See what 17-Bit brought to Boston for PAX East this year!
Next up on day three of PAX East was an appointment at the 17-Bit booth. I was at the booth to check out the physics-based co-op dungeon crawler/brawler, Awaysis. The game is an interesting take on having realistic fighting/physics with the charm of cute animals. The devs were very apologetic because the press build wasn’t running properly when I was there, but I was able to see and feel the whole demo.
You’ll be competing against the others you play against, and you’ll have to use everything in your arsenal. You can slide to build up speed to make jumps easier and to bump enemies. One of the cooler features is that the shoulder buttons on the controller control your sword movements. That builds on the strategy of the game. You might need to hit an enemy on the left side to smack it against needles or hit it on the right to knock it off a cliff. You also have a ground-pound-like attack with your sword that you can perform while jumping. The dev said you have to hold both buttons down all the way through the motion because you can fake out your opponents with it. I was trying to do strategic moves, but I found myself going nuts pushing buttons and using the ground pound like attack. That move has a lot of freedom.
You can also find things strewn about the levels. By things, I mean money, weapons, and food. You can store one piece of food in your pouch and that will come in handy as you can heal with it. You’ll find broken weapons like a sword hilt and the cool thing about that is you can throw them at enemies. You can also throw them at explosive barrels but I think the devs said they were thinking of taking that feature out. At the end of the run, you’ll find out who found the most money in the level. If you beat the boss at the end, you’ll get your hands on a new weapon. to use during that run. If you perish, you lose everything you had. Games like this don’t usually go for a more realistic approach but Awaysis tries and it feels like it works. I’m looking forward to seeing more from it in the future.