E3 Conference: Devolver Digital

Let’s review the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017.

Devolver digital is the production team that brought you HotLine Miami, Bro Force or Titan Soul. They are mainly responsible for producing most of the nice and edgy Indie Games. Thus, having a slot available for them at the big boys’ table of the E3 press conference is a power move on their part.

So let’s review the Devolver Press Conference.

The show starts with a cringy introduction, showing an “imaginary“ disdain the common press and people have for indie games. After that, on the stage, with the people applauding, it seems that “Chief Synergy Officer” Nina Struthers doesn’t have time for journalists’ enthusiasm and fires a gun on stage to make them stop.

Ok, something strange.

Let’s take a look at Ruiner, an upcoming cyber punk, top down action game with really bright colors and really bright violence. Coming in 2017.

Milo Lowrie, from “Research and development and more research” introduces us to Devolver digital screen pay. It’s a device that allows people to throw money at the screen to buy games. A man then comes on stage and starts throwing money with more and more enthusiasm and gets his arm cut in half by the screen, lots of laughing coming from the audience. Lots of blood coming from the arm.

Ok what?!

We are then introduced to a trailer for Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour, an online coop top down pixel art game with a fast paced gameplay, a lot of bullets and a lot of enemies.

Nina is back to talk about Devolver earliest access, a program allowing people to pay for the game when they are still in the form of an idea. A truly revolutionary concept. After that a completely stupid skit with Japanese game maker Suda51, responsible for the No More Heroes trilogy, the Silver Case and Killer7 among other.

The poor victim of the digital screen play is back on stage to try the Comment created content, a feature that allows anyone to modify the game in real time by complaining about it on forums, message boards and live chat.

Then everything goes darker and messier, until the presentation ends abruptly with Nina’s head exploding.

Ok what the hell did I just watch? Devolver Digital.

Those guys are not the common production or development team. A lot of what they do revolves around dark humor and absurdity. Their CFO (chief fictional officer), Fork Parker is a fictional character promoting their games on twitter and giving his opinion about current trends in the video game industry.

This show is a Meta Joke, designed to throw people taking these conferences too seriously off balance and highlight everything that’s wrong with AAA gaming these days.

I strongly recommend everyone to watch the show, as longs as you don’t have a problem with blood that is!