Greetings! I… am Lotus Prince,
A Let’s Player who’s been recording games for over a decade, and playing games for even longer!
I particularly enjoy horror and soulslike titles, but play a wide variety of genres on top of those. What follows is the top five indie games that I enjoyed this year.
Blasphemous
I’ve developed a love for soulslikes ever since Demon’s Souls on the PS3, and since they’ve risen in popularity, 2D soulslikes have been created, as well. It’s not too much of a stretch, as the Souls games are already effectively 3D Metroidvanias, so to make a 2D soulslike, you just need to tweak a traditional Metroidvania by adding something like being able to collect your experience at the point where you died, or including somewhat vague storytelling that makes sense if you observe the environment around you.
Blasphemous does this, but with the added twist of including allusions to Spanish folklore and rendering the game in gorgeous and expressive pixel art. You are a nameless person, simply called the Penitent One. What sin you are trying to atone for is not specified, but you navigate the game in an attempt to reach the Cradle of Affliction, fighting bosses and undergoing intentional humiliations to be deemed worthy of the relic.
The gameplay is tight, the atmosphere is appropriately heavy, and the music fits the mood. I highly recommend playing this game, and also tackling the DLC to see more bosses and encounter the true ending.
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
A sort-of sequel to the first two No More Heroes games and a setup to the third, Travis Touchdown is attacked by a mysterious person, whom he then teams up with to enter video games in a mysterious new console that makes the action real.
When this game first came out, it was written off for its repetitive gameplay and grindy nature. However, it is a massive love letter to Suda 51’s Grasshopper Manufacture universe. There are references to Killer7, No More Heroes, Shadows of the Damned, Killer is Dead, and The Silver Case.
Travis sees or interacts with characters from all of these titles as he makes his journey, and fans of those games will rejoice to see people who haven’t made an appearance in over a decade. The gameplay may not be as fun as that of No More Heroes, but the game is still brimming with attitude and has amazing dialogue in the visual novel segments.
Anno: Mutationem
This indie game looks like a labor of love. I’ve never seen such a gorgeous marriage of pixel art and 3D environments. The game appears to be 2D, and does go fully 2D in the action segments, but it becomes apparent very early that you can go into the foreground and background as you explore your apartment building and the town outside.
You play as Ann Flores, who suffers from a rare disease that makes her dangerous to those around her, and needs to find her brother who’s gone missing while searching for a cure. During the journey, you will witness the twisted beauty and corporate misery of a cyberpunk dystopia, mastering different weapons with which to fight enemies while navigating levels that would fit in a 2D platformer.
You can mix drinks at a bar, purchase new cars, and change your outfit, all while getting to the bottom of a mystery that’s bigger than Flores’ family. I highly recommend this game for its aesthetic and gameplay, with solid voice acting to back it up.
Clock Tower 3
Clock Tower is a series that was largely relegated to the 90s, but after Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within, known in Japan as Clock Tower: Ghost Head, on the PS1, the series stopped for a while. A few years later, a new entry was made not by Human Entertainment, the company that had been making the games so far, but instead, by Capcom.
The gameplay therefore feels less like a point-and-click adventure and more like an action game, but classic elements are still there. You are still chased by stalkers and have to manage panic instead of a health. Where things get more notably different, though, is the plot. You play as Alyssa Hamilton, a student who’s just about to turn 15. Her mother has sent her a letter telling her to stay hidden until that day passes. This seems strange until a mysterious man appears, and supernatural events start occurring.
Alyssa must evade and ultimately defeat her pursuers, all while trying to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it. The older Clock Tower games were interesting in that they managed to be scary in the point-and-click format, but Clock Tower 3 increases the sense of panic with the speed and depravity of the stalkers, as well as fast-paced camerawork during their action scenes.
AI: Somnium Files
Made by the person who headed Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, AI is a visual novel that revolves around solving a murder mystery.
You play as Kaname Date, a detective who suffers from amnesia, but is still good at his job. Throughout the game, you talk to people, search for clues, and also play sections where you control a mysterious artificial intelligence, AI, who can move around in 3D dream space to attempt to look into people’s psyches to try to interpret their memories.
Date and AI make unlikely allies who form a team with a lot of heart and passion. The game does most of its communication through text and voice acting, so it’s all the more important that the story is written well, and sure enough, the branching paths are compelling and include emotional moments and plot twists that keep the player guessing and engaged the whole way through.
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