Rebekah Valentine
Guest
Once again, non-profit Day of the Devs officially returned Wednesday with an indie showcase featuring nearly 20 independent games across multiple genres, platforms, studios, and styles as part of the run-up to The Game Awards. The show featured everything from a stop-motion game that’s entirely made of felt, a game where you engage in medieval warfare with modern guns, the return of an unreleased puzzle game first announced over a decade ago, and something to do with changing channels on a one-bit TV.
You should really go back and watch the whole thing, but if you’re skimming the highlights, here’s a rundown of everything we just saw at Day of the Devs:
The presentation opened with Faraway – a single-player, one-button, procedurally generated arcade game about drawing constellations in the night sky. Faraway has been a hot rumor for a long time, having been shown around at indie showcases all the way back in 2011 and initially billed as an iPad game. But it missed its planned release date then, and disappeared for years. Faraway is developed by Steph Thirion of Little Eyes studio, and is being published by Annapurna on PC in 2025.
Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is exactly what it says on the tin. A spiritual successor to Ultimate Chicken Horse from the same team, Clever Endeavor Games, it is a multiplayer competitive platformer where players build wild platforming courses and race through them with friends. This time, everyone’s on bikes. No release date yet, but it’s planned for Steam.
We’ve seen Sleight of Hand, from Riffraff Games, at an Xbox Partner Preview event earlier this year. In it, you play as Lady Luck, a witch detective working to take down her former coven using dark magic via a cursed deck of cards. In Day of the Devs today, we watched a sample of how a gameplay scenario might go, with Lady Luck using a drawn hand of cards to hide, lure her enemies, and ultimately trap them so she can pass by unseen. Sleight of Hand is coming to PC and Xbox at a later date.
By studio Fabraz, Demon Tides is an open world 3D platformer that gives off “Wind Waker but hip and stylish” vibes. We got a look today at some of the platforming and the player’s ability to customize not just their character’s appearance, but also their abilities, giving them a number of different options for how to cross the same gaps. Demon Tides is planned for release in 2025 on Steam.
Developers Redemption Road, makers of, uh, Road Redemption, appeared in Day of the Devs to show off Kingmakers, a game we’re already pretty stoked about here at IGN. It’s a game with a concept that’s…kind of delightful? You play as part of a team of fighters with modern weapons – guns, bombs, tanks, and so forth – who go back to medieval England to change the course of history. So you’re fighting in medieval times…but with guns. Kingmakers mixes city simulator elements with first and third-person shooter mechanics and massive, destructible environments. You can blow up anything you can see, or stage a fight on top of it, or drive a car through it. The whole thing looks kind of nuts, and you can play the entire campaign solo or with up to three friends. Kingmakers is coming to early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store next year.
Recur is a puzzle game from developer Astralogical where you play as an unassuming postman who suddenly finds himself with the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward time itself. From what we saw, it looks like you’ll be working your way through levels where the postman has to use his time powers to avoid obstacles and danger, such as collapsing platforms, a moving train, attacking dogs, or even a whole car nearly smashing into him. Recur is planned for release on Steam.
Blue Prince (Get it, like Blueprints?) looks gorgeous and mysterious, an atmospheric "architectural adventure” where you’re exploring an “ever-changing house of shifting rooms.” There seems to be some kind of mystery to solve, where you’re hunting for “Room 46” in a 45-room house, and you’re using the house’s blueprints to shape your exploration and build the structure as you go, day by day. The vibes are kind of like Edith Finch meets Mist, and the whole thing is coming out on PC in spring of 2025 from developer Dogubomb.
It’s right there in the title: don’t stop. Incolatus is a Y2K-style girly-pop movement shooter where you literally cannot stop moving. The more you move and the faster you go, the more damage you do and the more you heal yourself, so you just have to keep going. It’s a first-person arena shooter, where you’re shooting elaborate, colorful, and sometimes massive guns that blast cutesy girly hearts and stars at enemies (an evil mining corporation destroying the environment) to a boppin’ soundtrack. The guns get bigger the faster you go. More scope. More damage. More movement. Oh, and there’s a dress-up megagame where you can dress up your arms and customize your guns. Incolatus: Don’t Stop, Girlypop! is coming to Steam “soon”.
Lok Digital was born of a fascinating collaboration between a puzzle designer who made a clever physical puzzle book, and a game developer who wanted to digitize it in video game form. The result, Lok Digital, is a puzzle game where you slowly solve world puzzles in the fictional language of Lok, which you learn as you work your way through the puzzles. You start with the word “Lok”, and from there will discover other words, other puzzle rules, and the language of the little Lok creatures the game is named after. If that sounds intriguing, great news, you don’t have to wait. Lok Digital is out today on PC, and it’s coming to mobile next year.
We didn’t get a ton of info today about Neon Abyss 2, but it’s safe to say it’s a sequel to Neon Abyss from Veoowo Games. A 2D, pixelated, run-and-gun roguelike, Neon Abyss 2 looks to bring back the bright colors, flashy lasers, and bullet hell intensity of the first game for another round. It’s coming in 2025 to Steam, and looks like it will incorporate multiplayer, too.
A sci-fi fantasy motorbike game, Crescent County styles itself as “roller derby but with gay witches” or “Studio Ghibli but with considerably more crop jackets”. You’re a witch, you ride a broom motorbike, and through the day you make deliveries and do other important witch tasks on your broom, earning parts that will make your broom faster, cooler, and more powerful. Then, at night, you go out for broom races. In between it all, there’s plenty of flirting and smooching, as witches do. Crescent County is still fairly early in development, but there’s an early playtest happening now on Steam and itch.io.
I briefly thought I was looking at a Marcel the Shell short when I glanced at my screen and saw this one, but maybe that was just the googly eye. PBJ - The Musical is…well, a musical, telling a romance story of a berry and a peanut, sweet and salty, and their ultimate creation of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Through the musical acts, you’ll be guiding these two characters through paper stop motion cut out from vintage cookbooks and retelling the story of Romeo and Juliet…in sandwich form. All the music is written by Britain’s Got Talent’s Lorraine Bowen. Sadly, no word on when or where this hungry adventure is dropping for now.
Curiosmos is a cute little space game where you slowly create a solar system, at first by bashing asteroids into one another to create a planet. Once the planet’s created, you can experiment with sunlight, terrain, water, weather, and other elements to see what happens…including whether or not life blossoms and evolves. It seems like a fairly peaceful experience…until a giant black hole starts flying at you and your planets, potentially causing a catastrophe you’ll have to try and avert before it arrives. Curiosmos doesn’t have a release date yet.
In the platformer Bionic Bay, you’ll be thinking a lot about gravity, speed, and momentum. You’re a scientist with strange powers over time and space, allowing you to teleport, manipulate time, and flip the environment on its head. Using these abilities, you’ll flip and launch yourself across sci-fi themed environments with realistic physics. Bionic Bay is planned for release on Steam and PS5 in 2025.
I wrote about inKonbini earlier this year after playing it at an Xbox showcase adjacent to the Game Developers Conference. It’s a soothing organizational game about working in a convenience store, stocking the shelves, and interacting with customers who come in and share tidbits from their lives. I found the concept appealing and the execution incredibly relaxing, especially the sound effects of bags and boxes hitting the shelves and the satisfying way everything fell neatly into place on the display. InKonbini is planned for launch on Xbox, PS5, Switch, and Steam sometime in the future.
Feltopia is a stop-motion game that is entirely hand-felted. Every piece of the environment, character, enemy, everything is made by hand, out of felt, recorded, and animated. And the effect is adorable, with fuzzy unicorns, sheep, butterflies, clouds, and more all puffing up out of the world soft as can be. The game itself is a sidescrolling shmup where you ride a unicorn and shoot rainbow beams at shadowy creatures that will transform them back into their true forms. Feltopia is planned for release on Steam in 2026.
I’m not sure what I just watched, but I guess it’s Blippo+. This looks like some sort of game around changing the channel on a one-bit TV and watching all the different, weird programs? Whatever it is, Panic (the Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here) publisher, so that might convey the vibe. No idea when this is coming out, where, or how. Stay tuned for more Blippo?
We’ve already seen a lot of Hyper Light Breaker from Heart Machine, so I won’t belabor it (you can read my preview from earlier this year here), but today the team showed up at Day of the Devs to announce an early access release on Steam on January 14, 2025.
Finally, Day of the Devs closed with Tankhead from Alpha Channel. It’s a sci-fi vehicular adventure where you play as a “sleepwalker” or a person who uploads their consciousness into a machine to explore a dangerous world. Basically, you’re a literal tank (or sometimes a smaller robot) exploring a ruined world, able to travel over tough terrain, shoot stuff, and move fast when you need to. The tank’s customizable, and yes, you drive using tank controls. Tankhead, delightfully, is out today on the Epic Games Store.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on Bluesky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
You should really go back and watch the whole thing, but if you’re skimming the highlights, here’s a rundown of everything we just saw at Day of the Devs:
Faraway
The presentation opened with Faraway – a single-player, one-button, procedurally generated arcade game about drawing constellations in the night sky. Faraway has been a hot rumor for a long time, having been shown around at indie showcases all the way back in 2011 and initially billed as an iPad game. But it missed its planned release date then, and disappeared for years. Faraway is developed by Steph Thirion of Little Eyes studio, and is being published by Annapurna on PC in 2025.
Ultimate Sheep Raccoon
Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is exactly what it says on the tin. A spiritual successor to Ultimate Chicken Horse from the same team, Clever Endeavor Games, it is a multiplayer competitive platformer where players build wild platforming courses and race through them with friends. This time, everyone’s on bikes. No release date yet, but it’s planned for Steam.
Sleight of Hand
We’ve seen Sleight of Hand, from Riffraff Games, at an Xbox Partner Preview event earlier this year. In it, you play as Lady Luck, a witch detective working to take down her former coven using dark magic via a cursed deck of cards. In Day of the Devs today, we watched a sample of how a gameplay scenario might go, with Lady Luck using a drawn hand of cards to hide, lure her enemies, and ultimately trap them so she can pass by unseen. Sleight of Hand is coming to PC and Xbox at a later date.
Demon Tides
By studio Fabraz, Demon Tides is an open world 3D platformer that gives off “Wind Waker but hip and stylish” vibes. We got a look today at some of the platforming and the player’s ability to customize not just their character’s appearance, but also their abilities, giving them a number of different options for how to cross the same gaps. Demon Tides is planned for release in 2025 on Steam.
Kingmakers
Developers Redemption Road, makers of, uh, Road Redemption, appeared in Day of the Devs to show off Kingmakers, a game we’re already pretty stoked about here at IGN. It’s a game with a concept that’s…kind of delightful? You play as part of a team of fighters with modern weapons – guns, bombs, tanks, and so forth – who go back to medieval England to change the course of history. So you’re fighting in medieval times…but with guns. Kingmakers mixes city simulator elements with first and third-person shooter mechanics and massive, destructible environments. You can blow up anything you can see, or stage a fight on top of it, or drive a car through it. The whole thing looks kind of nuts, and you can play the entire campaign solo or with up to three friends. Kingmakers is coming to early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store next year.
Recur
Recur is a puzzle game from developer Astralogical where you play as an unassuming postman who suddenly finds himself with the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward time itself. From what we saw, it looks like you’ll be working your way through levels where the postman has to use his time powers to avoid obstacles and danger, such as collapsing platforms, a moving train, attacking dogs, or even a whole car nearly smashing into him. Recur is planned for release on Steam.
Blue Prince
Blue Prince (Get it, like Blueprints?) looks gorgeous and mysterious, an atmospheric "architectural adventure” where you’re exploring an “ever-changing house of shifting rooms.” There seems to be some kind of mystery to solve, where you’re hunting for “Room 46” in a 45-room house, and you’re using the house’s blueprints to shape your exploration and build the structure as you go, day by day. The vibes are kind of like Edith Finch meets Mist, and the whole thing is coming out on PC in spring of 2025 from developer Dogubomb.
Incolatus: Don’t Stop, Girlypop!
It’s right there in the title: don’t stop. Incolatus is a Y2K-style girly-pop movement shooter where you literally cannot stop moving. The more you move and the faster you go, the more damage you do and the more you heal yourself, so you just have to keep going. It’s a first-person arena shooter, where you’re shooting elaborate, colorful, and sometimes massive guns that blast cutesy girly hearts and stars at enemies (an evil mining corporation destroying the environment) to a boppin’ soundtrack. The guns get bigger the faster you go. More scope. More damage. More movement. Oh, and there’s a dress-up megagame where you can dress up your arms and customize your guns. Incolatus: Don’t Stop, Girlypop! is coming to Steam “soon”.
Lok Digital
Lok Digital was born of a fascinating collaboration between a puzzle designer who made a clever physical puzzle book, and a game developer who wanted to digitize it in video game form. The result, Lok Digital, is a puzzle game where you slowly solve world puzzles in the fictional language of Lok, which you learn as you work your way through the puzzles. You start with the word “Lok”, and from there will discover other words, other puzzle rules, and the language of the little Lok creatures the game is named after. If that sounds intriguing, great news, you don’t have to wait. Lok Digital is out today on PC, and it’s coming to mobile next year.
Neon Abyss 2
We didn’t get a ton of info today about Neon Abyss 2, but it’s safe to say it’s a sequel to Neon Abyss from Veoowo Games. A 2D, pixelated, run-and-gun roguelike, Neon Abyss 2 looks to bring back the bright colors, flashy lasers, and bullet hell intensity of the first game for another round. It’s coming in 2025 to Steam, and looks like it will incorporate multiplayer, too.
Crescent County
A sci-fi fantasy motorbike game, Crescent County styles itself as “roller derby but with gay witches” or “Studio Ghibli but with considerably more crop jackets”. You’re a witch, you ride a broom motorbike, and through the day you make deliveries and do other important witch tasks on your broom, earning parts that will make your broom faster, cooler, and more powerful. Then, at night, you go out for broom races. In between it all, there’s plenty of flirting and smooching, as witches do. Crescent County is still fairly early in development, but there’s an early playtest happening now on Steam and itch.io.
PBJ - The Musical
I briefly thought I was looking at a Marcel the Shell short when I glanced at my screen and saw this one, but maybe that was just the googly eye. PBJ - The Musical is…well, a musical, telling a romance story of a berry and a peanut, sweet and salty, and their ultimate creation of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Through the musical acts, you’ll be guiding these two characters through paper stop motion cut out from vintage cookbooks and retelling the story of Romeo and Juliet…in sandwich form. All the music is written by Britain’s Got Talent’s Lorraine Bowen. Sadly, no word on when or where this hungry adventure is dropping for now.
Curiosmos
Curiosmos is a cute little space game where you slowly create a solar system, at first by bashing asteroids into one another to create a planet. Once the planet’s created, you can experiment with sunlight, terrain, water, weather, and other elements to see what happens…including whether or not life blossoms and evolves. It seems like a fairly peaceful experience…until a giant black hole starts flying at you and your planets, potentially causing a catastrophe you’ll have to try and avert before it arrives. Curiosmos doesn’t have a release date yet.
Bionic Bay
In the platformer Bionic Bay, you’ll be thinking a lot about gravity, speed, and momentum. You’re a scientist with strange powers over time and space, allowing you to teleport, manipulate time, and flip the environment on its head. Using these abilities, you’ll flip and launch yourself across sci-fi themed environments with realistic physics. Bionic Bay is planned for release on Steam and PS5 in 2025.
inKonbini
I wrote about inKonbini earlier this year after playing it at an Xbox showcase adjacent to the Game Developers Conference. It’s a soothing organizational game about working in a convenience store, stocking the shelves, and interacting with customers who come in and share tidbits from their lives. I found the concept appealing and the execution incredibly relaxing, especially the sound effects of bags and boxes hitting the shelves and the satisfying way everything fell neatly into place on the display. InKonbini is planned for launch on Xbox, PS5, Switch, and Steam sometime in the future.
Feltopia
Feltopia is a stop-motion game that is entirely hand-felted. Every piece of the environment, character, enemy, everything is made by hand, out of felt, recorded, and animated. And the effect is adorable, with fuzzy unicorns, sheep, butterflies, clouds, and more all puffing up out of the world soft as can be. The game itself is a sidescrolling shmup where you ride a unicorn and shoot rainbow beams at shadowy creatures that will transform them back into their true forms. Feltopia is planned for release on Steam in 2026.
Blippo+
I’m not sure what I just watched, but I guess it’s Blippo+. This looks like some sort of game around changing the channel on a one-bit TV and watching all the different, weird programs? Whatever it is, Panic (the Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here) publisher, so that might convey the vibe. No idea when this is coming out, where, or how. Stay tuned for more Blippo?
Hyper Light Breaker
We’ve already seen a lot of Hyper Light Breaker from Heart Machine, so I won’t belabor it (you can read my preview from earlier this year here), but today the team showed up at Day of the Devs to announce an early access release on Steam on January 14, 2025.
Tankhead
Finally, Day of the Devs closed with Tankhead from Alpha Channel. It’s a sci-fi vehicular adventure where you play as a “sleepwalker” or a person who uploads their consciousness into a machine to explore a dangerous world. Basically, you’re a literal tank (or sometimes a smaller robot) exploring a ruined world, able to travel over tough terrain, shoot stuff, and move fast when you need to. The tank’s customizable, and yes, you drive using tank controls. Tankhead, delightfully, is out today on the Epic Games Store.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on Bluesky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].