The Watchlist: Slain!

Title: Slain!
Developer: Wolf Brew Games
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, PS4, PS Vita
Releasing May 2015, consoles planned for September and December
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Prepare to be Slain! Our homage to the gory hack and slash games of the 80's and 90's. We promise stunning visuals with gore galore.

There's something so satisfying about playing a brutally difficult game. Be it Volgarr The Viking or Super Meat Boy, succeeding where you failed myriad times before, mastering a game's seemingly insurmountable challenge, is always rewarding. Slain! harkens back to the days of brutal games like Shadow of The Beast and Ghosts 'n Goblins, a lone hero against grotesque odds, across Gothic landscapes of blood and death.

At a glance, Slain stands out due to its lavishly detailed pixel art. Clouds drift above and fog rolls across the swamps and underbrush. Torch lights flicker and sway in the breeze. The otherworldly abodes of werewolves and spirits and undead beasts drip with blood, walls choked with vines. Gruesome creatures, from skeletons and witches to more dangerous horrors, are displayed in grisly detail, all decayed flesh and tattered clothes.

But Slain! promises more than just wonderfully-realized Gothic environments. As the reawakened hero Bathoryn, you must traverse these lands and free seven towers from the grip of their monstrous overlords. From the crimson halls of Blood Tower to the lupine effigies of the Wolfwoods, Bathoryn strikes down creatures with his sword and mana abilities, while also dealing with each tower's puzzles and deadly traps. Master your skills, know your enemies, or die.

Slain! is estimated to release on PC, Mac, and Linux in May, with console releases rolling out in the months to follow. You can learn more about Slain! on its official site and TIGSource devlog, as well as support the game on Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight.

The Watchlist: Orphan

Title: Orphan
Developer: Windy Hill Studio
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Releasing late 2015
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It started as any other day. And then they came.
In Orphan, you are a young boy left to fend for himself as an alien race invades the earth to eradicate humankind. There's not much else to do but run, but along the way as you evade enemy forces you may discover the way to halt their attack and save humanity before it's too late!

Inspired by War of the Worlds, Another World, and Blackthorne, Orphan is a game about surviving an alien invasion. Taking place over a single night, you play as a young boy surviving and traversing extraterrestrial-infested wilderness. From the screenshots and GIFs, atmosphere is key here; raging forest fires, foggy swamps, pounding rain, dense woodlands, crawling with alien mechanics, as your child protagnist flees the onslaught. However, these invaders aren't invisible and you won't be defenseless, able to use the machines' weapons against them. While the shadow art style may bring to mind Limbo, the developer has stated there won't be physics puzzles in Oprhan, just a young boy fighting off aliens across the countryside. 

Orphan is still in development, with an estimated release sometime in 2015. You can learn more about Orphan here and follow the game's development on the Windy Hill Twitter page.

The Watchlist: Hover: Revolt of Gamers

Title: Hover: Revolt of Gamers
Developer: Fusty Games
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One
Releasing 2015
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Between the crazy Jet Set Radio, the interactivity of Mirror's Edge and inspired by films like "The Fifth Element" or "Star Wars", Hover let you play as a Gamer Team from another world, appalled at the dictatorship in their city.

Take Mirror's Edge, Jet Set Radio, mix with the towering sci-fi cityscapes of The Fifth Element, add multiplayer, and you get Hover: Revolt of Gamers. A first/third-person parkour game set across the bustling districts of a futuristic alien city, Hover combines free-flowing acrobatics with tricks and stunts in an open world.

Set in a video game-hating dystopia, you're the member of the Gamer resistance, helping citizens, tracking down secret warehouses of confiscated consoles, and fleeing police drones. Equipped with a high-tech suit, the sky is the limit as you leap across rooftops, grind along rails, slide along walls, pull off flips and stunts while fluidly racing through the city. Hover can be played from both a Mirror's Edge-inspired first person perspective (complete with Oculus Rift support!) and a third-person view to better admire the animations and stunts. But chaining high-flying combos across the city and through hover traffic is always better with friends, and Hover promises to also offer seamless online multiplayer, allowing you to race and compete in co-operative and competitive modes.

Hover: Revolt of Gamers just oozes potential and promise, from its vibrant colorful visuals and its fluid open-world parkour to its ambitious cities and multiplayer. You can learn more about the game on IndieDB and support it on Kickstarter. The campaign is already more than fifty percent funded in less than two days, and stretch goals include new characters, new game modes, a bigger game world, a full soundtrack from Jet Set Radio's composer Hideki Naganuma, and a Wii U version.

Hover was Greenlit in February.

The Watchlist: Gang Beasts

Title: Gang Beasts
Developer: Boneloaf
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, Android, WiiU, PS4, XBox One
In development
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Gang Beasts is a stupidly silly local multiplayer party game with doughy ragdoll physics and horrific environmental hazards.

I'll be honest. I first saw a screenshot of Gang Beasts during Screenshot Saturday. It looked interesting but nothing really jumped out at me as amazing or something to be hyped about. And then I read this great RockPaperShotgun preview and realized that was a mistake. Gang Beasts is awesome.

Even in its extremely early playable alpha, the game is one of the most fun and funniest I've played in a while. RPS was right when they said "every fight turns into a desperate action sequence." Gang Beasts is pushing and prodding your opponent into an industrial grinder. It's having a four-way brawl atop speeding trucks. It's punching your opponent in the face while both of you dangle from a window washing platform. What's more, those exciting fights are incredibly simple to control - keys for movement, for punching and grabbing - and your cute colorful brawlers all have physics-based animations that add some satisfying yet oddly hilarious brutality to every fight.

And that's only the 0.0.1 alpha. Reading through the developer's IndieDB and Greenlight pages, they have even greater ambitions. A shopping mall with glass elevators to fight on top of. A hotel/casino featuring a bar for a good old-fashioned bar brawl. A construction site with destructible walls and floors to smash through. An amusement park with a Ferris wheel and roller coaster to fight on. Levels ranging from fights in the middle of freeway traffic to fights on top of a train. A single player mode with levels and bosses. Various moves like headbutts, elbows, and evasive dodges. It sounds incredibly promising and the alpha is a clear evidence that Boneloaf is well on their way to achieving those goals.

Gang Beasts is still in early development. You can download the alpha here; it's currently multiplayer-only, with up to four players able to brawl locally across several levels, but the developers plan to add AI bots and a Sandbox mode in the next build. You can learn more about Gang Beasts on its IndieDB page and vote for it on Steam Greenlight.