BitSummit Day 3 Report: Golfing with rubber ducks, the joy of Mr Footy and Namco’s Suika Game rival

And so the curtain has closed on BitSummit for another year, as indie developers and publishers from all around the world pack up their booths and head back to their respective studios.

BitSummit has become increasingly popular with each annual event, and the huge queue of attendees snaking right around the Miyako Messe exhibition hall in Kyoto (as seen in the image above) was evidence that this year’s show was surely the most well-attended yet.

Some of those attendees may have done what I did and got their hands on an early build of Yodelee Golf, which could be played in a customised golf cart with televisions built into it.

Yodelee Golf is the latest from Q-Games, the studio behind the PixelJunk series, and I had a blast playing its very silly interpretation of golf.

It’s a co-op game that can be played by 1-4 players, and while the aim is for the team to collectively put the golf ball in a series of holes (as you would expect) the main point here is the journey you take to get there.

The holes are all connected in one large open world, and you have to work together to get the single golf ball from hole to hole, with a bunch of hazards and other things like motorbikes, boats, caves, rubber ducks and green-guarding enemies getting in the way. Let’s just say you can swing your clubs at a bunch of stuff here.

The game also makes use of chat in a few interesting ways. Not only does it have ray-traced proximity chat, which means you can hear your partners shouting all around you (the demo had headsets and mics to highlight this), but everything you shout is also transcribed into big 3D letters which fall onto the course and can affect things. The whole thing is crazy, but it’s a lot of fun.

So too is Pro Jank Footy, a retro-themed comedy sports game from Australian studio Powerbomb Games. The game is based on Aussie rules football but you don’t have to know it to enjoy playing it – indeed, the game’s developer told me one of the main reasons he created it was to spread more knowledge about the sport globally.

The game simplifies the sport a little, resulting in a brilliant arcade sports game with lots of crunching tackles and plenty of laughs to be had, especially from the power-up system which lets players choose from three random modifiers every time they lose a goal.

There are an absolute ton of these, from normal things like boosting stats to the introduction of special super players to your roster, to more ridiculous ones like the ability to play as a shopping trolley, or a power-up called “Who’s Got the Remote” where at regular intervals the screen changes to a blue AV2 screen, as if someone had changed the channel.

My favourite is easily the one that summons Mr Footy, the game’s mascot, who’s just a guy with a big grinning red football for a head. He runs onto the field and starts randomly charging into players, then having a quick nap. Every time he wakes up he gets larger, which means eventually there’s a massive Mr Footy running around and slamming into everyone.

I can’t wait to get my hands on Pro Jank Footy when the finished game is ready, because based on what I’ve played I have no doubt it’s going to be a local multiplayer favourite.

The same could go for SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed, the sequel to the original SpeedRunners (which started life as a Flash game and then an Xbox 360 Arcade game back in 2013, before getting a ‘full’ release on Steam in 2016).

While a lot has changed in gaming tech over the past decade, sometimes it’s best to make sure fancy new gizmos don’t get in the way of what made something so entertaining in the first place. SpeedRunners 2 appears to be aware of this, which is why the core gameplay remains similar to the first game.

For the uninitiated, it’s a multiplayer platformer racing game where you simply have to force your opponents off the edge of the screen until you’re the only one left, using power-ups and your grapple gun to try to gain an advantage.

The game will support up to eight players online, which means carnage is more or less guaranteed, and while it’s certainly looking slicker than its predecessor, the tense and exciting races I had at BitSummit reassured me that the underlying gameplay is as pure as ever.

Speaking of pure gameplay, one of the last games I tried as BitSummit was coming to a close was Namco Legendary Mountains. This comes from BeXide, a Tokyo-based studio which has enjoyed some success with its various ‘Mountain’ games, all of which seem to have similar gameplay. As the name suggests, though, this is one of its first licensed versions.

The initial concept isn’t massively original, because the game is a merging action game in the same style as Suika Game. If you’re not familiar with Suika Game, the aim is to drop fruits into a well and try to make matching fruits touch, merging them to turn them into a different, larger fruit. The larger the fruit you merge the more points you get, but the bigger the risk that your fruit will reach the top of the screen.

Namco Legendary Mountains has a similar basic idea but it brings its own twists to it. The most obvious is the addition of classic Namco sprites from Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Xevious, Mappy and The Tower of Druaga, all presented in 3D voxel form. It’s these sprites you merge, to create new characters from each game.

The other main twist is that instead of dropping them into a well as in Suika Game, you’re instead lobbing them onto a big dish that’s slightly curved. This means, as the dish becomes full of characters, you can start trying to stack some of them by lobbing them into the middle of the plate, creating a titular mountain, as you hope to start some chain reactions going.

BeXide says there are more than 100 voxels to find, and as you collect them you can display them in little retro-themed displays. It’s hardly Death Stranding, but I played the thing three times so the ‘one more go’ factor is certainly there, and the fact it’s also coming to Switch 2 (as well as PC and Switch) means it could be a new rival to Picross for the coveted title of ‘Game Chris Plays on the Train When He’s at a Loose End’.

That was BitSummit for this year, however. I’ll have a write-up soon for our VGC Media Highlight Award winner Sloppy Forgeries, and when I get back to Scotland I’m going to put together a video showing everything I played at the show – including all the games mentioned during my three reports and a load of others.

The show’s organisers have already announced that BitSummit 15 will take place on May 21-23, 2027. As the show continues to grow and gather indie talent from around the world, you can bet VGC will be there again to support and cover it.