Above your weight

As we stand on the cusp of a new decade and a new generation in this rapidly changing industry, it’s easy to get carried away. While it’s a scary time for the world at large, it’s a fascinating time for games, and for the indie scene in particular, which begins the 2020s on fertile ground. Funding has never been so easy to come by, with platform holders and storekeepers willing to de-risk all manner of out-there ideas. Yet that does not mean that small teams are putting their feet up. On the contrary: they are pushing at the boundaries of what indie games mean harder than ever.

Perhaps the clearest example of that this month comes from Snow (p36). It’s the work of a small Norwegian team with big ideas, which has found cost-effective ways of using the sort of trickery we have come to associate with some of the industry’s biggest players – lavishly detailed snowdeformation tech, photogrammetry and performance capture.

Elsewhere we find plenty of other examples of small teams dreaming big. Unto The End (p40) is a quietly thrilling brawler from a husband-and-wife team; Paradise Killer (p44) is a surreal detective adventure made by two childhood friends. In this context, Amanita Design looks like a relative juggernaut, an established studio with a proven track record. But Creaks (p48) sees the studio push beyond our traditional expectations of its work with a foray into tautly wound horror.

For all the funding sloshing around at the moment, any creative endeavour naturally involves shouldering a certain amount of risk. But we doubt any of the indies featured this month are feeling the pressure quite like the developers of Diablo IV (p32). Seeking to marry the deliciously satisfying over-the-top combat of Diablo III with the dark, oppressive tone of Diablo II is no easy task, particularly when Blizzard finds itself in an uncomfortable situation and fans are harder than ever to please. On first evidence, at least, they’re headed in the right direction.