PAX Australia has come and gone for another year, and I spent a lot of it walking from indie booth to indie booth, talking to devs and playing everything I could. After all, games like Hollow Knight and Screen Cheat were first shown here, and there’s always a few truly outstanding titles to discover. Here are three games coming from Aussies indies that really impressed me, and one bonus game from Norway via Canada.

Heavenly Bodies

Genre: Space problem solving | Players: Single, local co-op

Release: Early 2021 | Platforms: PC first, consoles later (hopefully) | More info here

This year saw an influx of chaotic multiplayer games, all inspired by the success of games like Overcooked and Human Fall Flat, that give you and friends a ridiculous but logical task and playful physics to wrangle in order to accomplish it.

However, unlike games like games QWOP and Gang Beasts, Heavenly Bodies actually makes a great deal of sense. The challenge is to complete basic tasks in a space station, while you and everything around you floats around in zero gravity.

Alex Perrin, one of the two person dev team working on Heavenly bodies told me that played on your own it is a “slow and contemplative experience”. But adding another player truly brings out the chaos of the situation.

The map that I played set us to task repairing the solar panels that were powering the station. This meant floating down a long corridor and working out how to open a series of doors that were jammed shut.

As you float through the station, the left and right control sticks are mapped to your left and right arms respectively, while the trigger buttons open and close your hands to grab onto things. The bumpers also kick your legs, meaning that you can grab onto walls and pull your way down a corridor, or float to a wall and dolphin-kick your way across the space station like a sentient space-missile.

The game is a brilliant mix of careful planning and unexpected consequences. Opening a drawer sent random bits of debris floating around the station, while pulling too hard on a door handle broke the lever off meaning we needed a crowbar to open it.

As you’d expect, opening the outside airlock without first closing the inside door set off a horrifying chain-reaction as the entire contents of the space station were explosively blown out into space, along with my poor helpless spaceman.

As I floated into the deep black yonder, I cursed my Player 2 and thought about how it was really just tone that kept the film Gravity from being a hilarious buddy film about two idiots trying to fix a space station.

Dead Static Drive

Genre: Top-down driving, surviving, monster slaying | Players: Single

Release: 2020 | Platform: PC | More info here

Dead Static Drive is about long roads, surviving alone and only taking what you can carry. It’s a novel approach to an apocalypse that had me first with its painted style, and kept me with its lonely, sombre tone.

Dead Static Drive feels like a game built by people who teach people to make games – and I mean that as the biggest compliment as the core team of developers all teach game development around Melbourne.

Everything in this game felt tuned, and worked just how I expected it to. The cars slipped and slid around the curving freeway just the way I wanted them to, I saw items scattered around the diner benchtops and knew exactly which could be picked up and used as weapons. Outside the diner, a dumpster backed up against the wall with a broken pipe meant that I could climb up and survey the area. What I’m saying is these guys know gamer psychology, and it shows.

Dead Static Drive feels like Silent Hill seen through an 80s Americana lense. It’s all set in bombed out towns and truck stops along an abandoned highway filled with the sound of roaring monsters as you tear down the strip in a rumbling muscle car. You roam from building to building looking for food and supplies to manage your character’s health and needs, while keeping an eye out for skulking enemies.

Everything from the pastel diner signs to the flashing lights of an abandoned cop car drips with style when it’s backed by the wail of a lonely jukebox playing something that could have been from a diner’s b-side collection.

The enemies themselves are hulking monstrosities that draw more from American folklore of creatures like Wendigos than the zombies you might expect to find in most post-apocalyptic settings. The title creature featured on cover art around the booth was humanoid and lean except for a ram’s skull for a face. I also deftly avoided gross tentacle monsters that burst from the ground and flopped around, nothing but spikes and death.

As I rounded out a search through the kitchen of a bombed-out roadside diner, a huge quadrupedal monstrosity that looked like an extra from X-Com built by David Cronenberg stormed forward and followed me ‘til I jumped into my muscle-car and tore off down the freeway, leaving dust and crumbs of cherry pie behind.

Broken Roads

Genre: Tactical squad-based CRPG | Players: Single

Release: 2021 | Platforms: PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One | More info here

Lastly, on the more tactical, contemplative side of the street, Broken Roads calls to the fans of X-Com, Shadowrun and the old Fallout titles.

It’s a lovely-looking top down tactics game set in Australia long after the end of the world has left everyone scavenging for supplies. It’s an incredibly Aussie approach to the apocalypse, with everyone talking about their mates and the blighter who got killed down the road.

All of the settlements are modelled on real towns in Western Australia that are all much worse for wear than their real-life counterparts.

The demo shown at PAX was very early in development – about 4-5 months for the 6-person team – but more than enough to see the shape of it starting to form. This is a very traditional CRPG with extensive dialogue trees, plenty of character progression and more story than you’d shake a dingo at.

Combat was relatively simple, grid-based and akin to X-Com with cover and various skills to fire off. Characters had a mix of melee and ranged abilities, with weapons and armour to be scavenged after combat.

But the real gem was dialogue, which had enough branches to keep me going back through the demo to try different paths. The team are pointing towards very situational morality, where every decision takes place on a spectrum from Existentialist, Nihilist, Machiavellian and Utilitarian. No one of these options are really good or evil, but vary wildly based on the situation, and each of your characters can land on a different spot in that spectrum.

The final game will have you taking quests to travel across the sunburnt country in a caravan of scavenged vehicles, taking quests and getting into punch-ups. There will be a number of towns, and fingers crossed plenty of deals to make and factions to swindle.

This one looks bloody good mate.

BONUS NON-AUSSIE MADE GAME: Sacre Bleu

Genre: Side-scrolling, swashbuckling platformer | Players: Single

Release: End of 2020 | Platforms: PC, Switch | More info here

On the complete other end of the spectrum, Sacre Bleu is a deeply weird, fast-paced game about a French musketeer who constantly looks surprised by what is going on around him. It’s part Super Meat Boy and part Castle Crashers, with a great deal of puzzling and combat to throw around.

Chatting to Stein, the game’s lead (and mostly solo) developer, I was surprised to learn he’s an animator for Hollywood films, with credits in Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Thor and The LEGO Movie, and this is his side project. No wonder the game is as smooth as French butter.

Sacre Bleu itself tasks you with escaping the Bastille where you were thrown on false charges, with nothing but your rapier, pistol, and extravagant hat complete with enormous feather.

The Bastille itself is littered with moving spikes, pitfalls, closing doors and moving platforms that you must manoeuvre your way through by firing your gun and propelling yourself through the air. It’s a novel way of getting around, and means that you can fire yourself one way, aim and entirely change directions to go further upwards or across.

This way the maps, reminiscent of last year’s Celeste, can have multiple paths and sections to avoid, and thanks to your gun – and the fact that time slows to a crawl when aiming – you can make several aerial moves without ever touching the ground.

Between puzzle sections, you’ll face off against hordes of armed guards in rather simple side-scrolling action. You can stab, cut and roll with your sword, and of course launch yourself through the air and shoot guards off their feet. Stein tells me he has plans to expand the combat to offer more options and tools in the final version.

The last challenge I faced in this demo was Renoir, Le Zombie Judge – a massive, bile spewing, hammer slamming judge who summoned hordes of guards for me to vault over and needed to be pounded on with a giant swinging mace.

It was chaotic, irreverent, and tres magnifique.

Nathanael Peacock is an Australian freelance games journalist. Why not say hey on Twitter?