You’ve read about how triple-A will define your next year - now find out why Xbox One’s indie lineup could end up putting all that in the shade
There was a time, a few years back, where even the most casual observer could tell you what 'indie game' meant: "It's like Mario, but the story's probably about the creator's folks getting divorced, or the outbreak of SARS or something." Thanks to legions of mistyeyed 16-bit enthusiasts, each as eager as the last to prove that the medium could serve to offer better stories than 'kill a lizard, kiss a woman', the retro, 2D, plaintive platformer certainly had its time in the sun - not least on Xbox 360. Think back to the very best of XBLA and you'll find games that took a single well-worn genre and warped one piece of its make-up into an unfamiliar shape - Braid (mechanics), Fez (perspective), Super Meat Boy (difficulty) and Limbo (colour) all pulled this trick. And it was a great one, proof that the ingenuity of creators more interested in challenging players than indulging them could be successful (and, yes, profitable - an inside source told us Jonathan Blow could afford to build an actual time machine, which he did and now uses to fly to his detractors' births and shout at their parents about the importance of a solid education in philosophy).
But just over a year into the new console's life and Xbox One's indie creators already seem to be taking a very different approach. The focus on creative, unexpected takes on familiar styles tends to remain - if you're going to get ahead, after all, make sure you show off - but those genres, the people making the games and the way you play them is a far cry from the narrow fare of XBLA and the Wild West-meets-lingerie catalogue that comprised the XBLIG storefront. That's never clearer than in looking at the raft of indie releases scheduled for next year. While 2015's blockbusters continue to look like sparklier versions of what we've had before, Xbox One's lesser-heralded download games aren't just aiming to surprise us, but show us ways of playing we'd never thought of, let alone tried.
Anything but Nirvana
Take Nevermind, the recently Kickstarted project from Flying Mollusk. Not only does the game directly utilise Xbox One's increasingly boondoggle-y party piece, Kinect, it takes one of its most opaque features as the core of its gameplay.
A horror game that sets you scrabbling about in the minds of trauma victims, it's already a (literally) heady mix of Psychonauts and Eternal Darkness, the dreamlike quality meaning it can shift levels and rules at a whim - but that's ignoring why it's shifting them that way.
Using Kinect's ability to map a player's heart rate through changes in the colour and heat of their skin, Nevermind effectively keeps track of how scared you are - and uses that to scare you further. Solving a quick word puzzle is far harder when the sudden appearance of a pounding soundtrack jolts you into being drowned in milk symbolic of the day your patient's father committed suicide, it turns out. The game turns you into a recursive difficulty-level selector, your own body and its biological wavering working against you as you play. There is nothing else like it.
That focus on devs thinking around how to use the hardware given to them is a major theme of next year's games. #IDARB is most famous for being the game made entirely to specifications set by Twitter - ending up as a frantic multiplayer sports game, pitched somewhere between football and a bar brawl. We're more interested, however, in the way it uses both Xbox One's intended always-online functionality and the growth of eSports to its advantage.
Every match played is given a unique Twitter hashtag and broadcast online - spectators can use that to comment on the game (which scrolls along the bottom of the screen as you play, like an even more banal Sky Sports News ticker) or invoke Hashbombs, a myriad of specific commands that can, say, cause it to snow, turn the match into a disco or summon monsters. It's as if a real-life sports crowd were co-ordinating insane, wondrous flash mobs instead of just swearing at the more talented men and women they've paid to watch.
That more pragmatic thinking about how to use the console itself pops up all over the place in next year's releases. Threesi is a viciously addictive little thing - an ex-mobile game that's part-Sudoku and part-child's slide puzzle. Perhaps realising that it's a little slight for a console, developer Sirvo LLC has made it specifically to sit in the cosy confines of Xbox One's Snap cutaway, meaning you can watch TV, movies or - if you're particularly lonely - your friends' activity as you swap and combo the little, grinning cards in the corner.
And, of course, there's that silently chugging graphical engine buried inside your big black box. Indie games have previously tended towards art style over graphical fidelity, but titles such as SeithCG's Ghost of a Tale are beginning to change that perception.
Its action-adventure debut, the story of a medieval mouse on a journey of terror and discovery, wouldn't be quite the same without its looks. The one-man dev team is an ex-Hollywood animator, and his exaggerated character models (pure Zelda) and beguilingly dank Dark Ages world (drawing a lot from the Souls series, we'd wager) speak to that experience. The whole thing is a wonder to look at, something we're not particularly used to saying about indies.
Bonus points
In part, that comes down to what Microsoft itself is doing to tempt these developers in. ID@Xbox, the programme set up as part-publisher, part-hands-on helpline for Xbox One's indies is remarkably open and generous. The fact that any developer accepted onto it is given a free devkit, access to the Unity engine's Xbox One functionality and (probably) a full-body massage from a Microsoft employee might well account for why recent conferences have seen programme director Chris Charla spitting out huge lists of indie superstars coming to the store that many assumed would never leave Steam.
The striking SuperHot is almost certainly a beneficiary, given that it started life as a Unity-made game jam entry - we imagine the easy port job accounts for why it's arriving on our console before any other. An FPS smashed and reformed as a puzzler, it sees you travelling around pristine white buildings, working out how to destroy their angry red-glass denizens by using your own movement to stop, slow or speed up time. It's like the little dude from Braid was recast as Michael Douglas' character in Falling Down.
Capybara Games' Below likely falls in a similar camp. After the Canadian studio's last game, Super Time Force, this is the first time the indie stalwart has used the same publisher twice - presumably because ID@Xbox acts so unlike other publishers. The 'roguelike-like' sees tiny, vulnerable Wanderers traversing the depths of an ever-shifting island, searching for treasures and some clue as to what the hell's going on with all the building-sized metal boxes and eldritch squid beasts down there. It's dark, challenging and strange - all the hallmarks of indie royalty - but its diamond-sharp looks and lengthy time in development point to the kind of game that would have been a full-price boxed release only a few years ago.
The increasing respect for console download games, the creative freedom they offer and their relatively low costs mean that 'В-tier' games have freed themselves from the old studio-publisher relationship - reflected in the calibre of developer coming to ID@Xbox in the coming year. Game dev veteran and confirmed Very Clever Man, Chris Hecker, is bringing asymmetric spy vs sniper caper SpyParty, Mega Man creator Keiji inafune is popping up with Mighty No. 9 and giga-indie Double Fine is even using the service as a sort of publishing middle man. Tim Schafer's studio has already given us Costume Quest 2 this year, and is continuing the trend with Brad Muir's genealogical strategy outing, Massive Chalice and, if we're lucky (we've not yet received full confirmation), Boneloaf's incredible physics-brawler, Gang Beasts soon.
Unexpected ideas
That said, it's the unknowns that have us most excited for next year's indie efforts - those miniature concerns who could be working away quietly on something we've never seen before. Behold Studios' Chroma Squad has you managing the fortunes of a Sentai TV show behind the scenes, outfitting your Power Rangers (or not, given that that franchise's corporate overlords recently took a rather negative interest in the project) before 'directing' the show in strategy RPG segments. After troubled fundraising, Adventures of Pip is now definitively on its way to Xbox One. The game sees you traversing a retro world while stealing pixels from fallen enemies to evolve into a more graphically complex character, awarding you with new abilities for the trouble. Hand of Fate makes every nerd's wishes come true by turning what starts as a collectible card game into playable action-RPG combat sequences based on what you and your enemy have brought to the table.
There's a commitment to the weird at work here, and we're excited to see it bear unfamiliar fruit. The biggest trend of all, however, is in how smaller developers are now taking genres we have all been playing for years, usually made by only the biggest developers, and repurposing them.
Strategy games, oddly, seem to be getting a lot of love. Besides Massive Chalice and Chroma Squad, we've also seen The Behemoth - maker of Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theater - announce Game 4, a strategy RPG that seeks to address one issue that the genre's rarely, if ever, dealt with: speed. While planning moves is still done unit-by-unit, entire teams resolve their moves simultaneously (bringing some of Civilization's macrostrategy down to a far smaller level), and characters assign their own attackers based on who's in range. It's a swift, simple change, designed to make the game feel as frantic as it is deliberate - but if it all sounds a little dry, let us tell you that the game's world is being pummelled by reality-distorting bear blood that means you'll as often be battling enemies with Uzis as you will ancient warriors mounted on vicious spider-woman hybrid beasts.
On the real-time end of strategy, we have the stylish There Came an Echo - a squad-combat RTS controlled entirely with voice commands that, as a byproduct, forces you to deal with backchat from its star, Wil Wheaton. If you want something with a tad larger scope, there's Habitat: A Thousand Generations in Orbit, a physics-based space survival game that has you building a functional space station in Earth's orbit by harvesting and repurposing jettisoned, floating junk, while avoiding being taken out, Gravity-style, by rival stations.
These are all deft tweaks to established ideas, but we can't help but think indies are latching onto strategy because it's a manageable genre, more interested in the mechanics of the action than its appearance. What if an indie took a swing at, say, a full JRPG? Well, then you have Earthlock: Festival of Magic, which combines classic turn-based party combat with some cute innovations (pairing characters for fewer turns but greater damage, attack chains and a story that doesn't make you want to burn the nearest fantasy novel), plus a Harvest Moon crafting/growing system.
Crossing platforms
Perhaps you're jealous of PC owners, with their ganks, junglers and incredibly hostile communities? Take a look at Smite, the only MoBA we've seen that, with its over-the-shoulder view, action mechanics and slight skew towards the absurd, could legitimately work on console. Polish studio the Farm 51 is working on a new take on first-person shooting, Get Even. This combines two campaigns that intersect - invisibly - online, designed to make you question whether you're fighting AI or real people (pro tip: the real people will be the ones drawing crude anatomical diagrams on the walls in bulletholes) as well as what seems to be a detective experience, examining crime scenes before gunning down whoever's left in them. Pathologic turns the shooting into an absolute last resort, as you're asked to solve the surreal, grotesque mystery of a plague spreading across a quarantined town.
The neon-beautiful Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime transfers the difficulty of a top-down shooter from battling enemies to battling with the ship's controls, as you and a co-op partner run around your pink Death Star-alike to take control of engines, shields and thrusters, all while trying to swoop by and save the galaxy's cute denizens.
Indie fighting games have been picking up pace for a few years now, with Skullgirls and Divekick both making their mark on that hugely insular genre, but next year's Rivals of Aether is aiming at a very different fighting franchise - it's a refined, more precise pixel-art take on Super Smash Bros (and it looks a damn sight better than that disgrace Sony unleashed a few years back).
And then, of course, we have the platformers. Indie's home ground might be familiar, but it's by no means played out. Studio MDHR is bringing Cuphead, a startlingly good-looking run 'n' gun that draws as much on early animation (think Steamboat Willie in colour) as it does arcade classics. Less traditionally, Dutch university students-turned-game devs, Through Games, are bringing FRU, a Kinect-based platformer that uses your projected silhouette to reveal hidden layers, items and exits.
As if to bring us full circle, Playdead Games - creator of Limbo - is returning to give Xbox One its long-awaited followup. We know very little about it at this point (and believe us, Playdead isn't giving up any goods right now), but the debut trailer suggests that it wallows in the same themes that its monochrome predecessor pioneered, but livens things up with bustling 2.5D backgrounds, an ominous sci-fi prison camp vibe and what looks like a greater emphasis on stealth mechanics.
The fact that we're still getting these kinds of games, ones we're used to from indie developers, but that they're a mere piece of Xbox One's 2015 puzzle, is very much the point. The sheer enthusiasm of smaller devs (and even bigger ones taking a new business route) in just trying new things comes through in the lineup - and the staggering amount we've had to leave out for space reasons should give you some clue as to how much new stuff is on its way.
it's just as easy to say what an indie game is these days as it was a few years ago - it's just that the definition is a hell of a lot broader now. They form the basis of an entirely new level of games for Xbox One, perhaps best explained by looking at your console as two very separate pieces. Titanic publishers and developers are iterating on their established templates in your disk tray, but it's on your hard drive that all the inventions are being made.
by Joe Skrebels