[author]It’s a testament to how profitable and attractive Indie games have become to see how popular the Independent Games Festival booth was as GDC this year. Consistently drawing crowds equaling or even surpassing the heavy hitters like Nintendo and Sony, the IGF booth was swarming with people eager to try their hands at the entrants to the IGF Main Competition, with even more people standing back just to watch.
I weaved through the hordes as best I could to sample as much as possible, to bring you highlights of the Main Competition. Some of these games are already available, and some have yet to be released, but all of them are worth checking out. Keep an eye out on GR for full previews of some of the forthcoming releases on the list as well!
Fez
Fez has been in development for what is professionally referred to as “a long ass time”. It instinctively draws the eye to it and is easily one of the most fascinating puzzle-platformers I’ve seen in a long time. The gameplay is very akin to that fantastic M.C. Escher-esque puzzle segment in God of War III where switching your perspective allows you to move in previously inaccessible directions.
Fez is essentially a 2D platformer with the added trick of being able to rotate the world around your character 90 degrees at a time, creating new platforms that were previously just window dressing in the background. It’s one of those games that is just as fun to watch as it is to play, and it excited me the most out of everything at the competition. In fact, it won IGF 2012's Seamas McNally Grand Prize! Though Fez has been frequently pushed back, it’s expected to release early this year.
English Country Tune
Here’s another puzzler that’s sure to twist your brain into a gray matter pretzel. Controlling a flat square on the edge of various 3D structures built from cubes, you must flip the square along the surface to push glowing balls into glowing receptacles. Sounds simple, until you realize you have to navigate all sorts of pits and obstructions that get in your way.
The demo level also had a mechanic involving light bridges that hold the ball while you push the bridges instead, a concept that thoroughly stumped many a player. I have no doubt that the full game has much more of that in store. English Country Tune is out now at http://www.englishcountrytune.com.
Frozen Synapse
This one’s been out for the better part of a year, but considering that it won the Audience Choice award in this year’s IGF, Frozen Synapse deserves a mention. Not quite turn-based and not quite real-time but instead a little bit of both, Frozen Synapse throws you into the role of a mercenary in a dystopian future fighting against an oppressive government. Nothing new there, but the method of combat is what will grab you.
In a birds-eye view of a cyberpunk wireframe battlefield, you’ll command your troops every turn to move and aim around, firing automatically at any enemies they encounter. The catch? The AI plans and executes their movements at the same time you do, so you have to predict their actions and take it into account before you submit your battle plan for the turn. Frozen Synapse is available independently or on Steam.
Realm of the Mad God
And now for something completely different… Realm of the Mad God is a Flash game that was released last year and was just made available on Steam in February. It’s a fast-paced action-RPG that plays like a shmup. The blocky graphics are highly reminiscent of 3D Dot Game Heroes, while the gameplay sees players in a massively multiplayer environment running around the world blasting everything in sight from a birds-eye view.
In Diablo II hardcore fashion, death is permanent, which fits in nicely with the web browser game format. Keep your character alive as long as possible, then receive a score from your character's collective adventures that doubles as currency for future characters.
Spelunky
Holy crap. Playing this four-player co-op adventure game without prior experience is like getting thrown into the deep end of the pool, if that pool was also home to a school of piranhas and the sharks from Deep Blue Sea. I also use the term “co-op” very loosely, as it’s incredibly easy to screw over your fellow fragile chibi-Indiana Jones explorers with a misplaced whip or bomb.
Dead players stick around on the screen and exist mostly to screw over the remaining players by blowing gusts of air that can knock them around into monsters or hazards The competitive mode embraces all these things by pitting the four of you in a small arena where you all try to murder each other in rapid-fire matches that usually only last a few seconds. Though it’s been out on PC for years, Spelunky will finally see release on XBLA soon.
Wonderputt
Good for a quick fix of fun and high score challenges, Wonderputt is an 18-hole minigolf browser game that sends you putting all around a ridiculous, logic-defying course with rockets, weather changers, glass tubes, elevators, forcefields, and even a giant skull stuck in a wall. On top of shooting for minimum strokes, collectible pickups on each hole increase your score if you manage to snag them along the way. It only takes 10 minutes or less to finish a round, after which you get a detailed breakdown of your performance and score as incentive to go back and try to improve upon it. Wonderputt is available to play for free on Kongregate.
Gunpoint
This simple 2D stealth platformer engrossed me longer than any other game on display. Playing a spy in a trenchcoat who can leap as well as any ninja, you have to make your way to the computer in each level to download… secret spy data, I guess, all while avoiding getting shot by patrolling security guards. You can cling to ceilings and walls and drop down on unsuspecting guards to knock them out, and sometimes trick them by making noise in certain directions or flipping off the lights and forcing them to walk over to the light switch to turn them back on.
Later, you can buy new gadgets that let you do spiffy spy things like rewire switches to activate other devices to help you get at that precious data that become more and more heavily guarded. No word yet on when Gunpoint will be released (PC only for now), but the website at http://www.gunpointgame.com has a release date of “Later than May 2012”. Way to be facetious about it.
Botanicula
Besides being hard to pronounce, Botanicula is a point-'n'-click adventure game, which always have the peculiar effect of releasing nostalgia endorphins into my brain that put me in a dreamlike state, as all those memories of classic LucasArts games come flooding in. But this one’s also got a trippy art style involving… fuzzy forest bugs, I guess? It’s hard to say, really, but it's weird, fascinating, and funny all at the same time.
Like the theme and the art style, it’s hard to tell what the goal of Botanicula is exactly, other than navigating the forest environment in order to not get eaten by bigger, scarier things. Teaser trailers are available at http://botanicula.net, and the game is scheduled for an early 2012 release.
