A few weeks ago I posted my favorite games of 2023! I mentioned a bit about helping out with the IGF (Independent Games Festival) - the longest-running independently-judged games awards in the world! A few of my games (Anodyne, All Our Asias and Anodyne 2) have picked up nominations over the years, but I’ve never tried being a judge for it. I’ve always been a little curious about how exactly things go on behind the scenes, but I also wanted to see if being a vocal participant in the judging could help sway the outcome of the awards - especially in a world where most game awards have literally the most boring and expected results and feel like victory laps for games that are already selling millions.
I’ll first talk a bit about the judging process, then followed by a list of games I liked from the IGF!
Two Asides:
I’m republishing posts from my old blog. Check out 2021’s “Lost Futures of Miyamoto”!
I’d like to answer reader questions in the future. Feel free to drop a question in the comments here - about anything, not just this post.
Judging and Jurying
So, there are two roles you can have when helping with the IGF. Judge and/or Jury.
There are more judges than jury members - maybe 4-5x more? Judges consist of - as far as I can tell - mostly independent developers of all stripes - designers, programmers, artists, musicians. If you’re an independent developer and reading this, if I can suggest one thing, it’s the judge selection process seems pretty open and welcoming and could always use more help, so do consider volunteering if you’re not submitting!
Judging was fun: some games would be under hot debate, and actually I felt that by arguing your case well you could turn the tide to get people to look more closely at a game. You could probably spend a weekend or two and finish your judging responsibilities since you only need to judge 10 games.
The jury is a more involved role: I’m not sure how the selection process works but I was suggested for the Nuovo (roughly: Innovation) jury by someone who couldn’t do it this year. Jury members have to play and look at many more games, we use the Judges’ votes to more easily prioritize games to look at. Ultimately the Jury decides what games get the awards, which feels both empowering but also - at least for me working in Nuovo - it created a bigger responsibility to try to look at every game.
What’s “Nuovo?”
This is a category that is supposed to pick games that make us think differently about what games can be. (For example my All Our Asias picked up an honorable mention in 2019.) I guess you could say ‘innovation?’
As you might expect this is still a broad definition - what seems novel to someone might actually be a subgenre they weren’t familiar with. Some people view it as ‘weird games’ (an unhelpful categorization), which I find unhelpful. Is it ‘weird’ because the judge doesn’t actually play a wide variety of games and gets surprised when a game looks up their desktop username and says it through an NPC in the game? Is it a ‘weird’ game that’s visually random but doesn’t actually feel that innovative within any historical strand of games? Or is it ‘weird’ in some other positive sense?
Personally, I found it was most productive to take a holistic view towards what Nuovo can mean. E.g. if I brought in a theoretical framework like “nuovo is nonviolent games” that kind of closes the door on games with violence that are novel in other ways. The result was I had to look through hundreds of the games because I felt we might be missing out on some games (and honestly it was impossible to get to them all.) So I ended up going with “well if it feels new to me and I can make a decent argument for it, then it probably is new because I play so many games…” And in the cases where I wasn’t sure, it was helpful to discuss with other jury members whose knowledge could fill in my gaps.
(In some ways it felt a bit like going ham on Backloggd reviews… except we could potentially get a game a lot of recognition!)
Playing so many games so quickly is a little overwhelming… causing me to start taking a meta approach to looking at games, developing a sense for if a game has the potential to develop in interesting ways within 15-30 minutes, or if it’s going to play out in a typical way (e.g. procedural roguelike). And for the games in-between I would fall back on other judges’ comments, other jury member thoughts, or existing playthroughs and player reviews. Ideally it wouldn’t feel as overwhelming, but there’s perhaps not as many jury members (7-8 per jury) or judges (100-200?) as there should be relative to the number of submissions (around 500).
And as things would turn out, some of the games I suggested to other judges ended up resonating with many as well - even picking up Grand Prize or Nuovo nominations! Overall, I feel pleased that my efforts seem to have paid off in this little world of independent games. Now then - here are my personal favorites from the IGF!
1000xResist (sunset visitor 斜陽過客, releasing2024)
I first heard of this game in 2022. What caught my eye was that the team was almost entirely Asian-Canadian with artistic backgrounds outside of games - and voiced by a mainly Asian-Canadian cast. Hmm!! The characters also appear East Asian and there’s some GIFs of settings that are clearly not speculative sci-fi. I wondered what was up with those contrasting settings.
1000x Resist is set in a far-future colony - where cloned women are assigned to symbolic roles where they must explore and study the memories of their “Allmother” - god-like/mother figure. There’s a unique sense of place to the setting, like a mix of spaceship/base and MMORPG hub. As you unravel the history of characters living there, there’s a haunted, myth-like sense that appears. But it gets better as the game introduces characters in our present-day - like Iris, who somehow was responsible for the birthing of all these clones!
So what’s up with that? There’s hundreds of years between Iris the Canadian-Asian teenager and the futuristic bits of the game. The game is about making those connections clear, pulling together all sorts of interesting influences from story-driven games to poetry, acting, film. Much of the game works as both literal narrative and loose symbol and that kind of dual-layered feeling to the story meant there was both an emotional directness to the characters as well as consistent universe of lore that was fun to think about.
If any of this sounds good to you (or if you’re a fan of my All Our Asias) you need to check this out when it drops this year!!
Anthology of the Killer (thecatamites/A. Degen/Tommy Tone, mostly out now, free)
There’s still one chapter to go (I think) but this is a collection of 8 short games by thecatamites. The game uses an easy-to-understand control framework of walking around and automatically displaying dialogue boxes - and then it takes this in all sorts of directions: various spins on the horror-genre’s chase mechanic, immersive theatre, text pop-ups when passing through hallways (turning the game sort of into a at-your-own-pace 3D comic), full on adventures with level selects. Walking might be simple exploration in one chapter, and in another it is the substances that creates the feeling of diving deeper into the strange history of an apartment building.
Each game feels like a response to not just various histories of film/tv/art I’m unfamiliar with, but also the active freeware RPGMaker, horror game, personal game scenes. The individual chapters also feel like responses to the other chapters - each game tending to feature a ‘horror chase’ (mostly played off humorously) but designed towards a different end. It’s a reminder that when we strip away the retention and progression-mechanic cruft developed over the past 20 years, there’s tons of storytelling potential to play and experiment with.
NIDUS (Caleb Wood, Q1 2024)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2372170/NIDUS/
Nidus is a separated-twin-stick action game. It’s a rare category of action game where the sticks aren’t just move and aim, but controlling two separate entities. I haven’t looked very hard and I’m certain there are more, the only other game with this control scheme I’ve played is Soft Body (2016). That game is arguably simpler - in Nidus the two entities you control have distinct movement and abilities.
The result is a uniquely challenging game, but one that (in the few hours I played) you grow to better understand the ideal roles for the flower and the wasp. The wasp is more of an aggressive attacker, the flower more wants to stay out of the way. There’s a relation between the two, like how the wasp must touch the flower to regain ammo, or how there’s a combo built if the flower avoids damage for long enough.
I like how the difficulty resonates with the visuals of the game: you’re fighting microbiology/insect/animal-influenced enemies in waves, with the a sense of the wasp and bee frantically trying to survive, and reaching each new boss feels like a real victory - the wasp and bee reaching some new nightmare alien habitat. The high quality of the animation and visual design make it feel like we’re just peering into some struggle in some far-off animal universe.
The game lets you pick stages in order (after clearing the intro stage), but you lose all progress if you die. Stages you don’t pick get harder. In some ways there’s overlap with the design language of shmups, one of those genres where the story beats (whether or explicit or not) can legitimately claim compatibility between the difficulty its protagonists faces and the difficulty the players face. (Compare this to a simple RPG where you save the world and slice through everything like butter). I think that there are interesting narrative possibilities in truly difficult games that don’t expect you to win (Souls-likes don’t count!), and NIDUS feels like it’s doing a lot in that sphere.
Final Profit: A Shop RPG (Brent Arnold, $14.99, out now)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1705140/Final_Profit_A_Shop_RPG/
This game takes the visual language of RPG Maker games (objects you talk to, the menus, etc,) and combines it with the progression of idle and clicker games. Final Profit felt like it was using those mechanics in just enough moderation towards its storytelling ends that it mostly worked for me. There’s a lot of charm in the layout of its world (three or four connected towns), and how the shop and item systems in each portray each town, its characters, and the overall story of your protagonist’s goal to ‘grow a big business to exact justice.’ Maybe this is my favorite ‘clicker-esque’ game?
HITM3 (xiri, planned release 2024)
HITM3 is a 3D-follow up to the visual novels HITME and HITME2, following a group of queer characters in Santiago, Chile. I liked the depiction of Santiago in this game, the relations of street vendors and shops, the ways the characters interact with musicians or host events at each other’s homes. The story is told through a mostly fixed-camera/simple-camera 3D perspective, which felt reminiscent of games like Boku no Natsuyasumi, Kentucky Route Zero, Attack of the Friday Monsters or Flower Sun and Rain. It also reminded me a little of Taiwanese New Wave film - all the casual focus on people and them inhabiting a cityscape. The art style is dreamy and imaginative, going from vivid interiors to harsher and ‘realistic’ city streets.
Crypt Underworld: The End of History (Lily Zone, PWYW)
A visually maximalist 1st-person exploration game, a huge explorable 3D surreal comic and universe of sorts. There are also some light immersive sim mechanics - in particular you can destroy almost anything for a various mix of resources, a day/night cycle. All areas have a name which lends a poetic atmosphere to each place, and you have an apartment you can return to with some furniture you can collect. Everything is articulated just minimally enough that it doesn’t feel overwhelming - it’s a fun game to try to map out on paper and come back to and explore. I think a lot of these big-open exploration games could stand to benefit from some sort of number-y/system-y sotr of thing - it doesn’t have to be particularly deep, but I think these little systems allow for the games to create ways of expression than without them. (E.g., in Crypt Underworld, a room full of furniture feels more significant as you can destroy everything for random drops)
goodbye.monster (Monster Team (Student group at NYU), Free Demo)
An experimental-pet raising sim set in an apocalyptic wasteland. The game uses browser windows and dark colors to uniquely portray its atmosphere - you travel from page to page, scavenging for food to feed your pets. It’s a way of exploration reminiscent of web art, Twine games, interactive fiction, but there’s something novel here, especially in the way the UI elements (representing your pets) float around and remind you of their presence.
Sometimes the pets just die. You run into a few mysterious strangers. Poetic descriptions of the visuals ask you to imagine. While the demo version is short, I enjoyed what they had to offer from an atmospheric standpoint even if the pet-raising aspect felt relatively underdeveloped. Pet-raising is a genre that has this inherent appeal to it (treat something well enough and it might change or surprise you) and this game reminded me of its possibilities!
Isles of Sea and Sky (Cicada Games, Planned Q1 2024)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1233070/Isles_of_Sea_and_Sky/
Am open-progression sokobon/exploration game. You go around different islands, solving block puzzles, and abilities you unlock let you progress further on an island (or other islands). There’s various levels of surprise achieved by the tile-based 2D art that make it fun to plumb the depths of. It’s kind of the ideal structure for a puzzle game to me… usually I bounce off of puzzle games once they get hard, but I like it when puzzle and exploration are woven together (The Witness is my favorite example of this).
Repeating the two notes from the beginning of the post:
I’m republishing posts from my old blog. Check out 2021’s “Lost Futures of Miyamoto”!
I’d like to answer reader questions in the future. Feel free to drop a question in the comments here - about anything, not just this post.
These all look super cool! On the note of twin-stick games controlling unique characters, the two examples that come to mind are The Adventures of Cookies and Cream and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. All that said, I agree that there's a lot of potential to be explored, and Nidus is certainly doing something different from either of those two games.