It’s 12:51 on a wednesday, and I’m currently sat in the Tel Aviv Expo Conference Hall, because it is currently hosting the Sparks Innovation Festival for 2026. Most of the floor is filled with tech startups, mostly what you’d expect; cybersecurity, AI, nd many acronyms that I sincerely can’t make heads or tails out of. But that’s not why I’m here today. I’m here today because in the leftmost corner of the hall, right next to the inexplicably placed Tesla cars, is a section for up-and-coming indie games.

This section has been crowded since the expo opening, which actually hasn’t been that long ago (the doors opened at 11), but I took a second to look at every game shown in the lot. And almost all of these are really exciting and (hopefully) spell good things for the indie scene in Israel!

The very first game next to the entrance door is NTD, a game I have not gotten to play yet bc it’s constantly crowded near it, but seems very interesting. It’s a tower defense game (woop woop!) where you take an active role in the defense of your castle rather than just placing down towers. They position this as a unique element, which I keep finding hilarious, because if I had a nickle for every tower defense game unaware of all the other tower defense games where you take an active role in the defense of your castle, I could probably afford to quit my job. Still, it has a very neat pixel-y style, and seems fun to play. I’m rn downloading it to my laptop to try it at my leisure.

Right next to it is UvsU, a game I’m sincerely very excited for. It’s a dev that’s made multiple other fun games before, and showed off a prototype of this game about a year back in a small tel-aviv playtest session. It was a lot of fun then, and it’s neat to see how the game’s improved since - a cool plastecine presentation, a decent-enough soundtrack, a lot of small QoL improvements that really make the game pop… I can’t wait for it to come out, wishlisted it.

I’m not gonna go down every single game there, there are a lot, but there are two other games I wanna mention, as they looked neat: There’s Antlers, a platformer where you play as a deer-creature with a positively wonderful artstyle, and The Adventures of Bentzy in Bentzyland, a gameboy-style game that they actually had running on a gameboy! (And ran significantly better than the big demo, might I add).

I thought the gameplay wasn’t that amazing, but the fact they had an actual rulebook with characters and a physical box is absolutely adorable, major props.

There were a lot of other games there, but they were mostly student projects (something I wish my uni would invest in). We had a lot of high-profile hitters from Tiltan, a uni in the north that is considered the cream of the crop when it comes to game design (and I wish I went there instead), and some low-polish projects from Ariel (a nonremarkable but decent uni). Tiltan has an in-house game studio called Clover Bite (bc “tiltan” is hebrew for “Clover”), and most of the projects there were games that are coming out to steam. The main one that caught my eye was Chef Knight, which needs serious work but looks like it has promise.

Anywho, it’s now lunchtime, and I want to be a cheap coot and eat some free catering-quality food. Cya’ll.