PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a huge gaming expo that happens annually in various cities around the world. This year, PAX East happened from March 26-29 in the Boston Convention Center, to which I was able to attend on Thursday (26th) and Friday (27th). This was the first time I ever attended PAX, and I had an incredible time! This post is a short summary of my two-day experience.

Before the event #

There is a very specific feeling that one gets the night (or nights) before some very exciting event. The night before school field trips, for example, I would always be extremely restless. I would always stare at my bag, which was already fully overpacked, and chronicle all the items and check my packing list twice over. I would check my list over and over until I'd tire myself out and I'd finally sleep.

This feeling was what I had the entire week leading up to PAX. This time was different, however, because now I am a full-grown adult and I am more susceptible to back pain, so overpacking was a no-go. I would mull over various packing lists posted on r/PAX and try to hyper-optimize the ratio of important items to weight of items à la ultralight hiking backpack. No one likes carrying a heavy bag all day, anyways.

Ultimately, I ended up packing only a few things in my backpack:

• Very important essentials: wallet (w/ cash), PAX badge, wireless earbuds
• For recharging devices: portable charger, charging cable, charging brick
• For recharging me: honey roasted almonds (the best flavor), water bottle, energy drink
• Misc: a Sharpie, a pen

Day 1 (Thursday, March 26) #

I went solo on Thursday, which left me plenty of time to check out all the exhibition booths and artist alley-like booths at my own pace.

I demoed quite a bit of indie games this day, including games like A Corgi's Cozy Hike which is a cozy adventure game that donates 10% of their profits to animal shelters as well as Rightfully, Beary Arms where you play as a bear in an Enter-the-Gungeon-esque adventure with procedurally generated rooms and silly weapon names. Both of these indie games were part of a cute stamp rally that awarded you a stamp for each indie game you demoed. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish the stamp rally due to the lines at each indie booth being extremely long. This was extremely truly unfortunate when I realized one of the many games was a "wacky" VR bowling game. I passed by someone who was demoing it, and they gasped in horror as the bowling lane sunk into a sinkhole while their ball was rolling.

The standout game that I demoed has to be Ghost Eater, an upcoming hack-n-slash action game with what I'd consider more of an interesting "hacking" minigame than most games. When I was talking to the developer, he even mentioned that he didn't like the quintessential "solve a pretty dumb puzzle to hack machines" hacking route that a lot of different games do. This game has a little hack-n-slash minigame in place of all of that. Much like Hacknet, a very popular hacking simulator game, you must step into various nodes in a network and "hack" each individual one via the aforementioned minigame.

I like to consider myself a support of indie games and indie creations in general. I primarily play a lot of smaller games with smaller audiences. It was so cool to me that such a historically large convention was able to be so jam-packed with so many different indie game developers. It is a little hard to explain the feeling, it just felt nice.

In the artist alley, I saw some insanely cool stuff, all the vendors were extremely talented. Notably, there was this huge rug by Area of Effect Rugs that was a giant mimic.

Day 2 (Friday, March 27) #

This day I was mostly hanging out with friends and seeing various competitions. My friends entered into a Riftbound tournament, the new League of Legends trading card game, so I spectated a decent bit of the time. Afterwards, two of them were competing in an almost professional 2XKO, the new Riot Games fighting game, tournament, so I spectated that as well. It was really interesting to see all of the tabletop and competitive eSports stuff in person - it was always something I'd see or hear about online but never really go to in-person events for. It's fun to see it in a tangible means and it makes the experience feel very rewarding.

Retrospective #

I think I generally saw everything I wanted to see. With these sorts of events, it can get very overwhelming...especially when exploring everything solo. I didn't really explore much of the tabletop section of PAX this year, but I do think it would be fun to get into tabletop games or trading card games. Overall, I had a lot of fun! Definitely want to go next year!!