Indie Week: Day Six

[Welcome to Indie Week at gameinformer.com. We’ve got a full seven days of indie game coverage leading up to the 2010 Independent Games Festival Awards. Check the hub daily for new previews, interviews and other coverage of the top independent games of the year.]

After five full days of exploring stellar indie games, we’re taking a look at the more abstract titles nominated for the IGF Nuovo award. 

The Nuovo award, created to give “abstract, shortform, and unconventional games” a platform to compete among peers, is judged by a separate panel of experts and awards a $2,500 prize. The titles nominated for the nuovo award challenge the accepted constructs of what a game is, and often are the most intriguing experiences to come out of the competition.

Today I Die
Today I Die is the epitome of an interactive poem. Short but memorable, developer Daniel Benmergui describes the experience as “a game about the prison of worldviews, and salvation in playfulness.” We won’t do a disservice to the game by disclosing the intentionally vague mechanics, as much of the charm comes from learning how to interact with the words and images on the screen. What we will say is that the simple pixel graphics and enchanting music are able to evoke sudden emotion through surprisingly small exchanges – the careful juxtaposition of a word, sound or piece of imagery. 

It takes roughly five to 10 minutes to play through Today I Die, depending on how quickly you grasp the concept. We seriously recommend you take a coffee break to give it a go – chances are you will connect with the author’s message.

[Additional Game Details]
Platform: Flash Release: Available Now Price: Free Website: Link
A Slow Year


Another nominee proudly adopting the “game poem” moniker, A Slow Year harkens back to simpler times when technological constraints forced game designers to make a little go a long way. An Atari emulator is required to play A Slow Year, and as such the developer didn't include any instructions for the player  – Atari titles didn’t come standard with such extravagant features in order to save precious space.

The game itself is a collection of four exercises, one for each season, which challenge you to sit and observe your surroundings. Intentionally slow, (hence the name) each task requires you to be methodical and patient. We won’t ruin the specific mechanics, but we can say that autumn involves watching a tree, winter, a hot glass of coffee, spring, a thunderstorm and summer, a lake. Developer Bogost is so intent on recreating an experience that would feel at home on classic consoles, he intends to release A Slow Year on an Atari cartridge complete with a poetry set. That’s taking an idea and running with it.

[Additional Game Details]
Platform: Atari VCS, PC, Mac Release: Early 2010 Price: TBA Website: Link

Tuning


Tuning is the most bizarre, disorienting and mindboggling platformer we’ve ever seen. More than once you will sit and stare at the screen, simply trying to decipher what you are seeing. The goal is always the same – use the arrow keys to guide a ball to the door – but the level design and presentation changes drastically as the game unfolds. The developers themselves describe levels as “gradually presented weirder and weirder, creating visual puzzles where the player has to figure out what he sees and how it relates to the actions in the game.” No kidding.

Some levels are fairly linear and easy to navigate. Others look like a kaleidoscope and make you dizzy. Some are so hard to comprehend that it takes minutes of trial and error to figure out what is a tangible platform and what is a void. Your ball will roll upside down, clone itself and defy gravity, resulting in a completely nonsensical experience. We’d be lying if we said it wasn’t fun, however. Tuning is a game unlike any other in the competition. Perhaps unlike any other game period.

[Additional Game Details]
Platform: PC Release: TBA Price: TBA Website: Link 

Closure

Closure has done well for itself this year, nominated in several categories including Audio and Technical Excellence. As such, we previewed the clever game earlier this week. You can read the full write-up here.

As a refresher, Closure is a game that is simultaneously intuitive and mind-bending. A puzzle/platformer, Closure has you navigate a man through a 2D environment using orbs of light to illuminate a path to the end of a level. Here's the catch. Objects in the light are real and tangible. Objects that fall into shadows cease to exist. Simple as that. In this regard darkness fails to fulfill the archetypal role as a thing to be feared. Instead, Closure uses darkness as a malleable tool that lets you define the world around you. Closure is a game that we, and the rest of the industry, will be keeping an eye on.

[Additional Game Details]
Platform: PC Release: TBA Price: TBA Website: Link

Enviro-Bear 2000


“Who is driving the car? A bear is driving the car! How can that be?”

We asked the same question when starting up Enviro-Bear 2000. The game tasks you with helping a bear drive a car through a park to collect the fish and berries needed to prepare for winter. The car responds about as well as you expect with a bear behind the wheel – you use your mouse to click and grab objects in order to steer, change gears and hit the brake or gas.

As you drive, random objects will enter your car through the broken windshield – some helpful, others harmful. Driving through a pond will dump tasty fish on your lap, and plowing through a berry bush will fill your dashboard with juicy red fruit. Pine cones, rocks and other hazards will also infiltrate your car if you're not careful, some of which can get stuck under your pedals and make it difficult to press forward. If you don’t store enough fat before winter hits, you will starve instead of hibernating. If you fatten up you will progress to the next level – this round given less time to get your goods before the snow begins falling. Enviro-Bear 2000 is a bizarre and quirky game, well worth giving a go if you’re in the mood for a good laugh.

[Additional Game Details]
Platform: PC Release: Available Now Price: Free Website: Link