You Know PAX: PAX East 2025
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Wide but shallow.
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Another year, another PAX East. I won’t lie, the shine is waning. Still a helluva weekend, but it’s impossible to ignore the widening margins of the expo floor and the lack of big publisher presence – Nintendo didn’t even bother this year. It felt smaller, seemed to go by more quickly and kind of just coasted on habits of shows past.
That said, as noted, still a good time. While the megacorps stayed home, many indies, schools, smaller dev teams and prototypes made their way onto the field, offering up a real buffet of videogames and tabletop games. The classic arcade room was back, bringing in a few Japanese exports including a killer Super Monkey Ball machine complete with banana joystick, as well as full-steering-wheel Mario Kart. My wife enjoyed trouncing me at Tekken (I’m more of a Street Fighter Alpha 3 guy), and the delight on her face is always worth the price of admission.
Beyond looking at many, many dice vendors, I probably played more games than usual, trying to trust just stopping and seeing what’s going down wherever the wind takes me. Here, as before, is a rundown.
Gwent (2025)
You know Gwent. First found in The Witcher III, with a limited-ish couple of boxes of physical cards (found at earlier PAXs, for me at least) matching the taller tarot-lite format. Then spun off into a digital card game, having all sorts of animation and math fun best kept digitally. Well, the digital game is finding its way back onto cardboard, back to the three lane roots of the first digital incarnation.
Whatever, it’s Gwent, complete with so much great Witcher art. Played a couple of games with the same bluffing, counting and scorching that we’ve all come to appreciate. I was pleasantly surprised to find how quickly the knowledge came back to me and just how much fun it was to sit across my opponent, trying to get in their head and keep them out of mine.
Dragon Quest I&II HD-2D Remake
Traipsed offsite for a little peek at the latest 2D-HD remakes from Square. We were told we were the first to see the game outside the company, even in Japan. Nice to get shmoozed even just a little bit, and just see what new sauce they’d bring a couple of the original videogame RPGs.
If you’ve played Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (released first because the story is a prequel to I and II), or any of the other HD-2D games, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect here. I actually haven’t yet played the III remake, nor any of the other games yet, so I still had it within me to be wowed. But the diehards nearby also seemed appreciative, so it wasn’t just novelty. We played for about 30 minutes, and each moment felt rooted in the source material. The sprite work serves Toriyama’s originals but also leapt higher, mirroring my memory more than the reality, which the best throwbacks should aim to accomplish, while the music soars as it ever did.
Plenty of modernization options help move things along, but the core loops are intact, and I remains a single-character affair. Both games do include a few additions to fill things out a little more, with additional speaking characters, monsters and cutscenes to better stitch the seams between all the games. Got me eager to play all three.
Elden Ring Nightreign
This is out now, but at the time, I’d kept it on my periphery. I’m still maybe only 66% through Elden Ring proper, and who has time for team games anymore. Still, they had a cool dome setup at PAX East, and were offering timed tickets instead of two-hour lines, so why not?
Inside was a group theater showing of an entire match, e-sports style I suppose, and we all sat and watched. Well except for one fan that shouted out her credentials and was allowed to fill out the squad with a few folks from Bandai Namco. A little preamble was shared, and then they jumped right into a match.
Honestly it was pretty thrilling to watch, especially with a crowd. No more fall damage and lots of zipping around, plenty of options for your approach and teamwork being key. Clearly a game for the homies to get wild all the way through the bosses, though my online time with homies is as limited as ever, so I may only continue to enjoy from the stands.
Nedra
Spooky games weren’t really a draw for me growing up, but they’re fun to play with my wife. Yelping together to cut the fear I suppose. Nedra is a perfect candidate for this, putting the player in the first-person position of being oddly transported to a human-monstrosity-filled Soviet research station in a remote frozen landscape.
The demo started with a poem, which I spiritually appreciated, and then quickly settled into The Long Dark meets Resident Evil, Call of Cthulhu and The Thing, with hints of elder beings and strange forces at play. But you’re preoccupied with not freezing and smashing things with a crowbar. The cold served as an interesting pressure to keep moving despite a desire to get lost in the snow to see what I could find, and the demo’s story kept shuffling me all over the place, perhaps to maintain disorientation, the core of spookiness. Plenty of notes, lore and secrets, including why the main character is even there, if untangling mysteries and running from ice zombies is your thing.
Shrine’s Legacy
A co-op drinking from the well filled by Secret of Mana and its many iterations, a line of influence I have no quibble with. I’m not sure that this demo was the best presentation of what the game has to offer, or maybe it was a long day on the show floor, but the elements are there and ready for sharpening. The building blocks are there for overworld action, going around with a friend taking down local flora and fauna while on the run from evil sorts. If it can get close to great contemporary pixel works as CrossCode, then I’ll be first in line.
Airframe Ultra
I can’t tell if I want to like this a lot and I’m kind of forcing it. Riding your hover bike through PS1/VHS cityscapes is very cool, but with some Road Rage style discussions through guns and chains and whatnot brings the friction. Eventually we were kicked off our bikes and doing some hide and seek in a parking lot, but then got on the bikes again.
The weight of the bike and floating around with Akira vibes really satisfied, but it was also distressingly easy to get off track. I felt like I could never find another player, but they were always around a corner behind me. I kind of just wanted to ride around without them, just cruise a bit. Gonna have to play around in the demo a bit, but I’m holding on to hope.
Fresh Tracks
A rhythm-game and skiing combo was not something I might have said I wanted, but I’m not mad it’s here. A Nordic-fantasy-inspired world is built around bobbing left and right and dodging trees and other chaos. Tutorial went from ez pz to downright squeezing me pretty quick but I got the itch a little, was willing to put in the time to see what I was capable of. With 23 original tracks, an overworld map brimming with places to visit, and plenty of lore to thread you through every slope and slalom.
Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz
Was fixing to give this a shot, and my buddy Abe scooped up a copy. The hype is real: bursting with all the Mass Effect lore one could ask for, a tidy little sidequest of co-op tactical action for a five-mission campaign that can thread through it all a few different ways. Felt a smidge overwhelming at first but actually reading through the rulebook had me feeling plenty prepared, and then after that it was a matter of making smart choices. That’s not my forte, so we lost the first mission very quickly and spectacularly, learning to keep Shepard protected at all times.
After that everything felt streamlined, and decisions rarely rote or simple. Thinking through things with your team felt collaborative rather than dominating, and all the marker board pages filled up with increasingly interesting options for each turn. There are dice so sometimes the dice will bite you in the ass, but sometimes a mission just goes in the wrong direction. Even when that happens here, you feel driven to carry to salvage what you can. Ready to get this one on the table again.
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Levi Rubeck is a critic and poet currently living in the Boston area. Check his links at levirubeck.com.
