BitSummit Day 3 Report: Rez with wolves, cozy trucking and love rival witches

And so the 13th BitSummit festival has drawn to a close, with indie developers from around Japan and the rest of the world packing up their booths and heading home.

I’ll have more information on our Game of the Show in the coming days, but for now here’s a final helping of hands-on impressions of some of the more interesting titles I played over the course of this year’s edition of Japan’s leading indie game event.

BitSummit is run each year by the Japan Independent Games Aggregate (JIGA), of which Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert is the president. Naturally, this means the PixelJunk studio usually has a presence at the show and this year was no different, as it presented its curious upcoming game Dreams of Another.

The game is the work of Baiyon, the Kyoto-based multimedia artist who previously worked on the graphics and background music for PixelJunk Eden. I asked Baiyon what Dreams of Another was about and he seemed very reluctant to say anything for fear of spoiling it, choosing only to compare it to the Naomi Watts movie 21 Grams and its non-linear narrative.

Dreams of Another is technically a shooter, but it’s immediately clear that it’s a very different kettle of fish. Not only does it have a unique art style making use of point cloud rendering technology (where the world seems to be made of floating dots), the aim is to shoot the world back into place, meaning you’re creating rather than destroying.

Baiyon told me the game is a very personal one for him and that he specifically visited locations from his past which had meaning to him to record the sound effects for it – stressing that, for example, when you come to a river in the game it’s not just a stock sound effect but the sound of the actual river that holds importance to him personally – so it’s clear that he’s hopeful it will resonate with players.

I enjoyed the very brief demo I played of it, but I admittedly didn’t have the courage to ask Baiyon if some of its odder moments – an absurdly long death performance from a dying mole person, or the PS1-style over-the-top voice acting – were deliberate choices to give the game its dream-like feel. We’re either looking at Twin Peaks or Deadly Premonition here, but I’m certainly looking forward to spending more time with it when it’s released on October 10, to figure out which it is.

A more immediately gratifying game is Truckful, developed by Polish studio MythicOwl and one of the titles being handled by Palworld studio Pocketpair’s new publishing division. The game has a very simple premise – you drive a pick-up truck through the countryside, meeting people along the way and helping them out with various tasks.

During my 10-minute demo, I came across someone whose delivery truck had broken down and needed help finishing her delivery. After a brief shuffling section in which I had to place her goods (and her!) in the back of my truck, it was time to head down the road, being careful not to let any of my cargo spill off.

It’s a visually lovely little game, as you can see by the trailer above, and it has a gentle sense of humour – apparently your driver is somehow stuck inside the truck, which is a charmingly convenient way of explaining why they don’t just get out for some tasks (like moving sheep off the road).

Shifting sheep wouldn’t be a problem for the protagonist of Twin Soul, a visually striking action game from Noboru Hotta, the artist who previously worked on iconic music-based titles Rez, Lumines, and Meteos.

Based on ancient Japanese mythology, you play as a fighter who rides on the back of a giant glowing beast thing. As enemies approach, you can either perform melee attacks on closer ones or use ranged attacks on those in the distance.

It’s these ranged attacks that make the game feel most like Rez, as by holding the button down, you can mark a bunch of enemies at once, then let go of the button and watch as they’re hit with projectiles to the beat of the music.

Twin Soul was known as Twin Souls when it was announced last year, and given that there’s already a Steam game called Twin Soul, I wouldn’t be surprised if this one changed its name again before release.

One game that definitely doesn’t have to worry about another having the same title is Bashful Adoration, a 3D action platformer from KittyWampus, a New Zealand studio made up of graduates from the same media design school.

This charming game revolves around four rival teenage witches, all of whom have a crush on the same person. In the Story mode, players pick a witch and play through a series of enemy-filled stages in an attempt to impress and win over their shared object of affection.

There’s also a PvP mode where the ‘Bashful’ aspect is more blatant and players actively fight each other in a variety of rule sets. The one I played was similar to Escort mode in Overwatch 2, and had the witch’s dream boy in the middle of the stage. By standing next to the boy, he slowly moves to your base, so the aim is to stay close to him while attacking opponents, knocking them out of the way.

I’m looking forward to playing more of this one, because the character designs are lovely and it seems it’s going to have a fun sense of humour.

Rounding off my coverage for this year’s BitSummit is Awaysis, a dungeon brawler by US studio 17-Bit. This is a wonderful action game where players take on the role of a variety of anthropomorphic animal fighters, from birds and foxes to frogs.

I spoke to 17-Bit founder Jake Kazdal about the game, and he explained that the aim was to make a physics-based brawler, but that the team has spent an extremely long time trying to make sure the combat doesn’t feel floaty like a lot of physics-based games do.

From what I’ve played, this has been accomplished, as the combat is brilliantly satisfying, and while things can get a bit chaotic when playing with four players – during one boss fight the screen filled with enemies, making it hard to distinguish who was friend and who was foe – by and large it’s a hugely entertaining game I can’t wait to play more of.

I came away from this year’s BitSummit as enthused as ever about the state of both the indie game scene, and the show itself. Every year, BitSummit seems to get bigger, but it continues to have that same community vibe that sets it apart from the Tokyo Game Shows of this world.

The fact that many of the booths are run by the games’ actual developers themselves is a wonderful thing: it’s rare that players get the chance to give face-to-face feedback to the people making their games, but at BitSummit, it’s very much the rule rather than the exception. Long may it continue.

Soon we’ll have a full write-up on my BitSummit Game of the Show for this year, while in the coming days, subscribers to the VGC Patreon will get notes on every single game I played over the past three days.

Here’s to BitSummit 14 next year.