Upcoming Indie Highlights | GameSided Roundtable

Greetings! This is our weekly GameSided Roundtable feature, where our writers converge to provide their opinions, wishes, statements or critical thought on one general topic centered around video games. Sometimes it can be funny, sometimes it can be serious. Contemporary, classic; we hope to cover a wide variety of things in this segment as a group. If you wish to submit an idea for a GameSided Roundtable discussion topic, you can leave the editor an email at: daniel.george@fansided.com. We’ll totally give you (and your Twitter account, if applicable) a shoutout!

This week’s GameSided Roundtable topic: “What upcoming Indie gaming project are you most looking forward to?”

Keith Myers (Twitter)

Tales from the Borderlands – Telltale Games

As Telltale’s games keep being hits, they keep growing as a company. Do they still count as Indie developers? I hope so, since their latest series is my pick.

I’ve already played, and reviewed, the first chapter of Tales from the Borderlands and it left me begging for more. Now I find myself checking for release detail changes ever couple of days, especially since they’ve already push episode 2 back once. At least for now, it’s due to drop on February 10th.

What has me the most excited for this series is that the writing and voice action was tremendous in the first episode. The story is both outrageous and engrossing. The characters are all both awful and entirely likable. It feels somewhat real, even though its set in the insane world of Pandora.

Rebekah Valentine (Twitter)

I have to admit I’ve been sucked in by the hype surrounding No Man’s Sky. Everything I’ve heard and seen of it gets me excited for the game it could be. An open world space adventure, we don’t actually know much about it except that it looks beautiful, features thousands upon thousands of procedurally generated worlds and areas to explore, and is in space. The planets all have their own ecosystems, with different flora and fauna. There are different methods of travel through the universe, an online multiplayer, and an offline mode as well.

The game seems to be primarily about exploration and trying to reach the center of the universe, but I’m hoping there’s more to do than just fly around and look at the scenery. For all the hype and lovely screenshots, this is a game that could very easily not live up to anyone’s expectations. While I’m really pumped, I’m also keenly aware that I may be seriously disappointed. Fortunately, as the PC version will be out sometime after the PS4 version, I’ll be able to hear plenty of opinions before I actually purchase it.

Daniel George (Twitter)

There are quite a few upcoming Indie projects that I’m fairly interested in. Darkest Dungeon looks to bring a decidedly gothic feel to turn-based dungeon crawling RPG’s, just entering Early Access on Steam fairly recently. Below from Capy Games has the appearance of an intriguing, minimalistic adventure game, focused on a sense of scale to drive that feel of true exploration. Of course, there are Telltale’s Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands series that I’ll get to when the seasons are finished. However, it’s the sense of the relatively unknown that has me looking forward to Drift Stage the most.

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Finishing its Kickstarter drive just hours prior to this posting, what has me so keen on the project is its simplicity and its authenticity. The early soundtrack offerings feel like they’re ripped from an 80’s movie, while the drifting itself plays like it is out of an Initial D arcade cabinet. Together, combined with a decidedly pixelated mash of neon colors and 3D model assets in glorious 60 frames per second play, and you have a racer that looks to hold up both alone and on couch/online multiplayer.

Knowing there’s a career mode, however, still provides much of my skepticism. It’s not like gameplay is beholden to that aspect working out, but if it plays out much more seriously than that of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, then it would upset the niche arcadey feel that it’s currently portraying. The wait for the completion of Drift Stage’s development, however, is what will kill me the most.

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