GameTyrant came away from PAX Australia in Melbourne last weekend with hands-on impressions of five indie games, not the crowded blockbuster everyone else was chasing. The biggest line at the convention was for Alien Isolation 2, but the write-up spent its time on the smaller projects that were actually being played.
That choice matters because PAX Australia is the country's biggest games convention, and the queue for Alien Isolation 2 showed where the loudest attention was going. But the roundup points readers toward what was on the floor too: playable indie games getting real time with attendees instead of just hanging on a banner or a trailer.
One of the most striking was Cooking for MA!, from New Zealand developers Tuatara Tea Party. It mixes cooking mechanics with a retro RPG layer, and the setup is simple but heavy with meaning: preparing rice for a grandfather's memorial service. The game also shifts into a top-down exploration mode that feels reminiscent of the original Pokémon games, which gives it a familiar structure even as the premise stays personal.
No Humanity - InternShip takes a very different route. It is a physics-driven bullet-hell survival roguelite that casts the player as a free-floating and highly expendable intern, then sends that intern to defend a drillship hunting for the last remnants of humanity. It is the kind of pitch that sounds absurd until the screen fills with chaos, and it is scheduled to release in December.
My Arms Are Longer Now leans into comedy, but the demo still asks for precise timing. It starts with the player crawling out of a vent on a moving train, then turns into a heist to steal a passenger's briefcase. Along the way, the player has to dodge a barking dog, loop a strangely boneless arm around a ticket inspector, and even grab a hammer to smash through a glass window. That is the kind of sequence that makes a convention demo memorable, because it tells you exactly how strange a full game can become in a few minutes.
The roundup does not spell out the other two indie games beyond those three, which leaves a small gap in the full picture. Even so, the shape of the visit is clear: instead of standing in the two-hour line for Alien Isolation 2, the writer spent the day on indie games that were ready to be played right there on the show floor. That is usually where the more revealing stories are at a convention like this, and it is also the part of PAX Australia that tends to stick once the crowds move on.
