The Best of PAX East 2023

Even though the multi-city video game expo PAX had already returned to being an in-person event in 2022, talking to developers and attendees at PAX East in Boston this year, it was easy to feel as if 2023 marked the convention’s true return to form.

There was irony, though, in the fact that while the crowds came back in droves, most of the big publishers stayed home, with only two deciding to throw their weight around. Nintendo set up a bright, friendly space to play Mario and Yoshi games, as well as hosted tournaments for Splatoon 3 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. (They also parked a massive Link statue for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom right at the entrance of the convention center, though they didn’t show anything from the game.) And Square Enix presented jam-packed panels for both Final Fantasy XIV and XVI. Capcom also let Street Fighter 6 be the ambassador for a few CPU/GPU manufacturers at the show, but the focus there was on the hardware, not the game.

And yet, the absence of so many major publishers from the convention, and a time when so many AAA games are increasingly risk-averse, was a blessing, as most years they tend to collectively suck up all the oxygen in a room. This year, much space was made for smaller titles looking to find their audience, allowing them to shine brighter and at the perfect time. And it must be said that many of those experiments—mostly for the better—looked to still-untapped elements of gaming’s past for their sources of inspiration.

Konami’s continued failure to do anything meaningful with Castlevania—at least beyond the beautiful, anarcho-gothic Netflix series—has left it up to many an indie developer to admirably fill in the gaps, with everything from Inti Creates’s Gal Gun series putting a kawaii spin on Castlevania’s aesthetic and game mechanics with the recent Grim Guardians: Demon Purge, to Berzerk Studios’s Infernax being the first game to truly refine and perfect the mood, tone, and mechanics of the far-ahead-of-its-time Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. (Infernax has been out since 2022, but the upcoming couch co-op update, in which our main character’s squire can now provide backup from the start, makes an excellent but hard game more accessible and inviting.)

And then there’s delightfully weird hybrids like the Deep End Games’s Romancelvania. The game gathered crowds at its tiny showcase all weekend, its art style promising all the dramatic bishonen posing and malaise of Castlevania’s Alucard. And it asked the simple question: Why hasn’t Lord Dracula gotten on the apps yet? Romancelvania starts out like a loving homage to and continuation of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow’s jaw-dropping ending, bringing Dracula literally crashing into the modern day, but his good pal Death decides that he’s had enough of watching Dracula mope around a dusty, deadly castle, and finds him—or her—a wild assortment of horned-up demons, monsters, and mythological creatures to potentially hook up with.

Turning Castlevania into a dating sim could’ve been utterly ridiculous, and it often is, but the sincerity of all the best modern dating sims is also present here, and it’s the game’s selling point. It can’t measure up to the likes of Symphony of the Night as a platformer, but its various supernatural freaks and the vampire who loves them are just as fun to get to know.

Possibly the most polished and perfect of those titles tipping their hats to Castlevania is Yacht Club Games’s Mina the Hollower. Finally managing to slip out from Shovel Knight’s unexpectedly long shadow, Yacht Club introduces us to the titular Mina, an adorable burrowing rodent who also happens to be a brilliant scientist who’s dedicated her life to fighting the forces of darkness. Putting even Castlevania aside, there was no shortage of games on the show floor aping the style and feel of your average NES game circa 1989, but Mina the Hollower, like Shovel Knight before it, is the rare game that would have felt like an instant classic back then, and it boasts enough creativity and immaculate design choices to feel like a masterpiece of 8-bit horror-fantasy in 2023, and all without spilling a single drop of the red stuff.

Elsewhere, creaky ’90s franchises like Alone in the Dark and Outcast are being resurrected by THQ. The Alone in the Dark remake’s demo felt a little like an attempt at doing what Capcom did with Resident Evil 7’s Kitchen demo, and despite being abrupt in execution, it managed to intrigue, especially with turn-of-the-century New Orleans as a backdrop, and the dual protagonists introduced at the end. As for Outcast 2, it feels a bit more like a game lost in time: a big open-world shooter akin to Warframe, with one of the best gliding mechanics since Rocksteady’s Arkham titles, but with a trademark mid-’90s square-jawed snark machine for a protagonist. That mix of new-school gameplay and old-school approach to narrative can work—that Devolver Digital and Flying Wild Hog managed to make something even remotely worthwhile out of the mind-blowingly racist Shadow Warrior franchise is a tiny miracle—but as it stands, Outcast 2’s demo felt too regressive in too many ways to make a huge splash.

THQ has a much more fertile gold mine on its hands with Three Fields’s Wreckreation, the next step in the studio’s noble work in keeping the spirit of chaotic arcade racer Burnout alive. It’s a rather sizable step as well. Not only does it play and feel like Burnout Revenge reborn, with blisteringly fast speed and a focus on violently delivering every other vehicle on the road into the loving arms of the guard rails, but there’s more than a little bit of Burnout Paradise floating around in its blood. There’s an open world to explore and mold to your liking, with the player being able to actively change weather and traffic patterns on the fly and accept races at any time, as well as a Remix mode where you can place ramps and blocks in the way of players and the finish. It’s all extremely intuitive, and, more importantly, it’s joyous in ways that far too many modern racing titles aren’t, given their constant pursuit of realism.

There was also no shortage of new old-school turn-based RPGs on the floor, many of them loving, reverent takes on the work of the Square Enix of old. The most impressive was Necrosoft’s Demonschool, a tactical turn-based RPG about a group of high schoolers that plays like Persona crossed with Final Fantasy Tactics, but whose laugh-out-loud funny writing, giallo-meets-anime art direction, and impressively horrific supernatural elements make the whole experience feel more like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode directed by Dario Argento.

PAX also brought not one, but two RPGs based around the world of wrestling that stood out from the crowd: TicToc Games’s Wrestle Story and MegaCat Studios’s WrestleQuest. As expected, combat in both games takes place inside the squared circle, with an endless number of hyperreal variants of real-life wrestling moves and finishers. Both know the value of trash talk to weaken opponents. Both owe a lot to Paper Mario in terms of how turn-based combat plays out, with extra prompts to do extra damage during an attack. Where they differ is more in tone.

Wrestle Story goes for a bright, blocky, Cartoon Network-style presentation that feels more like the American cousin to Drinkbox’s Guacamelee! than anything else. The tone is cheesy but in an endearing way. As for WrestleQuest, it means business in a different way, with not just a slew of big-name wrestlers, living and dead, showing up and showing out—ranging from old-schoolers like Macho Man Randy Savage and Andre the Giant to still-active vets like Jeff Jarrett—but a story that weaves in and out of kayfabe on a moment-to-moment basis. This is a wild, brash look at the static between athletes in the ring, and the backstage politics that go into why one wrestler might get a push over the other, and when it’s time for an aging one to retire.

Both Wrestle Story and WrestleQuest, though, embrace the over-the-top, theatrical nature of wrestling, and overflow with love for the stagecraft. Surrounded on all sides by all manner of RPGs full of anime faces questing to defeat all-consuming evil through the power of friendship and crystals, these two were a welcome alternative on the show floor.

Indeed, it wasn’t hard to find games that approached their respective genres from a much less bombastic angle on the show floor, though the lack of flash and flair seemed to make more than a few indie developers feel skittish. DigixArt’s Road 96 is an excellent little dialogue-driven narrative anthology following several kids in the mid-’90s trying to hitchhike their way out of a fictional nation that’s just gone full fascist. One would never guess that based on the demo brought for the prequel DLC, Mile 0, consisting of two raucous, maximalist dream sequences in which two prominent characters run and skateboard their way through their worst authoritarian nightmares, one of which was hilariously underscored by the Offspring’s “All I Want.”

Going off of the demo, one might assume that Road 96 is a musical action game akin to 2019’s dazzling Sayonara Wild Hearts. That’s not to say the dream sequences weren’t fun, but they don’t accurately represent the dialogue-driven game the developers have assured Mile 0 still is. And yet, Digixart felt this is what they had to bring to stand out, and they may have had a point, with their tiny section being sandwiched between the System Shock remake and Dead Island 2.

It was a common refrain from many of the smaller booths to feel the pressure of flashing up a much calmer experience to try and grab people’s attention. For example, Orangutan Matter’s Unleaving, an early-in-development Limbo-like platformer, didn’t need much help catching the eyes of the crowd with its beautiful, hand-painted art style, but aside from having one of the developers paint the backgrounds live on the show floor, there weren’t a lot of ways to gloss that up and, honestly, they shouldn’t have to. No small amount of effort has been made in recent years from publishers to give so-called “cozy” games their own space to thrive during Nintendo Directs, State of Play, and the like. That effort should translate to physical spaces as well.

Fortunately, Chorus Worldwide had no such trepidation, presenting their games as a much more chill corner for not just narrative experiences, but some of the best writing the show floor had to offer. Coffee Talk was overshadowed during the pandemic by Animal Crossing as everyone’s go-to “everyone remain calm” experience, but it did find its audience, and Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly promises to deliver everything that made the first title such a lovely experience. Lo-fi beats, endlessly chatty mythical company—the demo showcased a satyr influencer, and a banshee who wants to break into the music industry—and, of course, a fine collection of warm exotic drinks that you wish you could find in the real world.

The demo for Read Only Memories sequel Neurodiver goes a bit more twee than one might expect given how its predecessor delved into some surprisingly heavy territory. It’s an all too brief intro to our new protagonist, her mind-probing worm buddy, and the massive government laboratory where she works. That said, it’s a tone that matches the neon-colored aesthetic, and, far as PAX goes, it made for a much stronger fit with their other offerings.

The star of Chorus Worldwide’s booth, however, was a new game called Frank & Drake, a point-and-click adventure from Appnormals Team. Rendered in Waking Life-style rotoscope animation, the game tells the story of two men. One of them is the amnesiac assistant of an apartment’s superintendent whose day to day involves collecting rent, doing repairs, and having deep conversations with the hallucinatory animals that manifest before his very eyes from time to time. His routine gets disrupted one day by his new roommate, Drake, who only leaves his bedroom at night, and has a strange aversion to any sort of sunlight.

Even as coy as the game plays with the obvious fact that Drake is a vampire, there’s a fascinating asynchronous style to the storytelling. The core gameplay loop involves the typical “click everything flashy” exploration style of an adventure game, but the crux of the narrative involves the two men trying to find common ground and coexist with physical and mental illnesses and such opposing schedules that the whole of their communication happens through Post-it Notes on their fridge. It was the longest demo at Chorus’s booth, as well as their most fascinating title.

Despite a meager AAA presence, two major IPs still delivered a few surprises of their own. Focus Entertainment’s new Aliens game, Dark Descent, had folks chattering all weekend, boiling down the pitch as “XCOM but with Aliens.” And that mashup was a bigger slam dunk than one might expect, at least given just how little so much Aliens-based media captures the horror at the heart of James Cameron’s classic beyond the guns and the marines-in-space premise.

Even with a squad of ultimate badasses outfitted with pulse rifles and flamethrowers, any close encounter with the Xenomorphs does major damage, both physical and psychological, with a trauma mechanic built in where a scared soldier is an ineffective one. Half the play time is spent finding solace in mess halls and bunks, manually having to seal their doors shut for safety’s sake to heal and come up with plans of action before walking out into unknown, unmapped corridors.

Unlike most games based on Aliens, that famous radar ping at last feels like a blood-chilling threat, a harbinger of terror waiting somewhere in the darkness. I attempted the final challenge of the demo—setting up sentry guns to overcome waves of the bastards—multiple times before surrendering. Not because it wasn’t fun, but because the tension of it all was starting to raise my blood pressure. Based on what I played, Dark Descent isn’t quite the Alien Isolation sequel that the world has needed for nearly a decade now, but it’s worthy of the license.

On the flipside is Daedelic’s Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which will be a test of the now-famous meme about wanting shorter games with worse graphics. It very much looks and acts like a lost PS3 tie-in game in everything from its cinematics, to its Uncharted-style controls and platforming, to the way in which you sneak around. And in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s a big ask to put Peter Jackson’s films out of mind, especially given that Gollum and Gandalf don’t exactly bring to mind Andy Serkis and Ian McKellen’s iconic takes on the characters.

Where the game manages to impress is in its approach to Gollum’s psychology. It treats Smeagol as a separate character, an inescapable second being who can choose to defy an order given by an orc, who feels the guilt over the destruction that Gollum may cause, who swoops in to beg for mercy when in danger, and, most interestingly, who must be consulted during dialogue trees, where gaining agreement between Gollum and Smeagol is the only way to get a major decision to stick. Even with some aging mechanics, the game is a unique take on Middle-Earth that, at least in the wake of Amazon’s overwritten TV series, feels like some kind of breath of fresh air.

With all of those experiences on the show floor, to go from there to Final Fantasy XVI panel in an auditorium three floors up felt like flying to another planet. Unrestrained by budget, the sheer visual extravagance of Square Enix’s flagship franchise compared to everything else during the convention was culture shock at its most jarring, an experience of eye-popping dazzle and polish, though, ironically, this was the panel where the game’s producer, Yoshida Naoki, seemed absolutely terrified of the game crashing during the livestream.

That absolutely isn’t to say the game didn’t look fantastic. The much-vaunted addition of Devil May Cry 5’s combat director to the game’s staff to make battles fully real time is all over the thing, as evidenced by the absolutely devastating attacks and the way that the screen is bathed in magical flames, all of which looks like it was achieved with the flick of a wrist. That’s to say nothing of the Eikon (read: FFXVI’s summons) battles, where the main cast fully inhabits massive kaiju-sized monsters to take on other monsters, some the same size, and some the size of a city. The thought was a bit inescapable, especially with a specific rail-shooter battle involving Phoenix following an enemy into a pit, that this feels like the game that Bayonetta 3 was trying to be on maybe a fraction of the budget and horsepower.

Even as functionally and visually impressive as FFXVI felt to these eyes, it didn’t escape anyone that we still know so little of our hero Clive, beyond his name and the kingdoms of his world. That sense of obfuscation, where a game can hide this much about itself and still have a good chance of selling, is a privilege that games can only indulge in at this particular AAA level.

As I type these words, news has come out that primary work on FFXVI is complete. For a game this huge to not come in hot is near miraculous in this day and age, and even more of a sign that Square Enix may have knocked this one out of the park. But this is a game that sells itself, at a conference for games that all have to fight tooth and nail for every player they get. Here at PAX, if nowhere else, a game like FFXVI feels like a spectacular oddity, but to the convention’s credit, it’s an oddity that lives alongside its smaller, weirder, scrappier brethren, not “instead of.” Attending PAX was a strong reminder that artistry is still very much alive in this industry. You don’t even have to look terribly far beyond the AAA veil to experience it.

PAX East ran from March 23—26.