The Top Games to Look Out for From PAX East 2024
PAX East 2024 was this past week, and we saw dozens of exciting indie games from all over the gaming spectrum. Here’s my top picks for best games at PAX East this year:
NIRVANA NOIR
If there’s one thing PAX East can show off in spades, it’s games with incredible, unique art styles. Nirvana Noir, the point and click detective game from publisher Fellow Traveler, is a shining example of this. A “noir adventure beyond time and space”, Nirvana Noir is a cosmic journey lovingly steeped in tropes of the genre, all stylized in gorgeous black-and-white and pops of color. The line to play this was consistently long and for good reason – no other game on the show floor looked quite like it. The demo is now available on Steam and the full game is coming soon.
CHICKEN POLICE: INTO THE HIVE!
Another game taking cues from the joys of the noir, Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! is a visual novel following animal detectives sniffing out crime in Clawville, a rough-and-tumble city full of shady characters. Anything that throws photorealistic animal heads on the bodies of 30s detectives is a win in my book – fans of the visual novel genre should keep an eye on this game coming soon to Steam.
FINAL KNIGHT
Final Knight was one of the rare games shown at PAX East 2024 with a release window of Q3 2024 (it’s not much, but it’s better than “coming soon”). It’s a real-time beat-em-up with the setting and flair of classic sword-and-sorcery arcade game like Gauntlet and Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom. You control a group of daring heroes or scoundrels and clear out waves of goblins and fiends, wielding the powers of classic fantasy types like Rangers, Paladins, and Wizards. Local co-op is a dying breed outside of the typical Nintendo title, so here’s hoping Final Knight holds water when it releases sometime this year.
FRAYMAKERS
Few platform fighters have been able to challenge Super Smash Bros.’ chokehold on the genre. Multiversus, Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl - hell, even PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale have tried, but most can’t seem to break ground in such a dominated market. But none of those games were Fraymakers.
Fraymakers, from a team of Super Flash Bros. devs (which should be its own seal of approval), is essentially the Indie Smash Bros. Characters from beloved indie titles like Octodad, Slay the Spire, and Rivals of Aether duke it out in your typical platform fighter, with dozens of wild assists from all over the indie gaming world. Few fighting games let you summon in the Newgrounds Tank or the Among Us crewmate to turn the tide of battle. Fewer still encourage custom content creation using the supported FrayTools platform, utilize rollback netcode, and promise more and more characters, stages and assists as time goes on.
Fraymakers is the game I’m most excited about from PAX East 2024. It’s smooth, quick, and easy to pick up and play. Jumping into a game on the show floor with other fighting game fans and getting to trounce the competition as Octodad was an absolute blast. It’s out now in Early Access on Steam, with a final version in development and console ports incoming. If you love fighting games, indie games, party games, or even games in general, don’t sleep on Fraymakers.
