PAX Aus 2022 Highlight – RandoMine

At PAX Aus 2022 we got to check out the Blowfish Studios booth and played a demo of the upcoming Bitmap Galaxy game, RandoMine. If you are familiar with their previous title, the 2021 platform adventure YesterMorrow, you will notice that a lot of elements are similar, from the platform gameplay to the pixel graphics to the landscape art. However, the vibe is very different. RandoMine doesn’t take itself as seriously as YesterMorrow and uses slapstick humour throughout its demo.

The humour hits straight away when you and your friends upset the giant Innkeeper after you try to steal his booze. However, the bottle you find just so happens to contain “Randos”, evil creatures that steal the Innkeeper’s possessions. He isn’t impressed, so he transforms you into a donkey and shrinks your friends into a bottle, telling you to retrieve his stolen items and pay for the damage or else you’ll stay as an ass and your friends will be teeny tiny forever!

In your new form as a donkey, you strap your bottled friends on your back and head towards the world map that is littered with different runs to explore. At the start of each run, you’ll have the ability to free one of your friends from their glass prison and use them to tackle the mine ahead. Each of your three friends is equipped with their own unique abilities and skills such as bonus stamina, the ability to throw bombs, and a higher jumping range. Each character has a piece of mining equipment as their weapon such as a shovel or drill, and they use these to dig their way through the light brown areas to move throughout the mine and sometimes collect bits of silver and iron ore. It is this digging and also scaling walls that I used the most throughout this demo. Though there are some enemies, aka Randos, that you will encounter, RandoMine’s gameplay consists of digging, dodging moving platforms, escaping spikes and solving puzzles.

My time with the RandoMine demo was a lot of fun and for those who love adventure comedy platformers, this is definitely one to keep an eye on! The game doesn’t have an exact release date, but it will be released in the first quarter of 2023 and be available to play on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.