The annual Independent Games Festival has featured on these pages before, lauded as one of the biggest events on the average indie developer’s calendar. From a pool of more than 300 entrants, a new batch of indie game finalists for the 2010 event has already been selected, dusted off, and presented to us while we wait for the winners to be announced in February.
Here’s a small selection from the list of finalists to give you an idea of the sheer variety of games up for grabs. All four are currently available as demos or full games, so hit the links for gaming goodness.
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity
Dejobaan have style and humour by the truckload when it comes to game development. They’re also good at making painfully long titles. Aaaaa! is one of those sort of games which oozes all sorts of weird indie flavours: players spend most of their time throwing themselves from really high buildings and falling through a psychedelic environment filled with hugs, kisses, and a variety of spectators who you can flip off or grant a thumbs-up to. It’s a fun and elegantly-presented game which refuses to ever take itself seriously.
Rocketbirds has been nominated for several IGF awards, and is the only grand prize entrant that is currently available to play. Its slick presentation, excellent audio, and all-round fun easily makes it one of the top Flash games of the year, and if this quick description doesn’t convince you of the love and effort that went into it, you should try the single-level demo to get yourself a taste of some unrelenting action/puzzler awesomeness. Just be careful: its bandwidth requirements aren’t for the weak of heart, or anybody stuck on dialup.
Loren “Sparky” Schmidt is a delightfully minimalist developer: he tends to make awesome games like Slot Machine RPG using only a few retro sprites and a handful of game elements, and Star Guard does this just as well. The premise, like so many other things in this game, is simple: guide the spaceman through the castle and defeat the wizard. The excellent design, however, will quickly reveal that this is a far more engaging (and rewarding) experience than one may originally think.
Today I Die makes this list because it’s one of those intriguing “art games” featuring in its own category among the IGF finalists. One of several games nominated for the Nuovo Award, this game is about, well, constructing a poem (literally) through puzzle solving and simple click and drag action. It’s pretty difficult to describe, but maybe you’ll have better luck figuring out what it’s about by playing it and its two predecessors, I Wish I Were The Moon and Storyteller.
