Xbox Indies and Summer Games Fest Highlights

This weekend here at 3Bit, we took part in the ID@Xbox and Summer Games Fest's Summer Demo Event, where over 30 titles are coming soon to Xbox and other platforms, including PlayStation and PC. We checked out some incredible demos, and I would love to talk about them all in this article. Unfortunately, we just don't have space, so we have selected 3 games that stood out the most to us for you to check out when they release later this year!

Split Gate – Portal Meets Halo.

Our first highlight from the summer Demo Event is Split Gate, by Californian developers 1047 Games. This incredible new multiplayer title combines classic shooters like Halo 2 and Unreal Tournament with Valve's incredibly popular puzzle adventure Portal. This unique combination of genres elevates the FPS experience like never before with fast-paced battles that will leave you questioning yourself and how your enemies managed to pull off some incredible trick shots whilst making just as great kills yourself. When I first started playing Split Gate on my Xbox, I felt as if I had been thrown back to my school days playing Halo after school with my mates, but this nostalgia wasn't all that impressed me. Split Gate offered a tonne of different game modes for its Pre-Beta build, including Shotty Snipers, Team Deathmatch and many more. If you want to check out this fantastic looking shooter for yourself, then be sure to check out the open Beta for Xbox PlayStation and PC, which starts on July 1st. Split Gate will then launch as a Free To Play title on July 27th on each of these platforms and will offer Cross-Play and Cross Gen Play.

A Jugglers Tale – There Are No Strings On Me

Taking us into the world of storytelling, we have a story that is strung together like no other, A Jugglers Tale by Kaleidoscube. Whilst this demo was only a short run through the game's prologue, it gave us a taste for this all-new 2D puzzle platformer and left us wanting more.  A Jugglers tale puts us into the shoes of Abby, a young circus girl who is bound to her life of entertaining townsfolk and villagers by the strings that keep her upright. Abby's life is narrated in a poetic style, but Abby's life is hardly poetic, for each night, she is locked away in a small cage, left to suffer under the cruel ownership of the circus Ringleader. Until one fateful night, freedom calls for Abby. The demo ends with our puppet escaping the sinister clutches of the circus and entering a beautiful world where she will face many dangers from obstacles to bandits, all to break free of the strings that bound her to the circus. A Jugglers tale doesn't have a release date just yet but will be ready as soon as all the knots are tied and will release on Xbox, PC, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.

Death Trash – The Fleshiest of Demos

Usually, when I play a demo, I expect anything from 20 minutes to an hour of gameplay, but with Death Trash, I honestly feel like we got hours of gameplay in a pixel Isometric RPG that takes us to a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk world filled with grotesque horrors, and cyberpunk themes. We enter the demo in a strange building with robots revoking our citizenship, leaving us to explore a new world filled with dangerous monster's hideous mutations and bodily fluids, which seem to power certain machines. As we explore this new world, one thing that stood out was how much meat and flesh was lying around, where did it come from, what is its purpose. As the demo progressed, I met a range of NPC's, not all of them human and not all of them friendly. Death Trash is filled with dark humour and some rather unique events that honestly you would not expect, such as helping a disturbing "Flesh Kraken" make a new friend. This addictingly fun RPG will have you shooting, smashing, sneaking and puking all around this fleshy wasteland, and you will be able to get hands-on with Death Trash first on PC via Steam when it releases in Early Access on August 5th, but will also be coming to PlayStation Xbox and Nintendo Switch when the game fully releases. No full release date has been given yet but be sure to stay with us at 3Bit as we continue to follow this insane title.