Two Strikes is a deadly beat-'em-up coming to BitSummit 2021
Along with the full BitSummit game line-up
Japanese indie game festival BitSummit is returning and has just revealed its lineup of games. There's some familiar faces among the mix - Haven Park, for example - but as usual there's also a bunch of stunning-looking games we haven't written about previously.
Among them, Two Strikes, pictured above. It's the sequel to One Strike, and must be a contender for Biggest Series Glow-Up.
Here's a trailer:
Like, dang. For context, the first game in the series, One Strike, had perfectly acceptable IK+-style pixel art. Two Strikes switches it out in favour of stark, painted backgrounds and readable, black-and-white line drawing characters. Even the character select screen looks gorgeous:
It remains, like the original, a fast-paced fighting game where opponents can be defeated in just one or two hits. It's actually in early access on Steam already.
To pick a second BitSummit-featured game, one that's not out, I'd go for Sonzai:
It's an action platformer about brawling, hand-drawn characters, but it combines its monster-punching with RPG and life sim elements a la the Persona series. As a newcomer in town, you form relationships with the people you meet and those social links "affect both the course of the story and the scope of teh player's skill." I like how it looks and how it sounds and it's coming to Steam sometime in 2022.
BitSummit will take place in Kyoto on September 2nd and 3rd. Have a poke around its game list here and lament with us that Super Cable Boy doesn't seem to be coming to PC.