For all the big sights and sounds of the Tokyo Game Show, I usually find the best games in the humble little Indies section of the floor, and this year was no exception. Auer Media And Entertainment, a relatively large indie developer from Taiwan, had two of their games on display. Although both were quite good, my favorite of the two, and maybe my favorite mobile game of the show, was an action game called Project-S.

Project-S is a character-based action game that sees you taking control of two different characters that you can switch between at the press of a button. You won’t be doing much jumping or platforming, with stages mostly focused around battles requiring precision dodging and counter-attacking. While you won’t be swarmed with enemies, there will always be enough of them around to outnumber you, so you’ll have to pick your targets carefully. Fighting uses two attack buttons that can be alternated for combos, as well as special attacks that operate on a cool-down system. Surprisingly, the game features a co-op multiplayer mode, though it was unclear exactly how that would be implemented.

I particularly enjoyed the visual style of Project-S. It’s got a distinct anime look to it, and the framerate was nice and smooth even in this early version. The animations were quite nice as well, with the large boss enemy at the end of the playable stage showing off some humorous poses. Most importantly, the game plays really well. Dodging was simple and easy to bust out at a moment’s notice, and the combos have a nice impact to them without over-flourishing the animations at the expense of the gameplay. The boss fight against a rabbit piloting a giant robot was a decent challenge, requiring you to pay attention to his tells and counter-attack at the right moments. I hope to see more enemy variety and some interesting stages in the finished version, but what’s here is already quite strong.

The wildest thing about Project-S is that Auer is still looking for a publisher to take it worldwide. The game should be ready to go in 2016, and it has both a paid and free version, with equipment balancing being the difference between the two. With any luck, they’ll find someone to help them out so that we can all get to enjoying this game soon. We’ll be sure to bring you more information on Project-S as we hear about it.