BitSummit Day 2 Report: Giving out an award, and discovering a brand new Mega Drive game
Five more indie games we discover at the Japanese event
After the relative calm of the business-only first day, day two at Japan’s leading indie festival is naturally a much busier affair, but far from an ill-tempered one.
Despite the larger crowds, everyone was respectful of each other’s space, and there were no gurning influencers leaping in everyone’s way and generally being a bit of a pest. In short, it was about as orderly as you could hope for such a large event to be.
The controlled and composed nature of the crowds meant it was still relatively easy enough to get hands-on with a wide selection of the games on offer, which is just what I did. One of the more interesting games I checked out was Road to Empress, an FMV game telling the story of Wu Zetian, who reigned from 690-705 and is considered China’s only legitimate female emperor.
In typical FMV Choose Your Own Adventure style fashion, the game’s roughly 10-hour story has you picking different choices at key points, which either lead to you working your way up the ranks to empress or dying in any number of grisly ways.
Despite the linear nature of such a game, Road to Empress does its best to make things as user-friendly as possible by allowing you to go back through the timeline at any point, showing the choices that were available to you at each junction, and letting you replay specific points so you can choose the other option and see what happens (rather than having to start all over again if you die).
It also adds other things like a personality test (which rates you based on the choices you made first), and popularity contests where you choose how much you like each of the game’s characters and see how other players voted. It does about as much as you can do with a game of this genre and, coupled with the stunning 4K video – it’s made to the same production standards as Chinese TV dramas – it’s one FMV game fans should definitely look out for.
If 7th-century FMV games are a bit of a niche genre, the same certainly can’t be said for the action platformer. One of the highlights of the show for me was Hirogami, which is being developed by Bandai Namco’s Singapore and Malaysia studios and is set for release in a couple of months.
On paper (pun always intended) the game isn’t wildly original – you explore a variety of 3D stages, taking on enemies and acquiring powers which can then be used to overcome previously impassable obstacles – but it’s the origami-style presentation which gives it an added edge.
You play as Hiro, a paper chap who has mastered the art of folding and has the ability to transform into different shapes. This includes unfolding into a flat sheet of A4, which can be used for gliding through the air or picking up height in air currents.
The aim is to cleanse the land’s creatures of the Blight which has taken over their mind, which in turn unlocks their abilities. Early on, for example, there’s a boss fight with a paper armadillo, who charges at you. As a peaceful protagonist, your fan can’t harm living creatures, so it’s the classic ‘move out of the way so they charge into spikes’ routine.
Once you defeat the armadillo, they snap out of their funk and you learn the ability to fold yourself into an armadillo too, using its rolling attack to smash through barriers. It’s all well-trodden territory, but with a beautiful paper aesthetic only successfully handled in a handful of games in the past, such as Tearaway.
If there’s one genre Japan has a lot of time for it’s the visual novel, and attendees have been spoilt for choice at BitSummit with a wide variety of them on offer on the show floor. The one I’m most intrigued to play more is Schroedinger’s Call.
You play as Mary, a young girl who finds herself in a room with a talking cat and an old rotary telephone, and has no idea how she got there. When Mary picks up the phone, she hears thousands of voices all speaking at once, and by answering questions, she’s able to narrow these down to just a handful.
Eventually, Mary pinpoints a single voice – in the case of my demo, it was a woman who had just left prison and was trying to call her son, even though she had been told to stay away from him. Mary has to comfort the woman, while using her notebook to find out what happened and how to resolve the situation.
Eventually, Mary gets to listen in on a replay of what she’s told is the woman’s final phone call, where she gets to speak to her son from a phone box. The son notes that the moon is getting bigger, and then the call cuts off.
It soon emerges that, 21 nanoseconds before Mary appeared in the room, the moon had crashed into the Earth and obliterated everyone instantly. The voices on the phone are all those of the newly deceased, all with unresolved problems that Mary now has to fix over the phone. It’s a really interesting premise with some hauntingly beautiful music to go with it. There’s a demo on Steam now, and it’s highly recommended.
So too is Earthion, an upcoming shoot ‘em up coming to Steam at the end of July, consoles at the end of the year, and the Mega Drive in 2026. Yes, the Mega Drive / Genesis. The game has been developed for Sega’s 16-bit console, meaning the version I played today was running natively on it.
It’s also one of the better shoot ‘em ups I’ve played on the Mega Drive. Thunder Force III has been cited as a major influence and that’s clear to see, and with a soundtrack by none other than Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage) it’s sure to sound as great as it plays.
Day two ended with the BitSummit Awards, where a number of games from the show were handed accolades. This included the VGC Media Highlight Award, which was presented by me as my personal game of the show. This went to Digital Exorcist, a fantastic adventure game that I’ll discuss in more detail in a future article.
For now though, you can watch the awards below, with my appearance at about 5:53:10 in.
Further reading
In all, today was another successful day for BitSummit, with large (but respectful) crowds and a generally chilled out atmosphere highlighting why it’s one of the more pleasant game expos to visit.
Tomorrow I’ll provide my final daily round-up, followed by my report on the VGC Game of the Show , with a more detailed round-up of everything I played coming to the VGC Patreon page early next week.
