Small Names Take Big Prizes: 2015 IGF Winners
Winners have won, partiers have partied, and another year's Independent Game Festival awards are done. It was a less predictable list of finalists this year than in recent times, and in turn the winners weren't ones you could spot a mile off or who'd already won in years past. I'm happy about that, though it does leave me in the mildly awkward situation of not having played most of the winners yet.
Sci-fi exploration title Outer Wilds (which we've only ever mentioned here, more fool us) proved to be the festival darling of 2015, taking home both the Grand Prize and the Excellence In Design award. while This War Of Mine also wandered off with a gong. The full list is below, you'll be unsurprised to hear.
Excellence in Visual Art ($3,000)
Metamorphabet (Patrick Smith of Vectorpark)
Nuovo Award ($5,000)
Tetrageddon Games (Nathalie Lawhead)
Excellence in Audio ($3,000)
Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure (SuperChop Games)
Excellence in Narrative ($3,000)
80 Days (inkle)
Best Student Game ($3,000)
Close Your(Goodbye World Games - University of Southern California)
Audience Award ($3,000)
This War of Mine (11 bit studios)
Excellence in Design ($3,000)
Outer Wilds (Team Outer Wilds)
Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($30,000)
Outer Wilds (Team Outer Wilds)
Sadly a few of those aren't available on PC. I've been hoping Inkle's steampunky choose-your-own-adventure 80 Days would head this way for a while now, while I hear only good things about Vectorpark's Metamorphabet (which I should probably point my toddler at, in fact).
The others are either already on PC or coming out soon. Let's do the trailer thing to get a better sense of them:
Close Your:
Ephemerid: (out now, paid)
Tetrageddon Games: (out now, free)
This War Of Mine: (out now, paid)
Outer Wilds: (alpha out now, free)
Congrats everyone. It's good to see less familiar games wearing crowns, which is at least partly because I now have a new bunch of games to eagerly check out.