Copenhagen Gaming Week’s most interesting student games –

As a student, you have a lot on your plate. So having to develop a video game in just a few months – with no budget and little experience to speak of – may seem like an insurmountable task. Yet that is exactly what many of the attendees at the TAGS (Tomorrow’s Awesome Games Showcase ) 2025 had managed to accomplish.

The showcase was part of Copenhagen Gaming Week, and student developers from some of Denmark’s gaming and animation schools had a unique opportunity to build hype and get invaluable feedback from players of all ages.

The level was surprisingly high, and in this article we take a closer look at three of the most interesting games that managed to catch our attention with fun gameplay, new concepts and some rather unique stylistic choices.

Duster Buster

Duster Buster is a simple and charming rogue-lite about a cleaner, tasked with cleaning an old, dilapidated castle. This may sound like a tough job in itself, but since the furniture is not only covered in dust, but also haunted by poltergeists, you will face quite a challenge. “Duster Buster was inspired by games like Hades and The Binding of Isaac. It was developed during the first semester of our master’s program at ITU [IT University of Copenhagen], and we created a simple demo with 10 levels.” explains level and sound designer Sjúrður Eyðunsson Samuelsen.

The game uses pixelated graphics and a top-down perspective. Our brave cleaner has two types of attacks: a quick punch and a slower, but more powerful attack where he spins his mop around and creates a vortex. This may not sound like much, but you never feel weak because the vacuum cleaner moves faster and rolls longer than any Olympic gymnast. Each time you’ve mopped up a room, you can select one of two upgrades. Some of these give you a damage or health boost, while others change things in a big way, such as an upgrade that disables your normal attacks but causes your dodge roll to do damage.

We learned that our core target audience is actually kids. They really enjoy the game.

Samuelsen explains that making the combat system intuitive was one of the biggest challenges. “First, our attacks were too slow. Later, our testers had trouble figuring out the upgrades.” Now, however, the controls feel very precise, and that is certainly necessary, as the enemies are both tough and varied, even though there are only three types. The lights try to electrocute you with an area attack, the banks bite and chase you, while the dust balls attack you in numbers – fortunately, they can be killed by a single swipe.

The study group will continue working on Duster Buster during the current semester, but what happens next is still up in the air, Samuelsen reveals. In any case, Copenhagen Gaming Week has given them more motivation to develop the concept further, as the showcase finally showed that the game does indeed have an audience – although it wasn’t quite the one they expected. “At ITU, we only tested the game among other adults. Now we have learned that actually our core target audience is children. They really enjoy the game. It was definitely a good experience to show it off.”

You can read more about Duster Buster at itch.io. Here you can also try the demo for yourself, either directly through your browser or by downloading it.

Welcome Home

Playing games at conventions like Gamescom or, in this case, Copenhagen Gaming Week can sometimes be a bit stressful. You are often thrown straight into the game without any kind of tutorial, and even if you manage to get through the game, the noise of the crowd and surrounding booths will usually ruin the immersion. So it says a lot about Welcome Home that it still managed to draw me into its strange and disturbing universe despite this.

The game begins with you receiving a letter from your friend Astrid. She writes that she would love for you to visit her in her happy community of “peace-love-and-harmony-loving hippie Christians. Soon after, you find yourself on a remote Scandinavian farm, where you are met by disturbingly wide smiles and barred windows. The mere concern soon turns deadly, and what starts out as a quiet running simulator toward the end becomes more like a simulator for running and hiding. “It has a Midsommar-like atmosphere. It’s heavily inspired by that movie, but also by games like Nun Massacre. explains Simon Alaunė, who, as game design lead, is responsible for the game’s unique premise and striking visual style.

With its noticeable compression artifacts, moody lighting and rough, jagged textures, Welcome Home immediately catches the eye. Despite being only a student project, the game has already gone viral, Alaunė tells us. “The game is a huge success on social media, especially on itch.io, where it has currently reached more than 25,000 downloads and 80,000 views. It has also been picked up by one of the most famous Twitch streamers Case_oh, and his video about our game was viewed more than 1.2 million times.”

Other popular YouTubers such as Manly BadassHero and Alpha Beta Gamer have also covered the game, and it has even managed to gain some traction in China thanks to a friend of the developer. But what exactly makes these kinds of retro-inspired games so popular? The main reason is probably nostalgia. Where the last generation of indie developers grew up with pixel art and 2D games, many newer game makers (as well as consumers) have been shaped by the raw and often trippy three-dimensional landscapes of the late 90s and early 00s.

“The main reason I choose this particular style is that I’m a big fan of the PlayStation 2. I’ve been playing PlayStation 2 games since I was a little kid”, explains Alaunė. “The second reason is that there is a huge trend these days, especially in the indie sphere of PlayStation 1 aesthetics, and of course the visuals and aesthetics are also easy to make compared to something more realistic.”

The fact that horror games in particular have effectively used retro-inspired 3D graphics is probably no coincidence either, as there is something almost creepy about the rough textures. So the game’s title Welcome Home is fitting. The almost manic smile that greets you at the beginning of the game reminds you of happier days playing Crash Bandicoot and Harry Potter on the original PlayStation, but at the same time there is clearly something not quite how you remembered it. In short, Welcome Home is both familiar and frightening, and I think this is the main reason for its particular appeal.

As with the aforementioned Duster Buster, Welcome Home was developed in just seven weeks, a process helped by the fact that all the developers were familiar with programming beforehand – something that is not always the case. Unfortunately, Stalker Studio will not continue development of Welcome Home for much longer, Alaunė reveals. “We’re still fixing some bugs and adding some pieces to the game, just to fully perfect it. And then we’re going to release it after that, which will be in a few weeks, I assume. We’re going to put the project away after that, unfortunately, because we’re breaking new ground, we have new classes, new group exams and so on. We all agree that the game has reached its peak and we just want to leave it at that.”

Welcome Home can be downloaded at itch.io and wishlist on Steam.

The walls have eyes

While the first two games were developed by first-year students of the ITU Master’s program in Games, our latest game, The Walls Have Eyes, comes from a team of four women who just finished their final exams at The Animation Workshop in the city of Viborg. Vølven Studio they are called, their company is taxable, the concept is in place and the first prototype is fully playable. That said, they are still missing one last piece of the puzzle. “Right now we are trying to find a software developer or programmer for our game. We are primarily artists, so we need some help on the technical side.” explains game director Anne-Dorthe Hansen.

Even without a dedicated programmer, Vølven Studio managed to create a playable concept demo. It was built via the visual programming interface Blueprint in Unreal Engine, and although it is still not somewhat polished, the demo was ready in time for visitors at Copenhagen Gaming Week to try out a murder mystery with a twist.

In The Walls Have Eyes, you play as a ghost with amnesia who wakes up in an upper-class house just before a detective arrives on the scene. By helping the detective with his investigation, you can unravel the terrible things that have happened in the seemingly idyllic upper-class house, and perhaps even find the key to your own identity. To solve the game’s puzzles, you must pursue various objects and draw the detective’s attention to important clues. There’s not much gameplay yet, but what there is reminds us a bit of Capcom’s DS classic Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.

“Our message is very much about mental health.”

The game is set in 1884, and although neither the year nor the decade has the same meaning to Danes as, say, 1864 (The Schleswig War ) or 1941 (the occupation by Nazi Germany), both the time and place were chosen for a reason, the game director explains. “We think it’s a very interesting period in Danish history. It’s before World War I, the big wars, and it’s a kind of golden age, a very harmonious period. There’s a lot going on with the women’s movement and the universities are starting to open their doors to people from different layers of society. It’s generally a pretty progressive period.”

For their showcase at Copenhagen Gaming Week, the developers brought along a stapled folder full of drawings and concept art of standing clocks, porcelain polar bears and other stables of a stylish Danish house from the 1880s. The illustrations show a real attention to detail, and Hansen explains that it took a lot of research, both in digital archives and dusty old books, to find the right style.

“In the beginning, we step inside a beautiful house from this period that almost seems to come from a fairy tale. As you learn more about what took place, the outside begins to fall apart. We wanted to show that although you can smile on the outside and keep up appearances, things will eventually collapse.” explains Hansen before giving us an overview of the game’s theme.

“Our message is very much about mental health. It’s a topic that’s being talked about a lot right now. How do we make sure young people are doing well? How should we take care of ourselves in the job market. A rhetoric that everything is better in the good old days often pops up, including with regard to mental health. But I don’t think that’s the case. I just think people back then were less open and better at hiding things.”

The Walls Have Eyes is still a long way from release. The next step is to make a more extensive demo and hopefully secure both investment and a publisher. If successful, Vølven Studio hopes to complete the project in about two years.