Here are 185 jam games challenging the FPS formula, from pizza to santa

FPS games—been there done that, right? Maybe so, but the 7 Day FPS game jam is about dumping out the old first person shooting conventions and chambering some new concepts. The jam's ended now and this year's submissions include lots of first person puzzling, a santa simulator, and some Cyberpunk homages. Oh and someone's done Doom. I assume someone always does Doom right? That's the law.

The 7 Day FPS jam is week long game-making marathon meant to "challenge yourself and first person games by creating a game that takes us to new places in new ways," say the organisers. As ever with game jams, there's quite a lot of submissions to scroll through. Jammers are always quite creative, so there's lots more than just guns galore. Here's some of the submissions that caught my eye.

My favorite so far is Frequency, a puzzle game where you're following the sound of a radio to the end of each level. The trick is that as you tune the radio back and forth, parts of the level will shift and change. You'll tune obstacles in and out of existence while hunting down the chill tunes that are your goal. I've seen my share of "change the level around you" puzzle games, but the radio bit is nice and using a scroll wheel to cycle through states just feels right. You can find it over on Itch. It's a bit hard on the eyes, I'll warn, but easy on the ears.

In other oddities, here's a first-person santa simulator where you've got to shoot presents at trees in folks' houses to embiggen them and escape through the chimney before daytime. Ah and here's an infinite runner called Infinite Pizza where you're riding to the center of an infinitely large pizza pie equipped with a slicer and a gun. On the Cyber side, here's a puzzler about snapping together levels called CyberSouls III. It's definitely not the only one of the bunch calling up some neon FPS inspirations.

What about you, reader? What's caught your eye in the 7 Day FPS submissions?

Procjam, the game jam about making procedural games, took place at the same time. You can find those submissions also on Itch.

Oh, and here's Doom.