Screenshot from the student-produced video game, “Sword of Atlas.”

The beauty of video games is they allow players to be anyone, placed in any imaginative situation, whether you’re a mouse fighting off evil rats, a crow who helps a witch adapt to a new town, or a person trapped in a Lovecraftian-on-LSD horror adventure.

These out-of-this-world experiences and more are what’s in store for gamers soon. But these games are not created by triple-AAA gaming developers — they are created by college students from the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering (EAE) video game design program, and they will soon be on sale on the digital gaming store, Steam, as well as the Google Play store.

Thirteen of the student-made games were on display during EAE’s annual “EAE Launch” event, in which the program’s students demonstrated their newest completed creations to the public. For the safety of students and the public, this year’s “EAE Launch” was streamed live Wednesday, April 27, at 4 p.m. via EAE’s Twitch channel at www.twitch.tv/universityofutah.

Unlike big-budget games that utilize stories and gameplay that feel derivative, these student-produced games were developed with innovative ideas and storytelling but are made with eye-popping graphics and sound

Click below to see the full video stream of the event.

EAE Launch 2022