Shit, man, you can’t swing a very real cat in a very metaphorical store and not have it knock itself out on a baker’s dozen of those things at this point. Maybe throw a chiptune soundtrack in for good measure. Tell me if you’ve heard this pitch before: a new game by an independent developer with a cool pixel art look and Metroidvania structure. Come December of the same year, it was being included as a PlayStation Plus freebie. A Switch release followed not too late afterwards. Iconoclasts released at the beginning of 2018. Some months, it was a struggle to find a title to cover today, outlets are literally drowning in coverage requests from legitimately talented developers. In 2006, I somehow successfully pitched Hyper magazine on letting me review an indie game each month. Being a small developer is no longer special, platformers are no longer rare, retro is now so common it can barely be called retro anymore, and cool pixel art has somehow reached plague-like proportions. That didn’t last long – have you seen the size of the sale on Switch games that was going on over Christmas? The release of the Switch brought with it a brief window of time when one could stand out simply by getting a reasonable product out the door. Hell, Telltale has collapsed under mismanagement since then. It’s been a very long time since Darwinia raised a few eyebrows, since Braid seemed novel, since Audiosurf floated to Steam’s main page, since the first season of The Walking Dead surprised us all. But, boy, that indiepocalypse sure is here, huh? I mean, you could probably follow that up with a ‘like, duh!’ at this point. In fact, I’m happy for both of these games – it’s cool to see great design by small teams get rewarded, and these two games (perhaps you could toss in Return of the Obra Dinn towards the end) just seemed to rise to the top as mainstays of my Twitter feed. It was an excellent PC game, but it never really seemed to catch on, and it’s cool to see it get its due while its developer can still benefit from said sales. For some other people, maybe they were instead distracted by the explosion of attention that came Hollow Knight’s way after the E3 reveal that it was landing on Nintendo’s Switch. Personally, I just purchased my copy a few days ago. I’m going to take a completely safe guess and say that most of us aren’t done with Dead Cells yet. From there, it went from cool looking indie darling to a serious contender on many of the inevitable game of the year lists that rained down as December trudged forward. Iconoclasts – The Best Game We All Ignored in 2018Īre we all done with Dead Cells yet? That thing was swimming around in some form of early access for a respectable while before it launched for real b ack in August.
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