Tokyo Game Dungeon 11

Last weekend I visited Tokyo Game Dungeon 11. This is a very cool event where indie game developers in Japan show what they have been working on.

It is not a huge event, but not a super small one either. The atmosphere feels just right to browse several games and sit down and play some of them.

This is the second time I've been there. This time I arrived at 15:00, and had time to play 8 games! Here is a short review of the games I played there:

• Unknot! (Steam Link)

Unknot is a physics puzzle game, where you have to untie a knot by pulling at the rope. If you get stuck, you can switch two parts of the string, but that costs you points.

I manage to solve the hardest level on the demo with a perfect score, and they gave me a sticker. Yay!

This was a very nerdy game, and while it was very fun to solve the puzzles, I'm not sure how much you can get out of this. Bonus points for being made in Godot, though!

• Dropping Drops

This game was in early development, so no link yet. Actually, this one has some story. When I visited Tokyo Game Show 8, I saw this one table with lots of classic Mega Drive games. As I was admiring the lineup, a young man manning the table pointed to the older man showing his game, and told me that that man was the composer for the games I was looking at!

The older man was showing an actually pretty cool game, which used a controller with several knobs and sliders, which looked halfway like a music table, and those controlled an alife inspired game! We talked a bit about how cool it was to make games based on simulations.

This time, I saw that very distinctive controller again, and went to talk to them, and they were showing this new in-progress game, which looked like a mix of pinball and pachinko, but with weirder controls.

By the way, they have an amazing homepage, which looks like it was frozen in time in the late 90ies. It seems that their main job is actually servicing and leasing mechanical pinball machines, but there is also a page there for the software they have developed, including the simulation game (D-life) that they were showing up in the last Tokyo Game Dungeon.

• Stround (Steam Link)

The third game I played was Stround -- This one caught me by its attract mode. It is a shooter where you are a person moving in zero-g, and can rotate freely the world around you to line up shots and dodge bullet patterns.

The controls were a bit more difficult than I expected, but the game was actually really fun. It definitely went to my wishlist.

• Hamayumishi ~Night Parade of a Hundred Yokai~

This is a platformer action game, where you play an archer fighting yokai. When you shoot, you can aim freely with the stick, and if you shoot while jumping in the air, your shots penetrate enemies, which is essential because you will soon find yourself surrounded by monsters.

The aiming control was a bit hard to get the hang of, but the graphics were really cool!

This one was made by Nice Gear Games, who regularly do a cool stream of indie games on youtube! Do check that out!

• Cosmo Piercers:

This was an extremely classic vertical schump, that looked like it was taken straight from a 1989 arcade's cabinet. Your ship would shoot lines of enemies coming from above, and little tanks in the background, while a futuristic city/spaceship scrolled by. Very nostalgic!

The game is still in development, so no website yet, but it is developed by Magic Box, who have other games on their Itch page. From the screenshot of their other games, you can see that they are all about that 2nd gen era revival: Tank Battles, shooters, platformers, etc.

• Tama In between

This is a puzzle platformer where you control a slime cat that can leave slime copies of itself behind, and can switch between controlling the copies. The demo they had was really good -- starting with a very easy introduction to the controls, and then going on to levels showing really cool things you could do with the "copy swap" mechanic.

The graphics were a mix of cute and gross that hit very well with me, specially the giant spider enemy that was chasing after the cat in a "rising lava" kind of level.

The final level of the demo had a bunch of easter eggs, and more gross-cute monsters in it, so another one for my wishlist bin.

• Doubutsu Tenya Wanya

This one is a mobile game that at first glance looks "dumb and cute" -- a cat walks through a screen, an obstacle comes veeeery slowly towards you, and you touch the screen to jump. Yay.

Soon, though, a similar dumb game appears on the top half of the screen, and you have to play both at the same time. And then three games, and four. Each game is simple and slow, but playing them all at the same time quickly gets frantic.

This one is a "2 bucks" premium mobile game. If my phone wasn't already kinda giving up the ghost, I might have given it a buy -- but it was already difficult enough playing it on a tablet, a smaller phone might have been an exercise in masochism.

Cute masochism, mind you, but masochism nonetheless XD

• Cassette Boy

This was the final game that I played during Tokyo Game Dungeon. A 2D/3D RPG, where you can spin your view around, and changes in perspective influence the game (the idea is that anything that is hidden disappears).

This game is already released, apparently won tons of prizes, and has very high production values, but... of all the games I played, was the one big dud actually :-(

That is the classical problems with text-heavy RPGs in events: What is fun to do by yourself (reading a lot of text), is not so fun when you are sitting in a loud table with friends who want to check the other tables and you just want to get a quick idea of what this game is about anyway. Oh well.

There is actually an steam collection listing many of the games that were shown in the event. Most of the games are not actually available, but wishlisting games on steam is a huge help for indie game developers.

If you are ever in Tokyo, I highly recommend going to this event. They organize it four times a year, the next one is supposed to be during the Golden Week, so I guess it will be much more full. To think of it, last time I've been to TGD it was during golden week too, and it was packed. That time I feel like I played more experimental stuff (like a game that you controlled by shouting), while this time I played games that are more similar to what I play normally.

If I was a little less awkward, I wish I could actually spend more time chatting with the exhibitors. Usually I end up just asking what tools they used to make the games, or something about a mechanic or two that I liked... something to work on.