Gamezebo at GDC 2023: Day One Diary

Greetings, dear Gamezebo readers. We’re at GDC 2023 in an effort to learn about the latest and greatest games coming to any and all platforms. To help make the coverage easy for you to parse, we’re going to condense everything we see into a single story on each day. If we see something particularly exciting though, we may branch out into individual stories, but we’ll link to it from this. So, bookmark this story and check it out throughout the day.

It’s Zak and myself here this year, and we’ve both got our meeting planners stacked with some of the best developers and publishers. So, you can bet that we’ll have some great stories for you right here on Gamezebo.

Meanwhile, Adele and Meriel are hard at work on bringing you fresh content for all new releases, so it should be an exciting week for Gamezebo! We wish you a great week and hope you enjoy the content.

Memory’s Reach

Memory’s Reach is 100 Stones Interactive’s upcoming project. The developer has revealed that one of it’s greatest influences is the metroidvania sub-genre, and the gameplay really highlights this.

The game itself sees you explore a mysteriously vacant alien planet from a first person perspective. Each level contains a plethora of brain-teasing puzzles that you’ll have to solve in order to navigate yourself around the planet. What’s interesting about the game is that, along with the range of mini-puzzles, the environment itself is a quest that you’ll have to solve in order to move onto the next level.

Memory’s Reach is coming to PC and Mac. 100 Stones Interactive doesn’t have a release date confirmed just yet, but the studio is aiming for a late 2023/early 2024 release. Check out the game on Steam.

-Zak

Asym Altered Axis

We caught up with Asym this afternoon, and learned all about the upcoming asymmetric shooter, Asym Altered Axis.

It supports six players, with a team of five infiltrators versus a single defender. The infiltrators play in third person, while the defender plays in first.

Effectively, it’s Dead by Daylight in reverse. The infiltrators have to steal the defender’s nexus, while the defender has to stave them off.

The defender’s job is a lot more dense than the infiltrator’s. First you have to build your base, customising the aesthetics. If you want to build a base that represents a fiery hellscape, this is the game for you.

You can also completely customise your defences, adding traps like swinging pendulums, as well as buildings an units that will attack your opponents.

Then, when the battle commences, you fly above the map, using ultimate abilities to destroy your opponents. These include dropping icy walls and a meteor storm.

Asym Altered Axis is in alpha right now, with a beta to follow tentatively in Q4 of this year. We’ll keep you posted as this develops.

-Glen

Arcana Of Paradise

Shueisha Games presents: Arcana Of Paradise! The game is a side-scrolling adventure game set entirely in a tower, and the story follows a group of 20 children who live at the very top. After the children overhear a rumour that teases a paradise at the bottom, they attempt to traverse the dangerous floors in pairs.

Each kid has their own unique ability, and they work differently depending on their combo. Experiment to find out which ones are the best, and fight to get to the bottom of the tower! Once you’ve gotten to the bottom, you’ll have to repeat the process with a different pair, until all 20 children have made it out safely.

Arcana Of Paradise comes out on April 20th, and it will be available on Steam and the Nintendo Switch.

-Zak

Go Go Town

If you’ve ever wanted to play as a character in a city simulator, then this game might be for you! Prideful Sloth’s upcoming Go Go Town uses Animal Crossing-like graphics to put you in the shoes of a mayor who’s tasked with building up a town from the ground up.

The game takes a physical approach, and you’ll start off by manually grafting wood and minerals. After a while, you’ll be able to employ other people within the town to do these tasks for you, as you’ll be busy opening new shops and growing the town!

Go Go Town is coming out on PC, Switch, and the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Prideful Sloth are currently unsure on the game’s release date, although they’re working as hard as they can to get the game in the players hands as soon as possible! Check out the official Prideful Sloth Facebook page to stay updated on this exciting new genre mash.