Grasshopper Manufacture releasing five student-made Vita games free on PlayStation Plus

Grasshopper Manufacture is releasing five student-developed Vita games from its Game Campus Festa program free on PlayStation Plus.

Octalide, an action game in which you help a cute orange creature flee from the giant ball of pointy teeth chasing it through the cosmos, is one of five student-developed PlayStation Vita games that Grasshopper Manufacture will release for free June 21st to Japan's PlayStation Plus subscribers.

The other four winners fall into the puzzle genre: Eledive, a tilt- and touch-equipped block-pushing title; Mou, Sou Suru Shika Nai!!, in which you direct the path of crawling ants; Uni Uni Union, a switch-flipping puzzle-platformer; and Volt, in which you guide a robot through a power plant.

Game design students built the titles as part of Grasshopper's Game Campus Festa initiative, which saw the Suda51-led Japanese studio behind such games as No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw providing select Japanese game development schools with PlayStation Vita development kits last year. Teams of students came up with game ideas by June, and worked on their projects between September and February. Grasshopper judged all nine submissions over the past four months and selected five winners.

We have reached out to Grasshopper to find out if the winning games will also be available outside of Japan, because we want everyone to share in the experience of Octalide's nightmarish existential crisis.

Update: A Grasshopper Manufacture representative told Polygon there is "no plan" to release these games outside of Japan.