GDC 14: The best of the IGF Pavilion

’m mere hours away from one of the biggest events in GDC, The Independent Game Festival awards—the real action of IGF however, is happening right now at the IGF pavilion on the show floor. Soaking in all of the noise and lights that surrounded me, my stroll through the area proved to be a fruitful one, the games I sampled here are some of the most impressive I’ve played at the show so far.

Rogue-likes have seen a resurgence that’s still going strong, and while the divide from those who shy away at the infamous difficulty that the genre is known for, one team decided dial the shit out of the challenge past eleven—and the game’s incredible for it. The Crypt of the Necrodancer makes that crusty old DDR pad in your closet relevant again as you step your way through various rhythms for every single action in the game. Juggling your feet to match the tempo was pretty goofy at first but the layout and pacing for the dungeon floors gave me all the room I needed for the mechanic to steadily resonate with my input, and suddenly experiencing the game went from interestingly ridiculous to charmingly natural.

Adopting the bump ‘n slash method of the classic Y’s games, attacking your foes is as simple thrusting a full-frontal assault while avoiding contact from all other sides as they’re movement behavior adheres to the same rules of dance fighting that you do. The track list is incredible in that it’s not only easy to dance as it pleases the ear holes, but that it shares an solid relationship with the level design and the elements surrounding it into an organic connection that makes each floor feel unique from the last.

Crypt of the Necrodancer will appear on nearly every digital distributor for all operating systems and with such a crazy idea working better than any expectation it could ever convey, it’s a game that shouldn’t be missed.

Continuing my pace around the pavilion I encountered Chris Cornell of Paper Dino Software and he invited me over to play his nominated game, Save the Date. Stumbling through it initially, I was starting to get discouraged that I was never really going to find my groove with playing it without a disaster happening, and that’s when it occurred that this was the beauty of the game at work.

The game starts out with a promising opportunity of a first date with a woman that you’ve had your eye on for suggestible amount of time now, and naturally, you’re making decisions to help it be one of the smoothest dates imaginable; except that it’s practically cursed with the worst case of Murphy’s Law imaginable. While not to go into the specific towards the various tragedies, the appeal comes into play whenever you start the game over as you’re now granted a sort of Déjà vu clairvoyance that’s very reminiscent of the classic Bill Murray film Groundhog’s Day. Sprinkled in with the previous dialogue tree options are now new options that allowed me the opportunity to prevent the previous tragedy and continue the date, which meant I got to know Felicia even more; until something else came along to destroy the occasion. The writing that strings the madness of the game together is brilliant crafted and the humor ranges everywhere from black comedy to meta commentary that breaks the fourth wall, and it’s all timed wonderfully, making the same date feel different every time with a progressively more hilarious result.

The game is available now, and you can check it out yourself on his website, for free even.

Picking up after that, my eyes met up with what looked like the marriage of a visual novel game with Zork-like text adventure pacing, and that’s when I stopped to play it, and became further delighted to know that’s designed to be a local party-style multiplayer game.

The Yawhg plants players in a small town that anticipates the return of an evil creature of the same name, and the choices and story unfolds differently depending on what choices are made before the arrival of Yawhg. The pacing of the game emulates family board game sensibilities with randomly generated outcomes that can be as dire as the likes of Oregon Trail while still retaining a profound diversity to the events that would strike similar chords with a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The engagement of the Yawhgs dynamic is complimented with beautiful scenes of art that plays to the deceptively grim tone of the game quite well.

For those looking for something different to do with their favorite group of friends should definitely give the Yawhg a spin, and the best part is it’s available on Steam right now.

The age of the Wild West has been romanticized countless ways in a forms of media and has seen great success with video games in particular within the last decade, but some of the darker shades from the era till have yet to be fully realized within a game. That’s where the group known as the Ostrich Banditos come in, as they take these nuances and imbue the player with a subtle yet powerful sense of agency that will empower the lone gunmen that’s hidden in all of us.

In Westerados, you’re able to take on the role of a cowboy in a top-down Zelda style action affair where you’ve been robbed of everything dear to you by an entity maliciously referred to as the “Murderer.” Players have a giant palate of possible routes and methods that they can take in order to get closer to finding out who the murder is and punish them for their crime; the gunplay specifically will play into advancing the investigation in fascinating ways.

Every NPC within the game can be conversed with and interacted with in order to collect information towards a possible objective, and it’s during these typical exchanges of pleasantries that you’re able to draw your gun on the individual with a show of force in order to intimidate or extort different results in to further your own cause and it slowly became more and more intoxicating. The depth behind these reactions had a wealth of depth as the responses from anyone you engage with in this manner can further change if you then cock a drawn gun to incite that you’re ready and willing to end their life.

These same intricacies also see their way into the active dynamics of gunplay as shooting isn’t as simply as pressing a button, instead the process requires that players first draw their gun, cock their loaded bullet, then fire it, and will even need to reload ammo one bullet at a time within a six-sided chamber.

Westerados is available as a flash game for your respective browser but the team is trying to get a full-fledged release together that will allow for a longer campaign that accommodates saved progress, it’s going to hit Steam real soon.