Alpha Beta Gamer

Light is a top-down minimalist stealth infiltration game with a focus (aside from stealth gameplay) on narrative to keep the action going. You are part of a scientific study and a procedure left your with short term memory loss. Further investigation reveals that there is something called ’Project Light’ and that all is not well. You must search for the answers that will help you piece together the fragmented memories of your past.

In Light, you infiltrate buildings, sneak your way through the guards and cameras, hack to open secured rooms and search for intel to help you figure out what is going on in ‘Project Light’. As in Metal Gear Solid, you’re best off dragging bodies away from plain sight once you’ve stunned or killed the guards as you don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.

The minimalistic visual style of Light is wonderful, feeling a little like you’re exploring the futuristic blueprints of a building with furnishings only appearing once they’re in your field of view. In development by Just a Pixel and published by Team 17, it’s a great stealth game with an interesting story and a clean, crisp visual style. Metal Square Solid.

Download the Prototype, Free Win & Mac

PRISM is an old school top down arcade shoot-em-up with one game changing difference - you don’t shoot directly at the enemies, instead you shoot through a prism in the centre of the screen, which then spreads your shot out the other side. You can choose whether the shots go straight through the prism, or bounce off them like a mirror. This works well once you get used to it, as switching between normal fire and mirrored mode to dispose of enemies becomes second nature.

PRISM features clever enemy design, big bosses, retro visuals and a great soundtrack. It’s also hard, very hard in-fact, you’ll need quick thinking, quick reflexes and a bit of luck if you’re going to succeed in PRISM. It’s a game aimed squarely at hardcore shoot-em-up fans, and all the better for it.

Download the Beta Demo, Free

Guild of Dungeoneering is a papercraft dungeon exploration game where you don’t get to control your adventurer directly. Instead you lay out the dungeon one room at a time, placing treasure and monsters to trying to carefully guide your dungeoneer to victory.

Each turn you’re given a choice of 5 cards to lay or discard, allowing you to lay map tiles, enemies or loot. The loot can be treasure, equipment or weapons that will aid your progress. You can’t constantly just lay treasure cards though, thanks to a points system that means you have to defeat enemies before you can lay the loot cards.

Fights against enemies are entirely stat based, so it’s best to obtain some better equipment before taking on the tougher baddies. It can be a little infuriating that the dungeoneer has a mind of his own, as he can be suicidal at times, but it’s a good feature and adds a some welcome randomness to the proceedings.

The Alpha Demo is still early in development, so it’s not fully featured, but it does a good job of showing off the unique gameplay and the fun papercraft visual style which adds a lot of warmth and charm to the game. An interesting idea, well implemented, watch out for those rubber duckies!

Play the Alpha, Free

alpha-beta-gamer:

Storium is an online storytelling game that allows players to create a story through a series of scenes, reacting to obstacles and people as you come across them. It’s played with 3 people, with one person playing as the Narrator, and the other 2 playing as the characters.
The Narrator chooses the world that the story is set in (with choices such as ‘occult pop horror’, ‘medical drama’ and ‘cyberpunk’), then starts each scene, using cards to give the players challenges to overcome. The players will then try to overcome these challenges as they see fit, progressing the story in fun and interesting ways.
There are a few more rules, but it’s remarkably easy to pick up and is only limited by your imagination. Storium is a fun and fluid way of storytelling, with players reacting to each other and no-one being fully in control, it can lead to some VERY interesting stories.
Our attempt was an occult pop horror called ‘The Badgers of Doom’, they’re black, they’re white, and they bite! Coming soon to cinemas near you!
Sign up for the Alpha
UPDATE: Alpha Sign-ups are now closed, but you can now get immediate access to the Beta by backing the Storium Kickstarter

UPDATE: Alpha Sign-ups are now closed, but you can now get immediate access to the Beta by backing the Storium Kickstarter

Grave is a surreal, open-world, procedural survival horror game, with day & night cycles playing a big roll. During the day, you search for anything to help you survive, and explore to find new areas, during the night, you try to survive using light sources you’ve scavenged, and explore if you’re brave enough.

In Grave, you don’t have guns or knifes to survive but you use light as a way to defend and eliminate the creatures that’s out to get you. This was done in Alan Wake previously, but here the light-as-a-weapon theme is far superior, with no need for guns to finish off enemies and you can use various different light sources – like putting oil on the ground and setting fire to it with matches.

It’s an atmospheric horror game with a lots of inventive ways to play, the game is scariest in the beginning, more so than later on when hordes of monsters show up, but that’s where the survival gameplay comes into play – a little less frightening, but just as fun. With Oculus Rift Support, you can play the game in full VR if you really want to freak yourself out though!

Download the Alpha, Free

The Maestros is a fast paced real-time strategy game which sees you controlling a commander who roams the battlefield, amassing an army of minions who can transform on-the-fly.

Your commander must gather minions by killing the local wildlife (the Tenchii), these minions are pretty underpowered and follow you around in herds like Pikmin, but can be upgraded at certain spots on the battlefield, allowing you to amass a powerful army. As there is no base to defend (the only thing you need to protect is the commander) and you don’t need to worry about harvesting supplies, you can be right where the action is at all times, making for some fast paced and fluid gameplay.

Battle takes place in the fantasy land of the Tenshii Archipelago, with a war between two factions, the kingdoms of Teutonia and Regallis. The world and character design are colourful, bright and fun, giving the game character and charm. The game doesn’t take itself too seriously either, with a nice sense of humour throughout.

The Maestros is doing a lot of things right, it’s an RTS that skips the slow, boring bits at the beginning of the game, with you amassing your army on-the-go and allowing you to always be where the action is. Unfortunately the Open Alpha Test will finish on Sunday, April 6th at 11:00pm, so you’d better hurry if you want to give it a go.

Play the Alpha, Free

Grand Theft Flying Object (GTFO) is a 4 player local co-op game that encourages (not intentionally) frantic, bad teamwork. You and your friends are all stuck controlling a single ship and must work together to manoeuvre through the environment and fight off oncoming enemies. As the name implies, you steal another flying ship when your ship is about to be destroyed, each time you change ships you’ll have to learn how to fly them, as different ships handle differently. It thrives on the organised chaos that ensues when multiple people are forced to work together to fly a single ship.

The game was a university project developed by students and is now owned by the university, with the developers moving on to something else, so the game will probably never be completed. This is a shame as cooperative play in the game is great fun, it plays well and has a wonderful art style.

Download the alpha/prototype build

Outpost is a management sim that tasks you with helping your crew survive in a remote mining facility on a hostile planet until rescue. It’s simple, Prison Architect graphical style belies a deceptively tricky game, which is an ongoing balancing act of building defences, mining, hunting and resource management.

This balancing act is pretty hard to get to grips with initially as there are so many things to keep tabs on that you’re constantly running out of one resource or another. A tutorial would be a welcome addition, but once you get to grips with the game, it presents satisfying challenge. A challenge that only increases as earthquakes, freezing storms and local wildlife disrupt the base operations. Also, there’s also the small matter of what killed the previous occupants of the base, and when it’s coming back.

Outpost is a challenging balancing act that will force you to make sacrifices and difficult choices along the way. It’s doubtful all of your cute little engineers will survive, but hopefully they won’t die in vain!

Play the Beta, Free

Please Be Nice :( is a free game which allows the first person to beat the current build to submit a feature they want added to the game. This feature will then be added and the cycle will restart.

Now in it’s 98th cycle, as you can imagine people have requested some very outlandish additions, such as “giant star boss, wearing googly eyed pants” to “add bird jesus”. Since it’s inception the game has morphed from a from a very simple, get from point A to point B on a single screen game, to a multicoloured fever dream where you can control the horned-head of Nicholas Cage in a top down shooter, firing turtles and being rewarded with a picture of a big cat when you reach the end of a level.

It’s a fantastic experiment, and will probably never make a great game, but that’s not the point. It’s more about the experience, watching a game evolve over time and laughing at some of the ridiculous additions that have been requested and implemented.

Play Please Be Nice :( Free

Red Goddess is a beautiful Metroidvania 2D action/adventure platformer that allows you to enter the minds of your enemies as you explore the subconscious of the main character. This gorgeous CGI rendered world represents the mind of your character, Divine, and all the enemies you meet are manifestations of her own bad thoughts. Her mind has become clouded and ill, a mysterious and unknown corruption is tearing her apart from the inside, so she sets out to investigate her own subconscious.

As well as jumping into the minds of her enemies, Divine can also split into two aspects of her personality - Rage and Fear - effectively giving you 3 different playable characters to switch between, each with their own skills and abilities. Also, when split into Rage and Fear the inactive half of your personality is represented by a glowing orb which can be thrown at enemies or teleported to, allowing you to access out of reach areas. Also, as with any Metroidvania game worth its salt, there’s plenty of other interesting powers to unlock as you progress.

Already Greenlit on Steam and a quarter of the way to it’s $50k Kickstarter goal, even in these early stages of development, Red Goddess looks fantastic. With it’s interesting storyline, beautiful visuals and fun gameplay mechanics, Red Goddess is shaping up to be an excellent platformer with some great ideas.

Download the Pre-Alpha, Free

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