The Convergence Radar: 33-player hell, Next Fest finds and the indie games still breaking through
With just a month to go before our next showcase event, we bring you an essential scan of demos, launches, creators and games worth wishlisting
Time flies, and the games just keep rolling in. While we’re all neck-deep in a deluge of demos from Steam Next Fest, don’t forget that we’re going to be purposefully prioritising your Steam wishlist in just one month. The next Convergence Showcase airs on July 16th, with two hours of must-see trailers, live gameplay and expert commentary from our lovely returning hosts Jesse Cox and Dodger plus plenty more.
It will be a welcome spotlight amid a weirdly bittersweet time in games right now. The positive glow from the explosion of announcements big and small from the Summer Games Fest and its surrounding showcases has been dulled somewhat by a sudden, brutal wave of news. But as foundational, genre-defining studios like Rare, Double Fine and Arkane are seemingly at risk of closure or mass layoffs as Microsoft ‘reboots’ its Xbox division, we’re here to look on the brighter side of the gamepad.
Rough as things are in the overworld, there are still countless studios making wildly creative, innovative games within it. Which is why from next week, we’ll be making the newly monikered Convergence Radar weekly, to do them all justice and expand both our sights and your knowledge.
First up this week, we have a handful of this past fortnight’s finest, a fistful of picks from Next Fest and beyond, plus your chance to snag a Steam key or two for one of our week’s featured titles. If you enjoy what you read, make sure you’re a subscriber…
ON OUR RADAR
The games we’re playing, wishlisting and telling people about
33 Immortals
Mass co-op dungeon crawling where survival really is a team sport
Launching in full after more than a year of early access, 33 Immortals is a massively co-op dungeon crawler from Thunder Lotus, makers of Spiritfarer and Sundered.
Playing like a hybrid of Realm Of The Mad God and Hades but messier, 33 players are thrown into hell, scrambling to knock out demonic mini-bosses, level up and find loot so that the survivors can band together to take down a big and very tough boss.
Everything you can do to protect your fellow players will be repaid in kind, as the more that survive to the finale, the better your odds.
Voidling Bound
Creature collecting, gene-splicing and alien firefights at the edge of space
In this gorgeous and creative take on the third-person shooter, Hatchery Games throws in a little bit of creature collector and rogue-like for good measure.
Remote-control a series of alien critters to fight against a galaxy-threatening plague, picking up new species to experiment with and upgrading their genes to give them new abilities and appearances. Then take them out to the planet’s surface for some fast-paced, bullet-dodging combat to test out how well your genetic build-crafting worked out.
It feels a little bit like Crab Champions in action, although less frantically paced, with perhaps a little bit of Ratchet & Clank’s brightly coloured space-adventure style, and plenty of oddball attacks.
Burglin' Gnomes
Tiny thieves, stretchy arms and the beautiful stupidity of co-op chaos
Chaotic co-op games with proximity voice chat are ten-a-penny these days, but there’s something special about Fobri’s Burglin’ Gnomes and its utterly screwball sense of humour.
You and your buddies are a crew of kleptomaniac garden gnomes, out to steal anything that’s not nailed down from a human neighbourhood – and maybe torment the inhabitants a little while you’re at it. In your favour, you’re remarkably tough and have weird stretchy arms. Working against you, you’re tiny and even a porch staircase is a major obstacle to climb.
It’s a bit janky and buggy, which seems to fit with the theme, but there’s a very specific breed of improv slapstick comedy here that you won’t find elsewhere.
MOLE
Lo-fi horror that digs deep and stays there
Short but spine-chilling, MOLE is a lo-fi psychological horror adventure, slamming the player back and forth between a seemingly doomed subterranean tunnelling mission as they pilot a massive drilling machine while your family’s daily life crumbles around you in a dystopian retro-futurist world.
How much is real, how much is fragmented memories, how much is allegory? Off Black Creations leaves a lot to interpretation, but their game also contains a rich well of world-building and hundreds of tiny little narrative details that might take a second or third playthrough to fully wrap your head around.
It’s only a few hours long, but this one will probably linger on your mind for far longer.
A Kobold Story: Trenchcoat Adventurer
Old-school dungeon crawling, redrawn in crayon and powered by snacks
Sometimes the hero we deserve isn’t a barbarian with rippling muscles, it’s three funny little lizard-people in a long coat. Crystal Spider’s A Kobold Story left early access this week, and feels like a fantastic introduction to the normally intimidating world of old-school, grid-based dungeon crawlers.
Rather than having to roll a full party, your three kobolds are fixed characters with simple stats and limited equipment slots, mostly growing their power through eating just about anything you find lying around.
The whole game has a charming, crayon-scribble art style, as if the entire world is being drawn by your party of funny lil’ guys. A solid, simplified and very funny take on a venerable old sub-genre.
Pronoun Palace
Scrabble-like combat meets a furious, funny fight for identity
Wrapping up our big-ticket games this week with a breakout hit, Pronoun Palace is a word-puzzle roguelite where you defend and deal damage by spelling words using off-brand Scrabble tiles.
It’s also a brutally scathing, frequently very funny piece of satire about a bunch of oddball protagonists seeking to reclaim their genders after having them confiscated by the government because they were disruptive and illegal.
Cadence Petersen and Hazel Fackler have created an unflinching look at the absurdity of the gender ‘debate’ in modern life when everyone’s just tired and trying to live their lives. Plus, it plays great – always important – with a banger soundtrack and some fiendish boss gimmicks.
NEWS BLIPS
Compelling demos and freeware to download and devour
Luke Muscat’s Normal Golf Game is golf with hilariously unpredictable controls that would make Bennett Foddy proud. The demo is well worth a round.
Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator doesn’t play its convoluted controls, cooked up by Nick Nieuwoudt and Dominik Latos, for laughs. Attempt to fathom the pleasingly analogue cranks, wheels and gauges of a gigantic walking artillery platform while wrestling with the ethics of orders from High Command.
Convergence alumnus A Fighter’s Nova: Mindara from BadRez Games is a stylish solo adventure that fuses JRPG storytelling with tag-team fighter action. Try the demo and see if it inspires you to contribute to their Kickstarter.
More unexpected genre fusions abound with Denkiworks’ Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, where the titular mythical raccoon dog works for a post office in a cosy-coded prefecture while also pulling off sick tricks on his BMX.
Hyper Bun Buster: Rocket Hammer Action is a joyful throwback arcade game with echoes of single-screen classics like Snow Bros and Rodland. Send enemies crashing into each other with your giant mallet to rack up bumper combos.
End of Starchild is a fully freeware FPS and sequel to award-winning Doom mod Time Tripper that somehow blends bullet hell action, mystery-filled narrative and NES-influenced role-playing into a harmonic whole.
THE BIG CODE DROP
Solve the puzzle, claim your prize, win a game!
Cutesy roguelite ‘belt scroller’ Lost Castle 2, demoed on our very own Convergence Showcase by VTubers Limealicious and Yenkoes, has left early access. And to celebrate, we’ve got five Steam codes to giveaway courtesy of Hunter Studio!
Be the first to successfully fill the blanks of one of the codes below to claim your copy. (Enter codes in Steam by selecting Games -> Activate a Product on Steam.) Each code is single-use, so when they’re gone, they’re gone!
H3P79-YAEC9-5Y???
‘Baba Yaga’ assassinated the vowel in his surname!
2??AV-QAGVE-WIVJ0
Pretended they were dead.
0XKTB-??554-5PHR6
From Newbridge to Dunblane
I?38?-XDI?T-DVJB0
F2P ARPG set in New Eridu
8ARYX-4HAK?-?937W
Common cause of England’s exit from international tournaments?
SIGNAL BOOST: CozyGameNight
Spotlighting the creators and communities helping games find their audience
Sometimes it’s not enough to just enjoy a genre or an aesthetic, some folks have to truly live it. And few creators embody the softer side of gaming more than Ili on their channel CozyGameNight.
They’re a true gaming lifestyle maven. Not only can you rely on them for the very latest in easygoing game recommendations, but deeper dives on more holistic ways to engage with the hobby, like journaling your gaming journey or general life tips on cultivating a more whimsical existence on a limited modern budget.
A good reminder that as bombastic and gore-drenched as the big summer showcases can be, there’s room for vibes of every kind. You can find more of their long-form streams and short-form videos across Twitch, Instagram and TikTok.
THE DEEP SCAN
Long reads, big watches and strange stories from around games culture
Joshua Rivera over at Aftermath interviews Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment, the two tiny studios behind breakout hit Forbidden Solitaire.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais has released a five-hour critical meditation on the Resident Evil series, a mere 2.5 hours shorter than their (excellent) previous video on Capcom’s series.
FPS scholar Ruby Ranger celebrates 30 years of Quake with a nearly four-hour dissection of the classic and iconic shooter in all of its iterations.
Finally, speedrun expert Summoning Salt tells the story of how a global community banded together to complete every single Mario Maker level in existence before Nintendo turned off the servers.
FINAL TRANSMISSION
Tell us what you’re playing, wishlisting or hoping more people notice
And that’s us for another edition. Somehow we’ve only hit the mid-point of June and barely scratched the surface of the glut of demos arriving every day.
Even with the price of hardware spiralling out of control and Microsoft making some deeply questionable decisions, it only takes a cursory glance around to see that video games – especially indies – are as vibrant as ever, and there’s more out there than anyone can comprehend.
Before you know it, a month will have passed and we’ll be in the middle of our next showcase, so make sure to come back next Tuesday, our new newsletter day, for the next Convergence Radar. And in the meantime, follow us on YouTube, Bluesky, Instagram and TikTok, and tell us what’s giving you hope for the future of our weird, messy, beautiful medium.
Comment on Substack, post on social or drop us a line on which demos you’ve been playing, what launches you’re excited about and which hidden gems deserve a stronger signal. We’ll have our radar on. See you next Tuesday…