Devs have to submit their game to IGF, so sometimes that explains missing games.
Also note that IGF allows games in development as well.
Indeed, but last year’s selection was so brilliant, it’s a bit disheartening to see so many “eh?” titles this time.
Yeah? Here are the big nominees from last year:
Seumas McNally Grand Prize
A Short Hike (Adam Robinson-Yu) - WINNER
Eliza (Zachtronics)
Untitled Goose Game (House House)
Mutazione (Die Gute Fabrik)
Slay the Spire (Mega Crit Games)
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (Sean Han Tani & Marina Kittaka)
I think Unpacking stacks up well with anything on that list. I’d put Inscryption over a couple of them, and I get the impression a lot of players might consider it superior to all of them. Untitled Goose Game was cute and fun but overrated. I really liked Mutazione, but the gardening mechanics were flawed and a little pointless. Slay the Spire is influential in the gameplay department, but uninspiring in every other sense. As a strategy game, Loop Hero is much more innovative.
I might agree that last year was overall slightly better, but it was a pretty good year this year and I think the IGF nominees reflect that fairly well. There’s a lot of games they missed, but there were just plain a lot of games!
I have heard several people say something like that. Would you mind giving some examples of games you liked?
I strongly prefer indie games these days and personally found the last year quite lacking for my entertainment.
Dyson Sphere Program and SNKRX were the only great games for me. Then there are a couple of “merely” good ones but no bounty of options.
Heresy
That was 2020… and ew, that list is not very good looking, so indeed your point stands.
2021 was probably simply exceptional, with stuff like Spiritfarer, Umurangi, Paradise Killer, @chappers favourite A Monster’s Expedition, Ynglet, or the grand winner Chicory if I recall - which I have yet to play, it’s finally on the Switch and that “mom/dad” thing you mentionned makes me even more eager to play it! Also it felt like the same names weren’t trusting all categories last year, but maybe I’m remembering wrong, and I remember thinking the same names were trusting all categories years preceding, so it confirms it might have just been exceptionnal.
Only limiting myself to IGF-ish entries, ie. ones with an artistic ambition beyond the “simple” brilliance of games like Pawnbarian, Armoured Commander 2, Slipways, Monster Sanctuary or Astalon… I’m thinking of Beast Breaker, for its game design, at the very least, of course ;) Friendly joke aside, if you didn’t break it with a particular cheap combo, the game was so perfectly challenging to me, it was on Braingoodgames games (sic) levels of balance between frustration and pleasure, excepting unlike Braingoodgames’, the difficulty wasn’t adjusting itself dynamically to me: it was (or it seemed to be!) carefully handcrafted.
Alongside it, some games I’m saddened to see no mentions of are Wyldermyth, World Horror, Huntdown, Cloud Gardens, Sumire, or even Okinawa Rush which has an absolutely incredible aural artistic direction for “just an action pixel art game” (spoiler: it’s also a fantastic game).
I won’t say Northern Journey because nobody expected Northern Journey probably? (but IGF’s goal has always felt to me as much as exposing discrete great games, as celebrating ones).
I had forgotten about SNKRX which I spent quite a good time playing before you mentionned it, so I don’t want to even think about all the simply good games I have forgotten from this year.
What a crazy vintage!
Thinking about the common point between this year and last year, I’m afraid I have to say as a player I am thankful for the creative burst spawned by a pandemy.
[Edited my negativity for Loop Hero in, and back out again, sorry for the bumps!]
Really? Does anyone get excited about the art or the setting of Slay the Spire?
Whoops! You’re right, there was a lot of wonderful stuff last year–although I didn’t vibe with Umurangi or, to my surprise, Paradise Killer, but I can see why folks did. Umurangi was the grand prize winner, actually.
(Haha, I admit, I thought we had a decent chance of at least getting an honorable mention in design…)
Wildermyth not getting a narrative nod almost certainly means it didn’t get entered (or possibly was entered in a past year?). I think devs who played it were bowled over.
I don’t know. Although there were past years with games I just adored–Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds–I think this year stacked up fairly well, even if I think the likely favorite (Inscryption) is a bit overrated. It was a good year for indies, and there were clearly too many for everything to get its due recognition.
I kind of were for the setting… Before it was revealed there were nothing to it at the release!
They were running weekly recap of fan art based on the game during EA, so I guess it does something to some. I can’t enjoy art, mostly, so I didn’t understand it.
Oh yes, I added that to my wishlist a while back. It does indeed look lovely!
Oooooooooo, I just gave the Strange Horticulture demo a whirl and YES, this is extremely my jam.
You run a plant shop in a slightly macabre town, and divide your time between supplying plants for customers who drop by and going out in search of new specimens. It has a dose of Cultist Simulator, but less abstract: There’s a timer that paces out how often you can go out following clues on the map to find plants, and there are clearly some hidden secrets in the interface itself. When you find a new plant, you need to cross-reference its properties with the details in your plant guide to put a name to it. I usually waited until I was asked for a plant to identify it in my collection.
You can also pet your perfect black cat.
There wasn’t a lot of challenge in the demo, and no clear way to lose or fail. (As far as I know, I didn’t give anyone the wrong plant, but maybe that’s possible and maybe you can end up misidentifying things and having to revise your categorization?)
This just shot way up my anticipated list.
Oh and that also looks lovely!
That looks like something I’d potentially enjoy, thanks for the heads up!
That looks like Potion Craft. Will have to check it out!
I was wondering what that UI was reminding me of, thanks for removing that thorn on my side!
Uh oh. We have a Quarterlies vote deadline of Jan 21st. I guess I’d better get off my ass and start playing Northern Journey and see if it’s worth it’s own thread. (And a GOTY vote).
Bitburner is the only hacking-themed game I’ve ever seen that lives up to its theme. It may not be your jam if you don’t do this for a living, though.
I mean, one of the items on my to-do list is to write a bot that does day-trading in the stock market, and I’ve already written a metrics pipeline so that I can track what all of my services are doing. I think it may be possible to integrate it with Grafana, and even to get the graphs to display in-game, depending on how insane I want to get.
The first time you write a script that eats up all the CPU so that you have to kill the game and restart it, you get an achievement.
I have played many, many iterations of games like Cruis’n USA and Road Rash. The only equal I have found so far is Buck Up and Drive, which is as much of an excellent little nod to frantic, high-speed arcade nonsense as it is twitch-reflex fighting game inputs and Tony Hawks Downhill Jam if it jammed downhill faster and better and slicker.
It rules. Fun anti-cop, pro-LGBTQIA+ messaging too. Check it out!
I bought this yesterday and can’t wait to try it.
Not a recommandation, as this is a Japanese-only mouse driven PC game ported to a gamepad system, but the beyond awful machine translation they used for the store page description is worth the click.
Also worth noting for one of the most unredeadable game logos.
I knew the game, and couldn’t guess what this was until I saw the store page’s screenshots.
Lol, you weren’t kidding.
Right from the jump: “A Sengoku simulation game that guides stupid people.”
Sort of seems like, “What if Bandit Kings, but more cleavage?” Also, it does the horizontal text thing in game.
My personal favourite:
The world was once again flooded with death from hatred and justice.
The game is an early 2ks PC/Mac doujin, which I couldn’t purchase at the time. Probably very superficial and koeish, but I liked their first Zombie Vital game that way. Not picking it up at 30$ on the Switch though!