The game industry is a proper mess right now – a minefield of bloated projects, harassment from players, and layoffs are the narrative of the year. However, there are still so many people making games in the margins of these stories. At Salt Lake Fan X 2024, I was able to sit down and demo a few examples of games made by Utah locals. Some of these games can be played right now, even for free!
Familiars.io recaptures the fundamentals of monster taming
Familiars.io is a free to play game that’ll basically run on anything. It’s a “built in a cave, with scraps” take on the monster taming genre. Once players pick an avatar and starter “familiar,” they are dropped into an open field. Here, they’ll be given a bunch of other wild familiars to battle and recruit. The catch is anyone else playing Familiars.io could also be out in the wild with you.
Being developed for fun as freeware by a single person, Familiars.io isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or be in-depth. Even so, the simplicity does create some novelty. The ability to easily opt-in and out of PVP mode puts much larger online games to shame. When it’s on, your avatar turns red and it can only engage other red avatars. Battles look a lot like a high resolution vision classic Game Boy era Pokémon combat screens. Familiars.io gives contextual information on attacks from the selection screen. It’s also incredibly lightweight. You can snag it on Steam, but it’ll play in a browser on any device just fine. I demoed the game from a Chromium window, using an NES gamepad, with no issues.
Pioneering the “WarioWare-like”
It’s A Game Changer takes inspiration from the WarioWare franchise. Players are sent through a collection of micro-game challenges, with modifications that follow each round. These modifications can help one aspect of gameplay at the cost of other stats. In that way, It’s A Game Changer blends roguelike elements into that micro-game inspiration.
Unlike Familiars.io, It’s A Game Changer is still a work in progress. A demo is currently available on Steam now, but a refreshed one will be released with Steam Next Fest beginning October 14th. There are still a few details to work out for more clarity, but the demo I did partake in kept me playing for longer than I expected I would. Once the flow of the powerups really gets going, jumping into each micro-game is easy. There aren’t as many micro-games as the comparisons to WarioWare suggests, but more are planned before the game’s official release in November.
Would you love me if I was a snail?
Snail Simulator is already available in its full release, and it is exactly what it says on the box. Players inhabit true to life snails in an online environment. The appeal is very much the same as other games like Goat Simulator. However, the joke of Snail Simulator is that it avoids the over the top absurdity of games like Goat Simulator. Instead, the absurdity is the idea of being a snail at all.
Moving at a snail’s pace isn’t always the goal of a video game, but there’s an ironic enjoyment of slowly creating a slimy trail with other snails. Players can encounter each other’s snails in real time, all to join in snail adventures. Despite being out for almost a year, Snail Simulator has extremely consistent updates for its life cycle – both for fixes and features. Easily, this was the most popular game at the convention.
A game that “sucks”
Finally, Airlock Arena is a game with a particularly bold pitch: “The game that sucks.” Of course, that pitch line is a joke with the space theme. The core gameplay centers around staging heists and completing missions in procedurally generated space. Not only do players (and their friends, if they want) have to face combat situations, they also have to maintain their ships. There’s a lot to unpack in each run, with all kinds of different resources – even corpses – having use in maintaining the run.
Airlock Arena is definitely the most ambitious of the games I previewed at Fan X. On top of its main modes, the game also has other multiplayer modes. One in particular reminds me of the Astro Duel games with a battle mode that takes players both into a base and outside of it with their ships. While Airlock Arena does have a demo out on Steam right now, the game is also the longest out from release – only a tentative 2025 window right now.
It’s genuinely a joy to see that new game development ideas are still happening, especially in my own back yard. It’s easy to only think of games as either large AAA productions or incredibly lucky indie devs. However, the bulk of games today exist in the middle – people still trying to achieve their dreams, and they live all over. Getting to spend some time with developers in Utah working hard to make special experiences is a great reminder of that.
Travis Hymas is a freelance writer and self appointed Pokémon historian out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Known to be regularly obessive over pop culture topics, gaming discourse, and trading card games, he is a published critic featured on sites such as Uppercut and The Young Folks.
