Arcade

In the whimsical Donut County, you play a hole in the ground, growing a little bigger every time you swallow objects in the world around you. Ben Esposito, the game’s creator and Glitch City co-founder, joins us from Los Angeles, the city that inspired the game’s surrealist setting.

The new game from the creators of Gone Home, Tacoma is a story exploration game that takes place on an empty space station 200,000 miles from Earth, where you piece together what happened to the crew through augmented reality logs. Fullbright co-founders Karla Zimonja and Steve Gaynor, along with the rest of the Portland-based team, will share a playable version of Tacoma for the first time ever.

Explore a universe of boldly colorful giant monster heads in GNOG, each one part of an interconnected world filled with machinery and secrets. KO-OP Mode’s Saleem Dabbous and Bronson Zgeb join us from Montréal.

Reunite the characters of an exploded world and make new friends in Wattam, the latest creation from the mind of Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. We’re thrilled to have Funomena co-founder Martin Middleton, previously of Flower and Journey, on hand to show it off.

In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, one person in virtual reality must defuse a time bomb with the help of their friends in the real world. Randomly changing every time, the time bomb can only be disarmed with paper manuals and teamwork. Developer Brian Fetter will join us from Ottawa.

Nina Freeman’s vignette games draw inspiration from her own life, recounting sometimes-painful stories from her childhood and adolescence. Her upcoming game Cibele is a game about love, sex, and the Internet—meeting a boy through an MMO and the relationship that follows, with Nina and frequent collaborator Emmett Butler there to answer your questions.

Developed by Campo Santo and published by Portland’s own Panic, Firewatch is an eagerly-anticipated first-person adventure game set in the Wyoming wilderness, where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio. Campo Santo’s Patrick Ewing will show off their latest progress.

Winnie Song developed Badblood as her MFA thesis, working alone on her laptop for six months. That changed earlier this month when the teaser trailer exploded online and was instantly greenlit on Steam. With its unique illustration style and local split-screen gameplay, Badblood is hide and seek turned deadly. We’re very excited Winnie’s flying in from Brooklyn to join us at XOXO.

Circa Infinity is a mindbending circular platformer in which you descend into increasingly recursive circles across 50 levels, paired with a spare color scheme and heart-pounding soundtrack. Designer and developer Kenny Sun, a 22-year-old recent NYU graduate, joins us from NYC.

Overland is a stylish, minimalist survival game in which players guide a changing cast of characters across a post-apocalyptic America, described as “Oregon Trail meets The Road.” Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has written about bootstrapping the game, and the challenges that came with it, and we’re thrilled to have it at XOXO, joined by L.A.-based artist and designer Heather Penn.

The new game from the creators of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, BELOW is a beautifully minimalist top-down adventure borrowing from roguelikes, where you play a mysterious Wanderer fighting your way down to the Depths. Creative director Kris Piotrowski and soundtrack creator Jim Guthrie are coming from Toronto to join us at XOXO.

Hyper Light Drifter is one of the most highly-anticipated indie games, funded by a blockbuster Kickstarter project that raised over $645k from 25,150 backers in 2013. The fast-paced 2D action RPG was inspired by SNES classics, and creator Alex Preston’s congenital heart condition. Heart Machine designer/developer Teddy Dief joins us from the Glitch City collective in Los Angeles.

A one-of-a-kind arcade cabinet made here in Portland, TinderBox is a treasure trove of indie games—including some unavailable anywhere else. Anyone for a game of Shitty Voltron?

Built in its own custom arcade cabinet, The Moon is Dying & So Will You is a co-op beach combing simulator set during the apocalypse created by Portland’s Mackenzie Schubert and Charles Olson. As the dying moon falls towards earth, each tide rises higher and falls lower than the one that came before. Taking the roles of Caroline and Dave—one who cannot swim and the other who gets stuck on land—players must help each other survive while also collecting the valuables that wash in with every new tide.