The Japanese publisher has made the work of some passionate developers available for free on Gabe Newell’s digital platform, and it’s no April Fool’s joke.
In Doronko Wanko, you control a Pomeranian, and your goal is to cause so much damage to your owner’s house in such a short amount of time that when they return home, it looks like a nuclear bomb has exploded in their home. It may sound like Goat Simulator, but this time you can wreak havoc in a smaller environment without unusually idiotic physics, so Doronko Wanko might be a good choice for tension relief.
The second game on our list is Boomeroad, where you throw a boomerang. This creates tracks to explore an ancient ruin floating in the sky, and the goal is to find all the treasures. The concept could work well in an action game, or maybe a collectathon puzzle. The third is Nottolot. In it, you have to control a tiny robot named Rolly to hack other robots to solve puzzles and eventually escape the robot factory. Even with a mechanical protagonist, the pacing is extremely slow (even compared to the Oddworld games), but the puzzles can still hold your attention.
The games are created by Bandai Namco developers, but the publishing role is not played by Bandai Namco (probably because they don’t want to tarnish their own reputation with these projects), but by a Japanese group called Phoenixx. According to their description, they “aim to support innovative and creative developers from Japan and around the world. Its mission is to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one creator, one game, and one community at a time.
This is a good initiative because it allows developers’ ideas to be learned by others, or even to raise awareness so that the concepts can be better developed in a larger game.
Source: PCGamer,
