Every year a ravenous horde descends on Seattle, Washington, devouring everything in its path like a biblical plague, leaving behind nothing but scattered bones, plastic badges, and free lanyards. It calls itself PAX West. The horde’s hunger is an endless hunger for games of all sorts, but this year included a savory feast of indie titles. Here are our picks for the best indie games of PAX West 2017. Buckle up — it’s gonna get weird.
You’re a hole in the ground. You swallow small objects to get bigger, to swallow bigger objects — sometimes snakes, sometimes fire. Also, there are talking animals, a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and a raccoon who broke his quad-copter. It’s a lot to take in. There’s nothing that can prepare you for Donut County besides playing Donut County, but there’s a unique charm to the store here that is wholly unexpected.
The most surprising part of the game is the narrative it uses to tell its story. This isn’t just Katamari Damacy with a different coat of paint. There’s a tale here, a mystery to be solved, a parable about the perils of donuts, and a trash panda who’s in way over his head.
Donut County will be coming out later this year on PC and iOS.
In Moss, a VR game, you can befriend an adorable mouse warrior named Quill, and go on adventures together. Need we say more?
We covered this one at E3, but it deserves another mention, because this game was an absolute sensation at PAX West. Players of all ages were hooked on this game, all because of the charming little protagonist, Quill.
You help Quill as she fights her way through equally adorable enemies, and puzzles her way through dungeons
Moss developer Polyarc hid a few of its Quill figurines throughout the show floor, encouraging Twitter followers to search them out like tiny idols to a forgotten mouse goddess. This meant some enterprising fans took to stalking Polyarc developers all around the Washington State Convention Center, in hopes of seeing where next they would hide one of the precious sword-wielding rodentia.
The game itself is unusual for a PSVR title, in that it’s not a shooter or a tourism app. In fact, it’s a third person adventure game where you help Quill as she fights her way through equally adorable enemies, and puzzles her way through dungeons. You are her shepherd, her guardian, and her best friend.
Moss will arrive on PSVR in Winter 2017.
Wattam. Go ahead and Google it, we’ll wait.
Did you watch the video? Do you understand what the game is about? Okay. Let’s just start at the beginning. You’re a luminescent green cube. You sit in a field of grass. You have a hat. You come across a rock. The rock has arms now, and a face, and it wants to hold your hand.
The game only gets weirder from there. After you hang out with the rock for a while, another, larger rock wakes up, and you’re friends now. The same thing happens a few times before the pooping begins.
Yeah, there’s a big mouth, and when it eats things it, umm, excretes. Then the excrement grows arms, and it’s also your friend now.
There’s something refreshing about hopping into a game that tells you the bare minimum you need to accomplish a goal, and lets you figure it out on your own. That’s Wattam in a nutshell. It’s a therapeutic, relaxing game about befriending rocks, trees, and berries — then eating them.
Oh, and one other thing. It’s designed by Keita Takahashi, best known for the famously odd and awesome Katamari Damacy. Yes, that’s the second Katamari reference in this article, which should tell you just how weird PAX West was.
Wattam will likely come out in 2018, on PC and PS4.
Stories inform every aspect of our lives, from entertainment like books, movies, and TV, to the stories we tell ourselves about where we live, and who we are. Stories are malleable. They change with each telling, exchanging literal truth for figurative truth. That’s one piece of the puzzle that is Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.
It’s the kind of game that stirs your curiosity, and rewards it at every turn.
The trailer will give you a feel for the game, its spirit and language, but there’s a lot more here than we can unpack in a couple blurbs. At its heart, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a game about stories, and it’s your job in the game to keep these stories alive, to tell them and hear them told, transformed as they travel across dustbowl-era middle America.
It’s a bizarre game, but deeply satisfying. Playing it feels like cracking open a dog-eared book with a couple fingers of bourbon close at hand. It’s the kind of game that stirs your curiosity, and rewards it at every turn.
Where the Water Tastes like Wine is slated for release in 2017 on PC and MacOS, with other platforms TBA.
In Ooblets you’ll spend a lot of your time gardening. You’ll plant some seeds, and watch ‘em grow into adorable, smiling little fruits and veggies. Then, when they’re ripe, you’ll pluck them from the earth and teach them how to fight.
Ooblets has been making the rounds at a few conventions, and each time it seems to pick up a few loyal followers who trail behind in its wake like a conga line of Shrumbos, Clickyclaws, and Glanters. Those are a few of my favorite Ooblets, and just like those of us eagerly anticipating the release of this game, they’ll trail around behind you as you walk around town introducing them to your neighbors.
Look around, and you’ll see the most common description of Ooblets is something to the effect of Pokemon meets Stardew Valley. That’s a good entry point, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Once you get your hands on this game, it becomes clear this is something new, original, and engaging on its own merits. Plus, neither of those games feature dancing nearly as prominently as Ooblets. Just check out these moves.
Ooblets doesn’t have a set release date just yet, but it will be coming out on PC and Xbox One.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.