Watch Japanese indie game festival BitSummit Gaiden this weekend

The annual BitSummit event, Japan's festival celebrating indie games, was originally planned for May this year in Kyoto, but had to be cancelled in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Its replacement is BitSummit Gaiden, an online event including Twitch streams and a Discord server.

Over 75 games from Japan and around the world are being showcased, with streamable demos available on Utomik rather than on a show floor. All of the games are divided up into five teams and you can see them on a neat map of the event.

On the Discord server there are live chats with the developers, let's plays, and competitions, and the server will remain after the weekend as a permanent community. Follow the events on Twitch as well as the hashtag #BitSummitGaiden on social media.

For more on what makes BitSummit so special, here's our story on how it's paving the way for indie games in Japan from last year.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.