, kill the human, and become the orb-holder). Oh, and humans can shine their light at certain totems hanging around the level to rack up more points, but those only make the human’s location more obvious.

The Flock’s college development team has only gotten started with ideas, maneuvers, and levels, but based on our lengthy, intense demo session, we’d buy the game as it is.

The Gentleman

Developer: Cape Copenhagen
Platforms: TBA
Available: TBA
Website

Before rhythm games were all about matching the beat with dancing or plastic instruments, developers used songs to tell musical stories in games like Parappa the Rapper and Space Channel 5. The Gentleman brings back that sadly neglected idea for a game that plays out like an early 20th century musical set to an infectious beat.

The core gameplay loop involves helping the titular gentleman avoid hazards as he walks down the street by tapping face buttons to the beat. Successful timing lets the gentleman vault over trash cans, tap dance through puddles, or do a spin-dance past a police officer, all without breaking his stride. As he does so, the world transitions from a dull black and white to vibrant color, and the music picks up in its bubbliness.

Even in the short demo I played, the game was constantly changing scenery and shuffling different rhythmic mini-games to keep players on their toes. It also showed off some incredibly efficient environmental storytelling, crafting a visual, dialog-free tale in the spirit of some of the best Warner Bros. cartoons. While The Gentleman is still very early, fans of old-school rhythm story games should definitely keep an eye out for it.

Just Shapes and Beats

Developer: Berzerk Studio
Platforms: TBD
Available: TBD
Website

Rarely has a game title been as accurate as Just Shapes and Beats. You control a humble blue square that dodges around a screen that quickly fills with red bullets, in the greatest shoot-em-up tradition. Here, though, there’s nothing to shoot back at—it’s all about dodging and staying alive, with the help of a zippy dash move that grants temporary invincibility as it darts you from one side of the screen to the other.

What really sets the game apart from its genre are the titular “beats,” which correspond to giant laser beams that fill a good portion of the screen in time with the rhythm. A brief outline of the coming attacks tells you what areas will be off limits during the next beat, giving you just enough time to plan where you should (and should not) be in a few short moments.

The connection between the gameplay and the rhythm makes it really easy to get lost in “the zone,” making zen-like dodges without really consciously thinking about them. This gets a bit harder if three other players are constantly getting in your way with their own survival technique, but that brings its own enjoyable chaos with it.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Developer: Steel Crate Games
Platforms: Oculus Rift, Gear VR, etc.
Available: TBA
Website

For some, the need to close yourself off from the rest of the world when using a virtual reality headset is a drawback. Keep Talking turns it into a strength, using the headset to hide information from other players, Wii U Gamepad-style.

The player with the headset is faced with a 3D model of a bomb that contains a series of abstract puzzles on it. Another player (or players) nearby has a printed paper manual describing how to defuse the bomb by solving those puzzles. As the headsetted player describes what they see, the diffusal expert has to work through some confusingly circuitous if/then constructs to determine which wire to cut, which button to push, or which lever to pull.

The game is explicitly designed to make these situations as confusing as possible, using symbols that are hard to describe with words or instructions that can easily be misconstrued or confused with contradictory instructions if you’re not careful. Clear, precise communication is key, as are strong logic skills on each end.

Both sides will probably fumble with their first few attempts, but after a few games, a good pair can develop a kind of shorthand, melding into a single, efficient bomb defusing machine across the barrier of vision and spoken communication. Or, if you’re not in sync, you’ll likely want to strangle each other. If you’re looking for a game to test whether a romantic relationship has legs, you could do worse.

Killer Queen

Developer: Josh DeBonis and Nik Mikros
Platforms: Arcade
Available: Now
Website

This isn’t technically an upcoming game—you can find it in a handful of arcade locations nationwide, but it’s a shame there hasn’t been wider distribution for “the world’s only 10-player arcade strategy game.” Each five-person team gets its own widescreen monitor in this back-to-back cabinet. Teams are led by a powerful queen, who can fly quickly around the map and unleash a powerful downward attack, but who can lose the game in one fell swoop if she dies three times.

Other players, as weaker worker bears, can contribute to a win by taking berries to a central collection point, or eating those berries to upgrade to more powerful flying knights who can attack the other team. Worker bears can also pilot a slow-moving snail to the opposite side of the screen—or feed an opposing snail to slow it down.

It’s a bit hard to explain, and there’s a lot to keep track of on the big, crowded screens, but it only takes a few games to get the hang of the basic strategy. Becoming an expert at managing the risks and rewards of the multiple win conditions in real time will take a bit longer, though. Good thing there are usually some veterans around to explain the finer strategy points (at least in the locations I’ve played). Hopefully, some chain like Dave & Busters will give this game the attention it deserves.

Mekazoo

Developer: The Good Mood Creators
Platforms: TBA
Available: 2015
Website

https://youtu.be/Ifr7j9-ucnk

Not that we don’t love a good puzzle platformer (Braid, Limbo), but we’ve enjoyed the indie world’s recent shift toward speedier, Sonic-inspired mascot romps, particularly the explosive Action Henk from earlier this month. Soon to join that fray is a clever, neon-tinged cyber-jungle quest called Mekazoo, which we’d liken to Trine and Banjo-Kazooie’s zippy lovechild.

Throughout this side-scrolling quest, players unlock a total of five controllable creatures, each of which has special platforming abilities (a frog’s grappling tongue, a kangaroo’s wall-jumping boots, an armadillo’s speedy dash), and they use all of these to traverse levels loaded with multiple paths and hard-to-reach collectibles. The trick is that the game only lets you use two creatures’ abilities at any time, so you’ll have to reorient after passing certain gates when you must species-swap. It’s solid throwback platforming stuff—full of clever solutions to “how do I reach that little collectible” challenges—only built with a robust 3D engine and a panicky, glitchy soundtrack unlike any we’ve heard since the Wipeout series.

Outer Wilds

Developer: Team Outer Wilds
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Available: TBA
Website

https://youtu.be/vRQU1o8SrAI

This year’s Independent Games Festival awarded its grand prize to Outer Wilds, and after playing it, we’re surprised we hadn’t seen such a space-exploration game come before it. The game starts on an unassuming space colony rendered in PlayStation 2-level geometry, but its potential quickly becomes apparent once players find the launch codes to the colony’s sole spaceship. After launching into space, players find they must explore a massive galaxy with a very limited amount of time—20 minutes, to be exact.

The time restrictions and wide-eyed exploration of Majora’s Mask collide with the tricky, super-exact space maneuvering of Kerbal Space Program in a game that kicks up new exploratory surprises after each fatal supernova. Maybe you’ll find a new frequency to tune on your space radio, or maybe you’ll successfully aim your rocket to the correct edge of a chasm-scarred planet, where you’ll find its sole, sad inhabitant (and plenty of other weird, sad, and intriguing stories that we’d hate to spoil). You can already find that much and more in the game’s free alpha, available at the website, but the developers insist that the final game’s galaxy will include more content and secrets—including a more fully fleshed take on the game’s underlying mysteries.

Push Me Pull You

Developer: House House
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
Available: 2015
Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fugeouoo4A

We previously wrote this game up back when Sam plucked it out for inclusion in his indie-gaming festival exhibit in the summer of 2014, and the two-on-two worm-sport’s designers have pushed forward with more tweaks and smoother gameplay ahead of its 2015 retail launch.

The original game asks teams of two to control separate halves of a weird, two-headed worm thing and wrap their bodies around a ball to keep it on their side of a court, all while a rival team tries to do the same. That mode is still a treat, largely thanks to its squishy, creepy-cute worms hugging up on each other, and it’s been met with a very intriguing alternative: “two ball” mode. Two teams now have to split their time trying to fetch two balls on the court, and the first team to get both balls to their half win a match instantly. It retains all of the original mode’s tension, only now boiled down to far quicker matches.

That unexpected addition to Push Me Pull You bodes well for its eventual retail edition, which we imagine might have a few more tricks up its wormy sleeves.

Rive

Developer: Two Tribes
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, Wii U, Xbox One
Available: 2015
Website

It’s a bit surprising that Blaster Master didn’t lead to a bevy of games that directly cloned its mix of vehicular spelunking and shooting after its cult debut on the NES. Surprisingly, the team at Two Tribes has managed to make a spiritual sequel for a new generation, even though they say they had little to no knowledge of Blaster Master going in.

No matter, Rive beautifully combines the exploration of a Metroidvania game with the action of a good twin-stick shooter. It also throws in a clever robot hacking mechanic, letting you take control of enemies that can provide hovering boosts, extra firepower, or more to solve some simple platforming puzzles.

There was an even mix of gentle, platform-jumping exploration and high-octane, explosion filled shootouts in the demo I played, all driven by well-lit 3D graphics on a 2D plane.

Swordy

Developer: Frogshark
Platforms: Xbox One, PC
Available: Q2 2016
Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFACWDGKDUM

We define “platformer brawlers” as pure, versus fighting games with two walking axes, and we point that out because the subgenre is so rare. What representative games have we ever seen, aside from Dreamcast cult classic Power Stone? None until recently. The genre got some love in the form of last year’s weird wrestling game Gang Beasts (currently on Steam Early Access), and we’re getting another dose in the weapon-driven Swordy soon enough.

The game revolves around, well, rotation. Players land in an arena whose ground is dotted with swords, flails, and other puncturing weapons, and they must pick up and swing those weapons at their foes. Position, weapon speed, momentum, and rotation must be factored to get your stab on, which means this is less about button-tapping and more about strategic movement—a fact we always appreciate in a fighting game.

(We’d be remiss not to add an honorable mention to the same genre: Super Slaughter Kings. Imagine the above game, only with a simpler control scheme, 16-bit stylings, and a heaping helping of Mutant League Football-esque danger zones in a battle arena.)

Thumper

Developer: Drool
Platforms: TBA
Available: TBA
Website

The first thing that strikes you about Thumper is the look, featuring a shiny silver beetle sliding down neon pathways that look like a mix between Tron and an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Everything is sharp and futuristic, but there’s also an unsettling shakiness to the camera that imparts a sense of out-of-control speed and inexorable momentum.

Then the music hits you, with appropriately thumping beats that match up with the simple rhythm-matching buttons and turns on the track. You’re tentative at first, but soon it becomes second nature to tap along with the winding pathways on the controller, building up power and unleashing it with a pounding thunk in violent waves against skittering enemies.

Soon, you’re caught in the trance, letting Thumper’s driving beats, flowing futuristic pathways, and strong sense of physicality wash over you through a challenging match against a powerful boss monster. By the time you put it down, its after images and rhythms remain on the inside of your eyelids and eardrums for quite a while.

Tumblestone

Developer: The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Ouya
Available: 2015
Website

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjLj5ZDIpgg

As much as we love a good match-three puzzle game—Puzzle Quest, in particular, devoured a few staffers’ lives for a while—we haven’t really seen a great versus-battle take on the genre, or at least none as immediately captivating as Tumblestone.

At this early stage, this is no revelatory or deep game, evidenced by a so-so single-player implementation, but it has a wonderful, rapid-fire versus mode for up to four players. The object is simple: Clear a field of colored blocks, from bottom to top, by matching three like colors at a time. The catch is that players need to plan a few moves ahead; otherwise, picking the wrong colors will block progress and reset the entire board. When four people race through the same board of colored blocks at the same time, it becomes a sheer “who’s smartest” test that plays quickly and in satisfying fashion. We haven’t been bit this hard by the “oh, just one more game” bug in a long time.

We have high hopes for more modes and tweaks to both the single- and multiplayer modes, including garbage/damage blocks, but we already love the game’s early version.

Volume

Developer: Mike Bithell Games
Platforms: Windows, Mac, PS4, Vita
Available: 2015
Website

For all of the overwrought story and dramatic tension of the original Metal Gear Solid, the game’s “VR missions” training provided some of the best isometric pure stealth gameplay around. Volume captures this classic stealth style, with puzzle-filled, maze-like levels focused exclusively on getting through without being seen.

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