Since 2012, Day of the Devs has provided one of the best stages for indie developers to share their upcoming work, with its reach growing dramatically after it began partnering with The Game Awards. This year, Day of the Devs held its Game Awards stream the day before the big show, giving a spotlight to some smaller, but no less impressive games making their way to players soon — very soon, in one case.
In a show full of surprises, the reveal of TankHead may be the more unexpected of them all. At first glance, it doesn’t seem much like Day of the Devs fare at all. Day of the Devs tends to highlight games that look like nothing else out there, often skewing far from the polished, combat-centric titles that dominate shows like The Game Awards. The biggest surprise of TankHead’s showcase slot is the announcement that it’s out right now on the Epic Games Store, and it turns out its initial appearance hides a wonderfully inventive concept under the hood.
TankHead takes place in a post-apocalyptic world with various factions battling it out in the rubble of a long-ago conflict while avoiding the watchful eyes of the self-installed authorities. The catch is, this new battle for dominance takes place in a wasteland that’s impossible for humans to survive in, so the combatants are all mechanical drones with a telepathic link to the people controlling them.
As the name implies, TankHead centers tank combat, complete with realistic controls that let players aim the body of the tank and its turret in different directions to protect their most vulnerable parts while opening fire on enemies. It’s in these tanks themselves that TankHead becomes something truly unique. You control not an entire tank, but a drone called a Needle, which is capable of salvaging parts from defeated foes. Using these parts, you built a battle machine of your own, swapping out for better bits each time you take down an opponent.
It feels a little like Armored Core VI, which let players customize their mechs to suit each situation. That comparison looks even more apt in boss battles. As a roguelike, the goal of TankHead is to destroy three bosses in a single run. The one shown off at Day of the Devs is a towering mechanical monster like those seen in FromSoftware’s recent mech battler, this one resembling a gigantic hermit crab wearing an entire hotel as its shell.
Of course, Day of the Devs was packed with plenty of the cute, offbeat, and downright inscrutable games its known for as well. Perhaps the prettiest of the bunch is another shooter, Feltopia. Developer Wooly Games says that rather than a shoot-’em-up, it’s a “cute-’em-up” — a fitting moniker for a game made entirely of stop-motion animation with characters and environments all made of wool. The effect is stunning in its trailer, though we won’t see the finished game until 2026.
Don’t Stop Girlypop offers another cute shooter, a first-person game with brain-meltingly fast movement that makes your character hit harder and heal faster the quicker they’re running and dodging. Developer Funny Fintan Softworks says it’s coming to PC “soon.”
Another featured game putting a new twist on a familiar genre is Sleight of Hand. Putting a fresh twist on the stealth style of games like Dishonored, Sleight of Hand gives its heroine a suite of supernatural powers tied to a cursed deck of cards. By assembling your deck, you’ll be able to bring a new set of powers with you on each mission, finding ways to combine their unique effects with features of the environment to take down enemies or slip by unnoticed. Sleight of Hand doesn’t have a release date yet, but its Day of the Devs trailer already has me dreaming of the card-based shenanigans it could enable on PC and Xbox.
Then there are the downright bizarre games that truly make Day of the Devs the most exciting showcase around. First, there’s Blippo+, a barely describable adventure through TV that seems to comprise a collection of baffling “channels” to flip through, all with a lo-fi, one-bit aesthetic. I genuinely can’t tell what’s going on here, but I’m intrigued. PBJ: The Musical offers a slightly more comprehensible flavor of weird, telling the love story behind peanut butter and jelly combining to make the classic sandwich staple of lunchboxes everywhere. Presented with paper collages as art and a soundtrack full of original showtunes, PBJ: The Musical hits iOS in 2025.
It’s worth checking out the full, hour-long Day of the Devs showcase for even more indie goodness, from the anticipated Hyper Light Breaker to the pastel life sim racer Crescent County.
