When E3 canceled its 2020 conference, plenty of smaller events sprang up in its place. Publishers put on their own showcases, and smaller developers banded together to host indie events. One of the most prominent was the Guerrilla Collective. This year, Guerilla Collective is back, alongside a full E3 schedule, and day one of the 2021 showcase delivered another batch of fresh titles that vary in art style, genre, and release date.
Guerilla Collective is a series of streams run by the folks behind the Media Indie Exchange, an organization that focuses on promoting various independent games. The Collective had something for just about everyone in its first day of announcements this year, but a few rose above the pack to make a big impression on the indie enthusiasts tuning in.
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The following games were shown during the Guerrilla Collective’s day one livestream. A second stream will come on June 12 at 11 AM ET – right in the middle of the official E3 festivities and before that day’s Ubisoft Forward event. If the games that premiere on June 12 can compete with the standouts shown today, it could be a heck of a second year for the Collective.
Guerrilla Collective Day 1 Standouts: The Eternal Cylinder
ACE Team’s weird and wonderful The Eternal Cylinder had another great showing early in the Guerrilla Collective stream. The developer showed off another transformation for the Trebhum creatures players guide through the game’s unforgiving and surreal landscape. Although there wasn’t an appearance from the titular, all-powerful cylinder in this new trailer, there were a few new nightmare-inducing creatures to add to the game’s bestiary. As of now, The Eternal Cylinder is set for a 2021 release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Guerrilla Collective Day 1 Standouts: Source of Madness
Source of Madness is a Lovecraftian roguelike developed by Carry Castle and published by Thunderful Games. While the side-scrolling action definitely has the same flair as something like Motion Twin’s Dead Cells, the real interesting hook comes from the game’s Steam page: The masses of tentacles and gaping maws seen in the trailer are completely procedurally generated and animated via neural network AI. This means that not only will the levels of Source of Madness shift around the player, but the enemies will as well – a good fit for a game about losing one’s sanity. Players can dive in on Steam later in 2021.
Guerrilla Collective Day 1 Standouts: El Paso, Elsewhere
Strange Scaffold, the indie developer behind the distinctive An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, announced something completely different at the Guerilla Collective. El Paso, Elsewhere is a love letter to the original Max Payne games, complete with PS1-era graphics and tons of slow-motion dives. There’s also a supernatural bent, with alien forces made up of “werewolves, fallen angels, and other damned creatures.” El Paso, Elsewhere is currently set for a 2022 release date.
Guerrilla Collective Day 1 Standouts: Tamarindos Freaking Dinner
Sometimes, the ideal thing to do during an indie showcase is capture the viewer’s attention, which certainly seems to be the intent of the trailer for Tamarindos Freaking Dinner, a first-person horror adventure game from one-person developer Celery Emblem and publisher Neon Doctrine. Rather than describe the gameplay’s mix of ’90s sitcom and Luigi‘s Mansion, the trailer instead gets players prepared for the surreal style evident in Celery Emblem’s past work. Tamarindos Freaking Dinner is slated for 2022.
With E3 still on the horizon, it’s great to see how many unique indie projects are in the pipeline. In the tens of games with trailers shown during the Guerilla Collective’s first day, only a few could be described as even remotely similar, and most were stretching to every genre imaginable. The indie scene continues to remain healthy thanks to that diversity, and the gaming public is likely to see much more evidence of that throughout June.
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