PG Connects - The best of the rest of the Very Big Indie Pitch

This week we held our largest Big Indie Pitch event yet. A whopping 50 indie developers came to PG Connects in London to show their upcoming games to a panel of games journalists and potential publishers.

We ultimately picked three games as joint winners of the event: manic monster touchscreen party game Tap Happy Sabotage, silly speed photography game PhotoDash!, and botanical adventure Wild Dawn.

But to choose just three games from an impressive selection of original titles would be criminal. So PG's Rob and Mark combed through their rapidly failing memories to choose a handful of stand-out games.

Fangs Dash
By Game Source Studio - coming to iPhone and iPad

Fangs Dash – the soft launch version of which is available now in New Zealand – is like a cross between Flight Control and Fruit Ninja. You swipe lines on the screen for a young lady vampire to follow in murderous spurts of motion.

Your enemies include villagers, priests, maidens, soldiers, and other fundamentally decent members of society, and you can either take them down with a gory slash or suck out their blood for an energy boost by tapping on them.

It looks great, and dealing with the various enemy types – some of whom drain your energy if you tackle them in the wrong way – makes for some surprisingly tactical gameplay - Rob.

Sleep Attack
By Bad Seed - coming to iOS and Android

I think I could probably go my entire life without seeing another tower defence game and be perfectly content, but I'll make an exception for this clever circular strategy game from a team of ex-Ubisoft developers.

As ever, you have something to defend (a fat, sleepy monster), an invading army of enemy units, and defensive towers. But now you can spin the battlefield like a plate to change the maze-like path to the monster and send different enemies past different towers.

It's been done before, specifically in Futuremark's Unstoppable Gorg, but Sleep Attack gives this spiraling strategy variant a cute, colourful, and expressive makeover - Mark.

Relic Restorer
By Lady Shotgun - coming to tablets

Relic Restorer is an odd little game with a target demographic that we're not entirely sure exists – Antiques Roadshow fans who like to play video games on their high tech gadgets. The game involves unearthing and restoring various artefacts by doing things like reconstructing a vase via a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

The most intriguing part of this rather staid – and, in its present early state, visually unexciting – game is the antiques marketplace, through which you can buy and sell dusty old trash for profit. It's an odd one, but we think it might just work - Rob.

Piano City
By Room 8 - coming to iPhone and iPad

I like piano apps on iPad, but they're no use to someone with the musical talent of a cinder block. This saccharine casual game, however, might just turn me into the next Mozart.

Like Rock Band and co, you tap on keys when the falling notes reach the bottom of the screen. It starts out simple but soon the pace drives up, the songs become more challenging, and a drooping red curtain makes it so you have less and less time to react to new notes.

The game will have classic songs and modern keyboard melodies, a quest that takes you from piano school to the concert hall, and loads of stuff to collect. It looks like it's for six year olds, but you bet your ass I'll be playing this when it hits the App Store - Mark

Ratventure
By Przemyslaw Perkowski - out now on iOS

Ratventure is already out, and has been since last November, so there's every chance that you've already played it. But it managed to evade our radar so here's a belated lowdown.

It's World of Goo but with rats, more or less. The goal is to allow a pair of rats to eat as much cheese as possible by building structures for them to clamber up, down, and across. The physics are in real time, so your structures sway and sag under the weight of the vermin, but that seems to be the only real modification to the formula.

The art style is nice, though, and there aren't very many World of Goo clones on the App Store, so Ratventure is worth a look. There's a free version here - Rob.

Gunfinger
By Pixel Toys - Coming to "phones and tablets"

iOS developers keep coming up with new ways to kill zombies on a touchscreen. We've had dodgy virtual joysticks and convoluted control schemes. Now Pixel Toys has come along and said "why don't you just tap on them?". It's a good question.

Gunfinger is a classic on-rails light gun shooter ala House of the Dead, but you use your finger instead of some chunky plastic pistol to cap the undead enemies. You use swipes to reload, melee attack, and lob grenades.

You can also get some extra accuracy by holding your finger on the screen to zoom in and bring up a reticule. With this you can pull off headshots, or shoot a zombie in the kneecap to slow him down. It's pretty brainless and gory, but it works great on touch - Mark

Schroedinger's Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark
By Italic Pig - coming to iOS and Android

We've written about smartypants platformer Schroedinger's Cat before, but it still appears to be a while off – developer Kevin Beimers wasn't prepared to let the judges play it at the Very Big Indie Pitch event this week.

But it's a promising game. You play as the eponymous hypothetical cat, and as you make your way through the platformy stages you collect quarks that have up, down, left, and right orientations. Collecting three up quarks lets you jump, while collecting three down ones lets you fire a rocket. Combine them and you can do a rocket jump.

Developer Italic Pig is a self-confessed "closet physicist", and he claims that the game contains plenty of clever in-jokes that I will never comprehend - Rob.

The Detail
By Rival Games - coming to tablets

Developer Rival Games pitched The Detail as "*The Wire* meets Telltale's The Walking Dead," which indicates, if nothing else, a certain wild ambition. The game is a police procedural point-and-click adventure in which you play as two different characters: Reggie, a hardbitten cop, and Joe, an ex-con struggling to go straight.

Rival Games promises branching storylines, episodic content, player-driven narrative, and a "unique and exciting experience." It's difficult to say whether the game will live up to this vaulting ambition but we think it's worth keeping an eye on - Rob.

Her Majesty's SPIFFING
By BillyGoat Entertainment - coming to tablets

Her Majesty's SPIFFING is a point-and-click adventure game that was widely reported last November when its Kickstarter campaign began. The publicity didn't work, though – the campaign failed, meaning you'll have to wait a while to play it.

This highly presentable and humour-laced episodic game sees you travelling across the universe attempting to restore the British Empire to its former glory. Along the way you'll encounter other nations also trying to expand their frontiers in what can only reasonably be described as a light-hearted and mildly racist adventure - Rob.

Major League Wizardry
By Game Made Studio - coming to iOS and Android

In Game Made Studio's Major League Wizardry, wizards and witches are sports superstars. They have cheerleaders, fans, coaches, and an entire league to play through.

That's the idea behind this turn-based trading card game. You can use your hand-picked deck of cardboard rectangles to summon and level up monsters, as you try to out-magic the opponent.

It looks great, and the game has been in beta for some time as the studio conjures up the perfect balance. Plus, you will be able to get real world cards and scan them into the game with your device's camera - Mark

Tiki Taka Soccer
By Panic Barn - coming to iPad and Android tablets

At a glance, Tiki Taka Soccer could be mistaken for Sensible Soccer. But on closer inspection, it could still be mistaken for Sensible Soccer. But it's not Sensible Soccer.

This retro football game has a smart touchscreen interface (tap to pass, swipe to shoot and tackle), charming and evocative (of Sensible Soccer) pixel-art graphics, and a pared down, RPG-style management mode to give the whole thing a bit of structure. It looks pretty ready, so you can expect to play it soon.