Digital Dragons 2023: A Bastion of Indie Innovation

Before the pandemic instigated the cancellation of annual gaming conferences and this year’s E3 unceremoniously fell part, industry events were already growing stale. Sure, conferences always had the allure of seeing hotly anticipated titles publicly unveiled for the first time. But between the awkward banter delivered during pressers, the exceedingly scripted responses from public relations reps, and a push toward dreadfully generic multimillion blockbusters, the events could seem tiresome. As such, it was growing increasingly difficult to see the artistry beneath an increasingly dense plume of corporatization.

Held at the ICE Kraków Congress Centre, this year’s Digital Dragons offered a fresh alternative. Although one floor of the complex was provided to central-European notables like Techland (Dying Light 2) and 11 bit Studios (Frostpunk), abundant floor space was provided to indie developers. Walking through these crowded spaces was captivating, with intimate kiosks flaunting plenty of novel ideas.

Unlike the carefully constructed dialog and thoroughly polished demos of most conventions, with was gaming generated by gamers, often in the evening hours after their regular jobs. Here, passion, imagination, and humility were overflowing. After asking a developer a question and you always received a direct answer rather than a carefully rehearsed massage from a representative paid to feign admiration. Responses could be overly apologetic over diminutive details (“that texture is just a placeholder”) but it’s hard to fault honesty over puffery.  Here are some of the most promising efforts shown at Digital Dragons 2023.

SacriFire – Pixelated Milk – PC, PlayStation, Switch, & Xbox

SacriFire’s take on HD-2D-style visuals makes a formidable first impression. Like Octopath Traveler, the foreground is pixelated, but further into the distance characters and backgrounds are decidedly sharper. The game’s demo allowed exploration across the sprawling subterranean city of Antioch as well as a flora-filled landscape known as Erebus. Each setting was wonderfully evocative, with the cozy underground village illuminated only by the light of streetlamps while forests were filled with unruly tufts of grass and misshapen trees.

For the first part of the demo, typically role-playing dialog dominated. Here, you wouldn’t speak with every NPC scattered around the dense settlement, but signals indicating characters with something to say functioned as signposts. Eventually, SacriFire unveiled into action-driven combat. Here, dodges and gauge regeneration happened in real-time. However, when you wanted to combo an opponent (and they weren’t in an attack phase) you could effectively pause time, dishing out a succession of strikes. The pacing was taut and the animations were pleasingly flashy. My only concern is that the path to a boss battle seemed a bit too protracted. On the upside, SacriFire lets you skip fights.

Through the Nightmares, Sandman Team, PC

Originally from Ukraine, Sandman Team understands the importance of digital sadism. Their inaugural effort, Through the Nightmares, starts innocently enough, with the golden eponymous character jumping his way across gaps filled with phosphorescent spikes or sharpened logs. The hook here is that Sandman can shrink in size, which helps him scamper under narrow fissures or exploit the numerous physical-based action puzzles.

After an introductory level to help bolster your confidence, Through the Nightmares lets loose with a villainously smooth increase of difficulty. New stages introduce additional threats, from rotating buzzsaws to horizontally-firing fireballs that move at a pace that’s perfect for messing up your rhythm. Across its 45 stages, Nightmares expects mastery as you navigate through a succession of simultaneous perils. But strategically, you can place magical sand down, permitting you to resurrect up to three times at that position rather than sending you back to a checkpoint. Since level design is fiendish but always fair, making use of these custom checkpoints injects a bit of strategy into the test of reflexes and memorization.