Vlambeer developers Rami Ismail & Jan Willem Nijman visited Fantastic Arcade with three games this year- Radical Fishing, Serious Sam: TRE and Super Crate Box. Radical Fishing was famously ripped off by a lesser game company who pushed a cheap clone to the app store before the original developers could finish their iOS version, Ridiculous Fishing which features an all-new, highly-polished art style. Super Crate Box is a fast paced arcade platformer that got its own tournament during the festival this year, where a prototype of a two-player simultaneous mode was introduced. They also showed off Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, a commissioned game set in the world of the FPS Serious Sam, but that focuses entirely on the RPG mechanic of the random encounter, with an overworld map and randomly occurring turn-based running gunfights that pit your two little meathead players against enormous armies of monsters.

Rami and Jan gave an excellent talk where they aired their frustrations with the cloning incident and the chilling effect that such incidents can have on the indie community. One criticism they said they often receive is that they should “keep their ideas secret”, and not release games for free online. Flying in the face of that, they decided to show us a few unreleased prototypes. My favorite was the minimalist, creepy, Yeti Hunter; an atmospheric first person game where you trudge through the snow hunting yetis.