This year’s Game Developers Conference has been a tense one. International travel anxiety, panels full of AI tech talks, and an emphasis on consumers over creators have all cast a shadow over what’s supposed to be an important annual watering hole for developers to gather at. But even in that mess, the industry’s best qualities have still found a way to poke through. This year’s conference came with countless demos for upcoming games that show just how much creativity real humans still have in the tank.
I spent this week playing as many of those games as we could at GDC and the events orbiting it in San Francisco. Whether I was hunting undead CEOs or managing sibling rivalries, I walked away from the conference with plenty of reasons to believe that developers can find a path forward in a tumultuous time. These are some of the best games I played at GDC this year — and I promise that no two of them will look quite the same. (Note: these picks are in alphabetical order, and the numbers do not imply a ranking here.)
1
At Fate’s End
Ever since developer Thunder Lotus made a name for itself in 2020 with Spiritfarer, I’ve been dying to see the indie studio’s next narrative-driven project. That’s finally coming this year with At Fate’s End, and it’s living up to expectations so far. A 40-minute demo toured me through a very different kind of 2D action-adventure game centered around the inner politics of a fantasy succession story. There are tense duels against bosses and tons of exploration, but traditional 2D Metroidvania staples take a backseat to creative narrative components that get experimental with the genre. Mental battles are as important as physical ones, and environmental observation fuels a deduction component that puts the game’s mysteries front and center. It was one of the longest demo I played during the week, but also the one that I wished I could keep picking away at.
2
Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor
Imagine your average boomer shooter. Blast through waves of undead monsters and get some explosive feedback, right? Now imagine that, but your main character heals their mental health between shots by smoking a big blunt. That visual gets you partway towards understanding the appeal of Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor. The hand-drawn first-person shooter is a wonderfully irreverent work of anticapitalist angst, and players shoot their way up the corporate ladder of the dreaded Lichcorp in order to take down its evil CEO. It’s about as loud and in-your-face as games get, and that makes for a spirited jolt of corporate catharsis.
3
Dead as Disco
All action games have a rhythm to their combat, even if you’re not explicitly punching along to a beat. Dead as Disco understands that and builds a stylish brawler around it. The upcoming game plays like a cross between Hi-Fi Rush and the Batman: Arkham series. It’s a fluid action game where you do more damage if you happen to punch along to the background music. My demo had me pummeling enemies with Batman-like combos as a cover of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” played. That was enough to grab my attention, but what’s really exciting about Dead as Disco is that players will be able to import any music they want into the game and fight along to it. If developer Brain Jar Games can pull that feat off, it might just have a hit on its hands.
4
Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition
Yeah, I mean, it’s Elden Ring. What do you expect? The Switch 2 port of FromSoftware’s critically acclaimed action RPG actually runs much better on the console than we thought it would (based on the delay and initial reports), which is terrible news for me. Am I going to put another 100 hours into this thing just so I can slowly roll dodge around as Tarnished Edition’s new heavy knight. Maybe! Who is going to stop me!?
5
Fugue Shot
Fugue Shot has one of those ingenious elevator pitches that you just wish you thought of first. It’s a roguelike where each level is a different arcade game. Like a mix between UFO 50 and Balatro, the indie game has players clearing stages in different minigames of escalating complexity while crafting a build through passive perks. In my session, I was dealt an underwater minigame where I had to blow bubbles up as large as I could without fish popping them, an interstellar game where I dodged around stars, and a puzzle game where I had to place bumpers around a board and destroy them by ricocheting bullets off of them. Other demos I saw tossed players into top-down, Zelda-like levels instead. It’s a clever idea for a roguelike made for people who love bite-sized arcade game design.
6
Grindset T.V.
If you loved last year’s trippy Skate Story, you’ll want to keep as many eyes as possible on Grindeset T.V. The indescribable game by Michael Overton Brown is a psychedelic platformer where you control a corporate delivery person who gets around exclusively by grinding on rails. In my demo, I had to jump from rail to rail at high speeds while chucking packages at Gods. It’s like Paperboy was remade by aliens in 9200 AD. With a strange story about the worst parts of religious institutions and corporations fusing into one, Grindset T.V. looks like it will deliver high-speed action and social commentary at the same decibel level.
7
Hoa 2
If you’re familiar with the first Hoa game, then you know just about as much as Hoa 2 as someone who never touched it. The sequel takes that 2D puzzle-platformer and opens it up into a 3D world with more space to explore. It still has gentle visuals, but this time they’re even more watercolor-like and evoke Studio Ghibli’s films. My introduction to it was nice and breezy, as I platformed off of friendly crabs and solved pipe-connecting puzzles to collect the doohickeys I needed to progress. None of it was too complex, but there’s a whimsy and kindness to Hoa 2 that allowed me to go on a little vacation during a high-stress week of GDC.
8
Mina the Hollower
I thought I knew exactly what to expect from Yacht Club’s latest game, Mina the Hollower. It looked like a traditional ode to top-down Zelda games, specifically from the Game Boy era. While I did get some of that familiar nostalgia, I was taken aback by how much more there is to the deceptively deep indie. With its nonlinear structure and a pixel-art world populated by secrets, it feels like the kind of adventure game that you can just get lost in as you thoroughly poke around every single screen. But what surprised me most of all is just how damn funny it can be. From gaining stats by “boning up” to getting jump-scared by a town jester who’s a little too overeager to share their latest joke they just thought up, there’s already so much distinct personality in a game that’s doing much more than aping Link’s Awakening.
9
Screenbound
If Mina the Hollower is an ode to Game Boy games, Screenbound is an homage to the handheld itself. The perspective-shifting puzzle-platformer has you exploring a 3D world and a 2D interpretation of it that appears on a handheld console that you’re holding. It has shades of Viewfinder and Fez, deconstructing the world in ways that feel physically impossible. During my demo, I discovered hidden doors in the 3D world by seeing them on my 2D screen, and crossed chasms by grabbing balloons that I could only see on my handheld device. Later, my screen displayed the world as a top-down Zelda-like adventure instead of a 2D side-scroller, again changing how I saw my 3D surroundings. If Screenbound can keep that trick feeling fresh to the end, it should be a clever treat.
10
Tournamentris
I’m a sucker for a traditional puzzle game with a very unusual twist, and that’s exactly what you get with Tournamentris. It’s your standard matching game where a well fills up with numbered squares that you must connect to destroy them, not so dissimilar to Dr. Mario. The twist is that you pair blocks by dropping brackets on top of them, making your well look like a March Madness tournament. Naturally, you can get even more points by linking together more complex brackets and closing them off by dropping a crown on top of them. It’s a hard game to explain considering that it’s doing something fairly minimalist with its art, but it’s just weird enough to make for a fun twist on a classic formula.
