Each year in July, developers and gamers alike descend on the beautiful Japanese city of Kyoto for BitSummit – a laidback expo that showcases games from small teams. It’s the complete opposite of TGS; BitSummit is a show where you can chat directly with devs, where you don’t have to queue for hours to play games, and at which the likes of Shuhei Yoshida and Hironubu Sakaguchi are just hanging out.
Here are eight games from this year's show that particularly caught my eye.
Developer: Onion Games / Platforms: Mac, PC
At first glance, Black Bird may just look like a cool, sepia-toned side scrolling shoot ‘em up in the spirit of old school classics like Gradius, but it’s also a game that is thematically rich. “My story is about the curse of the Black Bird,” says Game Designer and CEO of Onion Games Yoshiro Kimura. “The main character that you’re going to play is a little girl, who becomes the Black Bird.” This happens at the very beginning of the game, when players are introduced to her - collapsed on the ground, dying. She passes away, helped by no one, and a mysterious figure transforms her into an egg; she’s reborn as a vengeful bird.
A sad story.
“It’s a very sad story,” he tells me. Players will spend the entirety of the game exacting revenge for a societal failing, on people who have no idea why. “The people don’t know why Black Bird appeared,” he continues, “so… [they’re] thinking - oh, Black Bird is like typhoons and disasters, it’s coming naturally – they don’t know this Black Bird came because of… it’s like karma… because they didn’t mind the little girl dying on the road. So this is a very important story theme.” The idea is to create a dissonance between the joy of mastering the gameplay systems and clearing the levels, and the story, which is one of revenge and slaughtering of innocents. “I want to put both feelings in the game,” Kimura says. “I want to make people feel good and bad both. Conflicted.”
The gameplay inspiration comes from influential old school shooters, like Gradius and Salamander as opposed to the modern scene in Japan, which is more obsessed with danmaku, or bullet hell shooters. It was an idea Kimura had four years ago, but it was only recently that he’s had time to flesh it out and take the idea to his team of seven. They’ve since been working on the game on weekends, alongside Kimura’s “favourite composer,” Hirofumi Taniguchi, whose work in the industry dates back to the early ‘90s. “I’ve worked with him a lot,” Kimura says, “and every time I feel his genius… it’s a really good combination – my mother goose cursed story, a shooting system like Fantasy Zone, and Taniguchi-san’s dark music, then [you have] this strange shooting game.”
The bird moves in a swirling mass of black.
Black Bird is still a long way off – the BitSummit demo was only finished the night before the show began, but the roadmap is there, from the randomised elements that will encourage replayability, through to how Black Bird will “metamorphose” and power-up as the game progresses. And as for the striking graphics? The sepia look is meant to replicate how a creature like this might see the world. “My feeling is that for us, the world is very colourful, but if you become a god, if you become a typhoon, if you become a disaster yourself, then they are watching us like this,” Kimura explains. “It’s just a sepia world. Maybe some part is red. Maybe this is a god view.”
Developer: Dadako / Platforms: 3DS, PC, Wii U
Pirate Pop Plus is like the lovechild of old school arcade series Pang and an original Game Boy. From the former it gets its core gameplay, where you fire an anchor on a chain at bubbles in the sky, popping them to collect fruit and coins. From the latter it gets its delightfully pixelated four colour graphics, aspect ratio and 8-bit chiptune soundtrack. The twist, however, is literal – there’s a reason the play area is a square, and that’s because gravity can shift to any surface, forcing you to adjust to shooting from the ceiling or a wall. It’s a neat conceit, strengthened by a handful of power-ups and some cool, but superficial, visual customisation options.
Developer: Vitei Backroom / Platforms: PC
In this asymmetrical two player VR game, one player is a human-sized robot scientist, on the hunt for a tiny teacup-sized alien, who in turn is trying to get to an exit hidden up by the ceiling. The alien moves around by tossing blobs of himself that he can then teleport to, while the robot is looking for signs of the alien and has a UV light that he can use to melt the alien’s blobs to eventually prevent him from escaping. It all takes place in a small laboratory, which is cluttered with equipment, pipes and physics objects.
A Tiny Escape very effectively plays with scale.
It’s cool seeing a two player project where each player has such a drastically different sense of scale in the same environment. While the robot is using room-scale VR to physically look behind and below things, the alien is frantically trying to keep tabs on where this towering behemoth above him is. Interactivity comes into play in interesting ways too - the robot can use objects in the room such as books to try and wall off paths to block the alien.
The story of how A Tiny Escape came about is pretty fascinating too. The seven person team at Vitei Backroom had been working on the PlayStation VR title The Modern Zombie Taxi Co. for some time, when, out of the blue, their publishing partner Sony cancelled the game. With six weeks until BitSummit, the head of the studio charged the team with making something specifically for the show. It didn’t have to be a project they’d pitch out to publishers or that was commercially viable – just a passion project to help re-energise the team. A Tiny Escape was the result. Will this demo become a full project? Here’s hoping.
Who wouldn't want to escape from such a dingy lab?
Developer: Q-Games / Platforms: PC
This hilarious VR game is almost like an unofficial expansion for Job Simulator. In it, players man a food truck and must “save the souls of the dead” by feeding the hungry zombies that shamble up to the counter. This means using motion controls to cook fries, heat pizzas, pour sodas and – most importantly – create the best burgers possible. Players must grab buns, tomato slices, lettuce and sauce, piling them all up on the available plates, while waiting for the meat patties on the grill to cook. Don’t burn them though! Zombies like well-cooked meat, apparently, and satiating a zombie’s appetite sees it miraculously turn back into a human and skip away.
That burger looks surprisingly tasty.
As is the way with many room-scale VR experiences right now, Dead Hungry nails the intersection between fast, precise controls – actually efficiently grabbing, cooking and arranging food – and physical comedy. You can toss anything that isn’t nailed down at the zombies, and you’re rewarded for originality (but must “meet the minimum flavour requirements”), so can build burgers out of almost anything. I saw one player unscrew the food truck’s light and put that in the burger, leaving the room in near darkness but the burger itself shining bright. You can even lean across the counter and pat the zombies on the head.
It’s an energetic, crowd-pleasing demo that has its own interesting backstory. Like A Tiny Escape, Dead Hungry was developed specifically for BitSummit. It came about after a two week game jam within Q-Games, where four teams of four or five competed to create the idea that the studio would take to the show. Dead Hungry was the winner, but at that point it didn’t even have motion controls. In the original prototype players simply looked at the item they wanted to pick up then pressed a button. The team then had a month to implement motion controls and get it ready for the public to play. They did a great job. More please!
Yes, I would definitely like fries with this.
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