6 Great Indie Games from EGX 2016

6 Great Indie Games from EGX 2016

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The Fall 2: Unbound – Over the Moon Games

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It is common in the indie space to hear of games that are made by a handful of people. The limited budgets received to make these games equates to a small team size that bring the project to life.

Over the Moon Games is no different, as they work on The Fall 2: Unbound, a 2.5D action side-scroller that tells a heavy sci-fi narrative. Its predecessor, The Fall, revolved around a female A.I (A.R.I.D.) aboard a futuristic combat suit that contained an unresponsive pilot, with the goal to seek medical attention for the pilot. Part 2 explores the idea of artificial intelligence and robotics further, as A.R.I.D. taps into a global network of different robots to escape a tricky situation she finds herself in. Inhabiting different robots and living their stories then drives the narrative forward.

The Fall 2: Unbound game combines “the exploration of Super Metroid and the interactivity of Super Monkey Island to tell the story,” founder of Over the Moon Games, John Warner describes.

The section we played revolved around inhabiting another robot, specifically a butler serving two dead, human masters it believed to still be alive. During this section it presented interesting thematic concerns like, the unbinding purpose of robots and their importance to humans. What does a robot feel when it fails their master? What do they do when they have no purpose? From this section alone the narrative looks very compelling. Before this, we also got a taste of a rather neat combat system, that involves you timely attacking left and right whilst stationary as enemies converge on your position. Platforming and the shooting mechanic remain unchanged from the first game.

Speaking of the first game, The Fall was released in 2014 to critical acclaim, but took some time to find itself in player’s hands, John describes:

“The launch itself was pretty terrible, so we had to flog it and then it started picking up.”

Despite the first game’s shaky launch, The Fall received over $38,000 on Kickstarter, double what the goal was to get the game off the ground. The plan after the Kickstarter; however, then became to create a trilogy John reveals:

“We’ve always had a vision for Part 2. We weren’t sure when we started what form the game would take, but when we did the Kickstarter, I knew I wasn’t going to raise enough funds to do a long, fully-complete game.

“So we thought we’ll break it up into three small games that stand on their own and have their own cohesive story, which would become a trilogy and we’d use each standalone game to fund the next one.”

The Fall 2: Unbound will be coming to PS4, Xbox One and Steam during the first half of 2017.

So that rounds out the list of six great indie games from EGX 2016. There were plenty of other games that could have made the list, too. Games such as Little Nightmares and Congo Master were equally as strong, which bodes very well for the indie scene moving forward.

Images: Playtonic Games, VooFoo Studios, Bitmap Bureau, Mad Fellows Games, Lince Works, Over the Moon Games

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An aspiring video games journalist in my third year of media studies that has a rather unhealthy obsession with a certain Caped Crusader. You can follow my nerdy shenanigans on Twitter @LevelUpLynch.
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