Sense of Wonder Night 2014: the weird and the wonderful of the world’s indie games

The weirdest game we’ve ever seen come out of Australia took center-stage at Tokyo Game Show’s Sense of Wonder Night presentation yesterday. Push Me Pull You is a game that may remind you of Catdog of Nickelodeon fame, or more menacingly, of the human centipede. But actually it’s a concept pulled straight from the classic Dr. Dolittle series of children’s books.

The game involves you controlling a double-ended human creature and moving a ball about within a round wrestling ring. On its website, Push Me Pull You is described as a cooperative physics-based sumo soccer game.

[fve]http://youtu.be/9fugeouoo4A[/fve]

It’s super weird, and it won both best game design from the event as well as the hearts of the attending audience (you can try it here). However, Push Me Pull You wasn’t the only awesome game we saw presented on stage. Here are the Sense of Wonder Night 2014 (SOWN 2014) finalists who caught our eye.

Picolecitta

[fve]http://youtu.be/oTkXobKsjjs[/fve]

Developed in Japan, Picolecitta won best presentation at SOWN 2014, and justifiably so. It’s a game that can support massive local multiplayer action, and was created by Japanese indie developer Teco because he wanted the future of gaming to not be people just staring at individual phones and screens. In his presentation at SOWN 2014, Teco demonstrated game levels that needed up to ten players’ cooperation. Unfortunately, we weren’t told where else Picolecitta could be tried out (apart from the indie area at Tokyo Game Show 2014). You can follow its creator, Teco, on Twitter.

(See: Kickstart a music game that teaches you to write Japanese)

8bitMMO

[fve]http://youtu.be/jC1unLrT9oM[/fve]

This massively-multiplayer online 2D game is a player-generated universe that’s approximately 262,471 square kilometers large. Created 13 years ago by Bobby Zinchak from the US, 8bitMMO has come a long way from when it was a simple graybox online game that crashed whenever more than three people logged on. It’s a huge pixel-art universe today, and you can enter it via Steam.

(See: Meet GLEN, a game engine from Malaysia’s Pickled Brains)

Fill

This zen puzzle game for the iPad is very reminiscent of its more colorful counterpart, Shapist, from Qixen-P Design. Fill is a minimalist approach to the puzzle genre, with no instructions. It definitely evokes a sense of wonder in you—because you can’t play it without that. We’ll find out just where you can try out this game, and update as soon as we can!

(See: Shapist review: mind officially blown)