Indiecade Winners Announced
Image via Indiecade
Indiecade, or the International Festival of Independent Video Games, to give it its full name, is dedicated to celebrating and showing off the work of the best independent developers in the world.
The people behind Indiecade recognize the creative crisis that has struck the videogames industry of late. Too many developers and publishers equate technological progress with pushing boundaries and confuse iteration with innovation. By publicizing and promoting the best and brightest independent creators, Indiecade aims to do for the videogames industry what Sundance and Cannes do for the film industry – energize and invigorate it.
Not all of the winners here are video games, however. Vornheim is a revolutionary sourcebook that no self-respecting GM should be without. Available in Print and PDF versions, part of the book describes the eponymous city from the writer’s own campaign, the rest of the book is literally packed with resources, rules, cheats and tips for creating streets, buildings and interactions on the fly and making them interesting. I’ll be clear: you could use this small book, A5 and 64 pages in the print version, to run an entire campaign based in one city, and it would be legendary.
The games are as diverse as one would expect from the cutting edge of the industry. Unmanned, the winner of the Grand Jury Award, is about a day in the life of a drone pilot you go about your business, chat with co-workers, interact with your family, with short, split-screen minigames providing a contrast to the mundane happenings. The Stanley Parable, a standalone mod for Half Life 2 is a delightfully strange game which is as much a meta-commentary on the very act of playing videogames as it is an actual videogame itself. That sounds incredibly pretentious, I realize, but it’s also deeply touching and weirdly compelling. It also has one of the greatest narrators in all of videogame history.
There are other winners, of course, but I’ll not do them the injustice of reducing them to a bullet list. Take five minutes, and go cast your eye over the winners and remind yourself of just how weird, stimulating and exciting videogames can be when they’re not FPS killathons.
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