We’re Still Living in an Indie World

A welcome aspect of Nintendo Indie World showcases these days, beyond the announcements made, is that Nintendo is still presenting them at all. Every console hardware manufacturer showcases indie titles, yes, but Nintendo is the only one still providing streams for them. The company has been in the news lately for the kinds of dubious actions they’re wont to partake in, some perhaps of dubious legality. Indie discoverability has been poor on the Switch’s eShop for nearly the entire system’s lifespan thanks to the sheer number of them competing for attention, and Nintendo’s is unlikely to fix this for a platform that just entered its seventh year.

Even considering all that, Nintendo deserves kudos for showing off titles that absolutely need the exposure. The newest presentation, which concluded at slightly over 20 minutes, featured several larger and smaller titles.

Mineko’s Night Market from Humble Games was one of the first and biggest shown, a narrative-driven simulation game suffused with Japanese cultural aesthetics featured on a prior Indie World presentation. It will release on Switch (and PC via Steam) on September 26th. Another was My Time at Sandrock, the standalone sequel to My Time at Portia planned for release this summer. The combination of these two is proof enough that indie development studios still love life simulation games, but that’s more than fine when larger publishers have largely shunned the genre for several years.

Cat games continue to be a staple of Indie Worlds too, which shows how these can often double as Wholesome Direct presentations when included with the life simulation games. The key examples were puzzle game Quilts and Cats of Calico and adventure game Little Kitty, Big City, the latter of which is absolutely not an attempt at making Stray for the system. It looks more reminiscent of Untitled Goose Game, once a staple of Indie World and Nintendo Direct presentations prior to its release. This game could assume that mantle considering its 2024 release timeframe.

Rift of the NecroDancer, coming this year, looks markedly different from Crypt of the NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule through its 3D presentation. But from its appearance, it’s a worthwhile way to keep its rhythm formula fresh and unpredictable.

Rift of the NecroDancer was far from the only sequel announced, which applied to several of the larger titles showcased. Teslagrad 2 is now available on Switch as you (hopefully and ideally!) read this, with the Remastered version of the first game available alongside it separately or in a bundle. Another was Shadow of Loathing, the follow-up to West of Loathing (which our own Drew Young streamed) that’s now available digitally, with a physical version coming this fall. Blasphemous II, the sequel to the first 2D sprite-based Souls-influenced title, is coming this summer, with an art style that very visibly resembles its predecessor. There’s also Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, the 2D voice-acted exploration game with a visibly different art style from its processor that releases on July 12, 2023. (That’s this writer’s birthday, I thought you should know.)

Not that the original titles don’t deserve focus too. Animal Well looks solid, an exploration game with an 8-bit aesthetic being published by YouTuber dunkey’s organization at Bigmode Games, the reason why he was featured in the presentation. His influence should help the game stand out for a big audience. Crime O’ Clock was another, an investigation and exploration game, as the title implies, due for a release this summer.

The montage featured some bigger announcements. In addition to Little Kitty, Big City mentioned above, the August 18th release date for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was jammed in here so quickly that you could have blinked and missed it. Both games could have been featured in the main presentation to bolster the showcase. But Nintendo knows how receptive a vocal portion of the gaming audience can be to longer indie presentations, which emphasized the need to keep this short. It unfortunately resulted in some games getting comparatively sidelined, but it’s, at least, better than not being featured.

Some games are also getting extra content, including A Little to the Left, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon, and Cult of the Lamb. The first game’s extra content will be $5.99, or an equivalent outside the United States, while there will be no charge for the latter two.

This Indie World didn’t have the biggest announcements, and ending it on a montage instead of saving a prior-mentioned title for the one last thing was a peculiar decision. The well-presented trailer for Oxenfree II would have sufficed. But I’m aware of the segment of people who going to be disappointed simply because of the lack of Hollow Knight: Silksong, a title too many people expect to see every time one of these presentations is announced, and which people got their hopes up too high for thanks to the first game being among the discounted indie titles on the eShop. Silksong is big enough at this point that it should be a focus on a main Nintendo Direct, or an equivalent presentation for another publisher like Sony or Microsoft, the latter of which featured it on their Xbox presentation during not-E3 season last year.

It was nonetheless a solid presentation for titles coming to a system in its seventh year, even nothing super-spectacular was included. There are still more titles coming than most of us will have time to play through, which leaves little to complain about.