My five favorite demos from PAX East

This past weekend I was lucky enough to be able to attend PAX East for the first time and experience the gigantic celebration of gaming culture first-hand. I traded some pins, got a great picture with a Buster Sword, lost my first game of Magic: the Gathering in nearly 20 years, and met several Pikachus.

While the panels, concerts, tournaments, and meetups all contribute to the magic of the four-day event, the chance to try out a staggering number of recent and upcoming video game releases is the core that holds it all together. Out of the many that I tried, here are the standouts that I decided to put on the top of my wish list.

Get between a dragon and its hoard, but Don’t Wake the Beast

The very first demo I got my hands on was the one that most caught my eye in the lead up to the conference. Don’t Wake the Beast is a roguelite stealth game that challenges you to collect as much treasure as you possibly can from the lair of a sleeping dragon. Each pile of coins you step on causes an echoing clink that might alert the nearest skeleton guard, and each trinket you acquire will make sneaking around a bit more difficult. You’ll need to utilize timing, deliberate movements, and your trusty grappling hook to escape with your loot.

While the game will feature procedurally generated dungeons, the demo was a single abandoned castle strewn with gold coins and still-flickering candles. Using the grappling hook to smash pots and distract enemies was fun, but the biggest thrill was pointing it straight up to the ceiling and dangling above an unsuspecting guard as they patrolled down the corridor. Reaching the final treasure room upped the tension, as the enormous dragon is barely visible out the window.

Each tiny noise caused the dragon’s eyelid to open slightly, necessitating a dive behind a pile of gold. The shiniest treasure is wrapped up at the tip of the dragon’s tail, and plucking it out causes the beast to wake up in a grumpy rage. You only have a split second head start towards daylight before the dragon begins its pursuit. The sudden jolt from tense sneaking to an all-out crash retreat was fantastic, and I only made it about halfway back to the dungeon entrance before the fearsome wyrm squashed my poor would-be thief.

Give me back my zaps in co-op Bytebond

Bytebond was the co-op demo that I was most excited to try, not least because of its cute and strangely familiar rolling robot protagonists. It’s a puzzle game that uses split screen when your two characters get too far away from each other. You are tasked with fixing up an infected computer by bumbling around and zapping energy back and forth in order to open doors and solve puzzles.

After the initial joy of dashing into each other started to wear off, I could really start to see how the full game could end up being tricky but fun. Absorbing energy from a battery-like device was easy enough, but it makes your spherical avatar too large to fit through the tiny openings found all around the circuitry-based levels. Figuring out how to zip the energy back and forth was satisfying, and the controls and scenery were both terrific. With some more environments, harder puzzles, and a decent story to tie it all together, the full game could be a rolling ball of fun.

Bearnard is cuddly archer with an attitude

Bearnard caught my eye as I walked by its booth because it seemed to combine a few of my favorite features into one game: physics-based puzzles, turn-based combat, and deckbuilding. Whenever I see a “???” on a menu screen, I know I’ll be happily tinkering away with some crafting elements in order to produce some recipe or effect. That was true in the first few minutes of play, as you can combine arrows with different elemental properties to create different special effects.

You can control your bowstring to fire an arrow straight and true for maximum impact, or on a delicately looping arc to trigger an out-of-reach lever. The combat seemed just complicated enough to be interesting without being frustrating. The cherry on top for me was the writing — I am a sucker for a game with some wit, and watching Bearnard grumble around the tutorial level while making it clear that he was missing his nap struck a perfect balance with the seemingly cute forest setting.

Triple jumping never felt so cool as the platforming action in Demon Tides

Demon Tides is the sequel to the 2021 platformer Demon Turf, and the demo featured some unique characters that popped right off the screen. The controls were easy, the jumping combos we very fun without feeling too much like cheating gravity entirely, and the comic-like graphics were a welcome break from the deluge of pixels at the other demo booths.

Bouncing around in the linear tutorial area was a blast, and if the full game can live up to the extremely high bar that seems to always be set for a game that calls itself “open world”, then Demon Tides could be a mold-breaking platformer standout.

How heavy is that Gigasword, anyway?

Gigasword was the overall winner in my book, and I can’t wait for this project to be finished. As the title implies, you are a hero with an absurdly large sword tasked with solving puzzles and slaying enemies as you make your way through this 2D Metroidvania. The realism of the extra fraction of a second it takes to swing your sword (because it is enormous) resulted in the most trivial enemies becoming potentially dangerous.

The first time I hit a button and dropped the sword I nearly panicked, until I realized that the hero can jump several times higher without being weighed down by the gigantic weapon. This means that exploring the sprawling world will often involve leaving your gargantuan weapon behind in order to reach ledges and climb walls. Everything clicked for this one, including a toe-tapping retro soundtrack.

I had a chance to chat with Jack Breen, the sole developer of the project which has been in development for several years. He has handled everything from the programming to the music, and was even dressed as the main character at the Gigasword booth. He showed me a few more things he was working on adding into the game, such as epic-looking boss fights and a hidden fuzzy friend. I hope we’ll get the full version soon so I can wield a physics-accurate humongous sword while saving the world.