An important Star Wars question is: what colour lightsaber would you have? The lightsaber is the mood ring of elegant weapons for a more civilised age. Jason de Heras, design director on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, agrees with me on the purple blade (a colour introduced to the canon specifically because Samuel L. Jackson wanted it for his character in the prequels). "I was like, 'we gotta have a pink lightsaber blade'," says production director Kasumi Shishido. "So whenever I play I always stick with my pink saber."

Shishido tells me the dev team focused on improving on Jedi: Fallen Order for this sequel, and one of the bigger areas where they did that was customisation. "We knew we wanted to put more resources and effort into it," she says. "There's a lot more that you can do with Cal, with BD... and just within Cal, it's not just outfits you can customise, so I'm just really excited to see what players are going to do with it."

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It's episode seven of Indiescovery and this week, wow, the gang is tired. With a busy four days in Boston for PAX East, mine and Liam's brains were basically mush last week, so Rebecca - an absolute angel - graciously said she could host a special PAX East episode where she chats with Liam and me about the indies we saw on the show floor and try desperately to string together a coherent sentence. She also made bulletpoints of our entire chat so writing up the shownotes would be easier; we do not deserve her.

Saying that, our exhaustion doesn't stop us from kicking up a riot over the BAFTA Game Awards at the start of the episode. We then delve into our PAX East indie round up and, as always, we end with our current hyperfixations.

You can listen and subscribe via your podcast provider of choice! Find us on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Deezer, and now YouTube.

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A belated apology to anyone who was assaulted by a sudden burst of upbeat bagpipes in the GDC press room the other week. I was having an early sneak peak at Inkle's new game A Highland Song in an appointment booth with paper-thin walls and no ceiling. The speakers on my Steam Deck demo unit were really going "full pipe" that day, so I'd like to say a big awkward sorry to any of my neighbours in there who were trying to conduct actual serious business interviews.

But also: A Highland Song is 100% a game that deserves to have its music cranked up to full, whether it's returning Heaven's Vault composer Laurence Chapman's soaring orchestral score, or Scottish bands Talisk and Fourth Moon's aforementioned folk music. The clue's in the name, after all, and after a spirited 30 minutes with it, I'm certain this will have Inkle fans singing from the hilltops.

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Originally released in 2010, Desktop Dungeons is a top-down puzzler about whacking beasties in the correct order, exploring the map to heal, and retreating to enjoy your hard-earned taxidermy skills. Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a recently announced remaster of the tile-based roguelike - freshly coated with 3D graphics and a rewind feature - and it’s now fully launching on April 18th.

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When Marek Markuszewski had finished working on The Witcher 3's Blood And Wine expansion, he wanted to go back to basics and make something by himself, Starward Industries' chief marketing officer Maciej Dobrowolski tells me at GDC. Something that would capture the same kind of cultural Polish heritage as The Witcher - originally adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski's six-strong series of novels - but that would take him on a new, more introspective kind of development journey. It took a while to find, but after a fateful encounter with an investor who'd just sailed across the Atlantic with only a copy of Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible for company, the signs were too good to ignore, Dobrowolski says. And after spending the best part of a year convincing Stanislaw Lem's son (and current rights holder) of the same thing, Markuszewski finally had his something - and a new partner to help him realise it.

"People tell us, 'Don't fuck it up, this guy's important,'" Dobrowolski continues, and no wonder. During the course of our conversation, Lem is described as both a "national treasure" and "mandatory reading in high school" for Polish students, and his hallowed cultural status is something the team's "had to deal with" in bringing the book to life. Despite all this, though, Dobrowolski insists this "isn't a one-to-one adaptation" of Lem's interstellar rescue story gone wrong, and that fans of the book will still find some surprises on the surface of Regis III as they explore its strange canyons, caves and crash sites.

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Normally, when a big game releases, I’ll test how it runs on PC, knock together a best settings guide, respond in the negative to an email that asks if it will run on a GTX 680, and we all move on with our lives. Not so with The Last of Us Part 1, which as you’ve probably seen, has launched in a technical state that’s bleaker than Joel’s face. The first few patches and hotfixes (more are planned) have made it somewhat less terrible on powerful desktops, but I’m sad to report that playing The Last of Us Part 1 on the Steam Deck is not currently worth your time.

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At last year's PAX East, we spent a lot of our time poking around the PAX Rising Showcase booth, which is a collection of indie games curated by PAX itself. Not only did we find a bunch of cool games to play, but we were also able to chat to the games' creators, as all Rising finalists are invited to attend in person to show their work to the public.

This year, though, Rachel and I decided to go one step further. We interviewed the teams behind four of the eleven 2023 finalists, asking the developers behind Go-Go Town!, Paper Trail, Slay the Princess and Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action about their experience of bringing their games to PAX, what they learned along the way, and what it’s like to spend four days standing on your feet talking to thousands of attendees (spoilers: it’s really bloody tiring).

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Everspace 2 is an arcade space shooter with an action-RPG style loot system and a distinctly early 2000s vibe, set entirely within a false memory of a Saturday morning cartoon that never existed, and featuring some obscenely shiny spaceships.

I don’t claim to understand whether this has something to do with “ray-tracing” or some manner of “screen space occlusion” or what have you – Digital Foundry, I am available for work – all I know is that there’s an option to crank up the gloss until you’re pretty much zooming around the galaxy in a big angry disco ball.

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There's a kind of game that we all have a fondness for. It transcends genre, even if it doesn't particularly push the boat out. It's not the first game that comes to mind as a favourite or recommendation, but it's a plain good time. Raidborn is one of those.

It doesn't try to take over your life, or be the Everything Game that invariably becomes the Nothing Game. It's just a neat little thing to have some harmless fun with. Sometimes that's what you want.

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Liam and I played a lot of games at PAX East, like a lot. Most of them we managed to make videos for, but there were many more that we just didn't have the time to cover, and that were also very good! So here's a quick list of five more games I wanted to spotlight in written form while Liam's busy in the editing mines working on all the community videos we filmed (the first of which is out right now, chronicling the PAX Facebook group that takes a community photo every single year). It's very wholesome. We've got more community videos coming out this week, plus an article listing our absolute favourite games we played throughout the entire event, so keep your eyes peeled for those, too. For now, though, let's dive into some more indie highlights.

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