Great Downloads: Award-Winning Indie Games

These mostly free downloads were among the winners and finalists at the 2007 and 2008 Independent Games Festival. Playable, fun, and sometimes quite weird.

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Introduction
Think of the Independent Games Festival as "Sundance for video games." Think of "indie games" as a bit like the short films they show at the Sundance festival, i.e. brief, tasty, even intellectually stimulating alternatives to the latest publishing blockbusters with retina-scorching visuals but a fast-food template-tastic design aesthetic.
Sometimes the best games come in small packages, and that's certainly the case with this sterling inventory of IGF 2007 winners and IGF 2008 finalists, plus a few notable extras to round out our list of award-winning independent games you can't miss.


DEFCON
Remember that scene in the 1983 movie WarGames where Joshua, the creepily insouciant military computer program, was instructed to play itself? The screen exploded with dazzling two-dimensional salvos as Joshua calculated hundreds of nuclear scenarios, from predictable "US/USSR first strikes" to outre stuff like "Thai subversion" and "Gabon takeover." The world dissolved a hundred times in blossoming blotches of light, and all you could think was: where can I play that?
Thanks to Britain-based indie developer Introversion, you can play apocalyptic war games on your home PC? DEFCON isn't an official movie tie-in, but it might as well be. It's a real-time strategy game from the folks responsible for the IGF 2006 award-winning Darwinia, which renders the world in the same dehumanized 1980s vector graphics you'll recognize from the film's ominous NORAD war room screens.
Command a range of conventional and nuclear weaponry, which you deploy in stages as the clock ticks down from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1, at which point the nuclear gloves come off. You can challenge the computer or go nose-cone-to-nose-cone with up to six players online, but as for winning, let's just say the player who loses least, loses best. And make no mistake...everybody loses.
Download DEFCON (Price: $19.50; Feature-limited demo)


Battleships Forever
Asteroids is dead, long live Asteroids! Which if you add a dash of tactical finesse in the guise of hull points, turning speed, and then build all the ships from individually assembled pieces, pretty much sums up IGF 2008 finalist Battleships Forever.
First you build your ship. It can be a battleship, a destroyer, or other naval craft. Once constructed, you can launch missions to protect civilian ships, space stations and more from roaming pirate marauders. Or you can try out skirmish mode and do a little marauding yourself.
Battleships Forever may look a little retro in the graphics department, but it's all part of the nostalgia, lovingly coupled to a real-time tactical aesthetic which turns brittle-looking ships into durable composites made of interlocking pieces. You can even draw custom force fields around some, or fiddle the deflectors on others to make individual sections invulnerable to fire. Winning comes down to harmonizing those abilities with tactical placement and facing. And when you've mastered all that, you can design your own battles in sandbox mode, or draft custom ships with the bundled ShipMaker tool.
Download Battleships Forever (Freeware)


flOw
Everyone wants to be an aquatic worm-creature under the sea, lazily chewing on microorganisms and evolving into something completely different, don't they? Grab a copy of flOw and get transformed.
Playing this weirdly hypnotic game is as easy as moving your mouse pointer in the desired direction and clicking to speed up or slow down. As ethereal music chimes in the background, you aim at targets that look like tadpoles and other odd undersea creatures, wrap your mandibles around them, and voila -- you "evolve."
As you creature changes, it gets larger and more complex, a process you can speed up by targeting specific organisms -- you are what you eat. Swimming up translates as "zooming out," while swimming down zooms to deeper and ominously darker planes. In those depths, you'll eventually encounter hostile organisms composed of multiple glowing dots, which must be fully consumed to convert your enemies into benign and edible particulate.
How do you beat it? That's not really the point, but if you manage to swim to the ocean bottom and defeat the final enemy, you'll float to the surface and be reborn a jellyfish-creature, at which point you can run the entire gauntlet again.
Download flOw (Freeware)


Eschalon: Book One
Remember Ultima? Tile-built worlds? Isometric view angles? Turn-based combat? Having the option to abandon your computer at will without hitting pause to prevent holy pandemonium from breaking loose?
Miss that? If so, you'll want to give Eschalon: Book One a try. It's a role-playing game (RPG) done up old-style, but rendered in clean, high-res lines and inviting hues that make it visually superior to most of its bygone predecessors. Like stats? It's got 'em. Loot? Scattered everywhere. Pick a class, a name, your attributes, and you're off to wrestle with oodles of enemies, plot twists, and your own missing memories.
Eschalon's world may not quite be Ultima-sized, but it's big enough, with a story that doesn't hold your hand or force you to tackle missions single-file. Give it a look if you miss this sort of thing, and know that it's called "book one" because it's the first in a planned trilogy. Plenty more to come, in other words. And why not? Like bell bottoms, sideburns, and platform shoes, there's no reason old school RPGs like this can't make a comeback.
Download Eschalon: Book One (Price: $27.95; Scope-limited demo)
Racing Pitch
True to its name, Racing Pitch involves getting dragsters to accelerate by half-growling, half-screaming into a microphone. That's right, a microphone, which means you'll need one to play (I used the USB mic that came with my Xbox 360 copy of Rock Band, but any headset will do). Pick a character to match your vox-box -- Stemcell-Bill sounds in the baritone range, while Miss O'Pzekt responds to a nice, screechy alto -- and you're ready to squeal, squawk, and rumble.
"Drag Race" lets you propel a race car with the sound of your voice down a stretch of track on a timer -- keeping the needle buried by maintaining a constant pitch is critical, and pulling that off without cracking or wavering unless you're a trained vocalist is harder than it sounds. "Pro Drag Race" is just "Drag Race" with a requirement to drop your voice at timed intervals to mimic shifting gears.
Download Racing Pitch (Freeware)


Toribash
Mix a turn-based fighting game with floppy ragdoll physics and out pops Hampus Söderström's deceptively simple Toribash. Boil human anatomy down to spheres on the ends of chubby pipe cleaners and you've got a sense for what Toribash's contenders look like. Click joints with your mouse then tap hotkeys to relax, hold, extend, or contract appendages in a contest to see who can inflict the bloodiest damage first. Turns zip by at intervals -- one is roughly equal to raising your arm from hip to head, or kicking a foot forward from flush with the ground to hip level -- and gauge your success by monitoring your "ghost," a translucent projection into the future represeneting what would happen if you ended your turn with your current selections. Tapping the spacebar commits your choices and advances the clock.
Inflict enough damage with a single blow and you'll send body parts flying -- the game is in fact quite fond of blood geysers, though it's worth noting you're maneuvering bundles of simplistic geometry as opposed to anatomically realistic people. Moves run the kung-fu gamut, inviting sophisticated tactics, including everything from "punch" and "kick" to exotic stuff like "aerial body breaker," "good arm removal," "overhead body split," and "super duper simple decap." It's even possible to engage in different fighting styles, from kickboxing and judo to "taek kyon" and "wushu."
Download Toribash (Price: $20; Feature-limited demo)


Clean Asia
In this futuristic IGF 2008 finalist, twin American pilots with distinctively armed space ships and special sixth senses blast off to battle a pair of evil eyes (yes, eyes, as in "the eyes of mankind") responsible for toppling countries in Asia like Thailand and New Korea. China opts to battle the eyes themselves and shuns help from the rest of the world, which is where you come in with those two pilots, who've designed special space craft capable of dealing with the threat.
Maneuvering dot-like ships around a vertically scrolling landscape, your modus operandi entails pulverizing enemies, then interacting with the debris, which you relate to differently depending on which ship you're piloting. The first can employ a special thrust move to destroy pieces of an enemy, suck those pieces up like a magnet, then fling them at subsequent opponents. The second has unlimited ammunition and upgrades its bullets by collecting enemy debris to cumulatively release seismic blasts. Can you beat the game's three largish levels -- crawling with dozens of enemies and fourteen bosses -- with both ships?
Download Clean Asia (Freeware)


Synaesthete
Possibly the most exhilarating music game to materialize since Guitar Hero, IGF 2008 finalist Synaesthete combines the rhythmically complex beat-matching mechanics of the latter with the simplicity of an isometric action game and wraps it all in a pulsing, grooving, funked up universe of light and sound. Take on denizens like the Voxel King, who rules "a machine world made of funk and rhythm," or the Viper Vizier, "master of an endless plane of trance," all by tapping out simple or complex rhythms on the keyboard with your right hand while guiding your Synaesthete out of harm's way with your left.
To create those rhythms, you have to match falling "notes" that rain down the middle of the screen and correspond to the J, F, and K keys. When you're strike on the beat, your Synaesthete automatically fires laser-like beams at encroaching enemies. When you're off, enemies pounce and whittle away your health. Clear a room and you can move to the next one by way of adjoining staircases; clear an entire level and you advance to increasingly psychedelic venues. Eventually you'll fight boogieing polygonal bosses in blistering rhythm-jams that on the highest difficulty settings should set all but the nimblest fingers fumbling.
Download Synaesthete (Freeware)
Empyreal Nocturne
With a wink and a nod to Sega's Panzer Dragoon, IGF 2008 finalist Empyreal Nocturne expands the aerial action genre by giving you control of a flock of birds. Your enemies are living geometric configurations and your goal is to knock out orb-like segments glued to your enemies' appendages. As the "god" bird, you don't directly engage anything, but instead command dozens of bird-like subjects that can attack on order, rush to your defense, or sacrifice themselves to restore your health.
Getting around in the air can be a little tricky if you're wed to your keyboard, and a game controller is almost mandatory (the game supports the Xbox 360 gamepad). But once you've got the kinks worked out of your up-down and left-right vectors, you'll be able to charge these fabulist monstrosities weaving and winging their way through the clouds, isolate their weak points, then unleash your flock of aerial havoc.
Download Empyreal Nocturne (Freeware)


Galaxy Scraper
From orifices opening out of the front-sides of planets to whatever you want to call the little volcanic nubs directly in their rears, IGF 2008 finalist Galaxy Scraper sends you on a zany platform-style adventure in the vein of Super Mario Galaxy, only raunchier. At the outset you have to careen around a planetoid that's straight out of When Lips Attack meets The Little Prince, knocking little red, yellow, and purple creatures that look like two-legged gumdrops into a toothy mouth yawning out of the ground. Once you've fed it enough, you have to beat a timer to the planet's backside at which point you'll be "expelled" to your next destination.
Each of the demo's planetoids offers an overarching puzzle, one requiring combat (you can essentially "kick" enemies), the other requiring you navigate a precarious lava-covered planet to throw levers that open gates and further your progress. It's fast, furious, and best played with a gamepad (natively supports the Xbox 360 controller).
Download Galaxy Scraper (Demo)


Gesundheit!
Weird hardly describes this whimsical little puzzler about evil booger-eating monsters who've invaded a series of lovingly hand-drawn levels accompanied by a soundtrack packed with whistles, flutes, steel guitars, and euphonious vocals. The monsters' only weakness? A passion for nasal discharges, which you have the pleasure of delivering (at long range) as Gesundheit, the resident allergy-prone pig. Using only the mouse, you left-click to direct Gesundheit around obstacles and out of the way of glowering potato-shaped creatures who'd love to chow on him, while clicking the right mouse button to fire greenish projectiles (the longer you hold, the further they fire) that momentarily distract the monsters and can be used to lure them into spiky traps.
Keep out of line of sight using buildings and other miscellany and the monsters will snooze, but they'll pop awake and charge the moment you enter their visual range. Solving increasingly complex levels requires shrewdly bouncing Gesundheit's snotty ejections off walls, across holes, and through starry teleporters.
Download Gesundheit! (Demo)
Mayhem Intergalactic
IGF 2008 finalist Mayhem Intergalactic offers no-frills turn-based strategy in an elegant, easy-to-learn wrapper that boils the so-called 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) genre down to just the "expanding" and "exterminating" stuff.
On a flat map sprinkled with planets, players launch ships at neutral nearby planets in a bid to see who can grab up the most in the shortest time and then train all their firepower on the opposition. Simple colors identify who's who, and deploying ships is easy as clicking a planet and confirming your fleet size. Longer distances add extra turns, but adjacent planets are usually just a single interval away. While the demo only lets you play with a dozen planets, the full game offers hundreds, promising extensive enfilade maneuvers and back-territory raids that combined with the simplicity of the mechanics make this strategy game feel almost tactically speedy.
Mayhem Intergalactic's AI automatically gets smarter as you win battles, with half a dozen adjustable levels, but the game's clearly designed for multiplayer, where flank maneuvers by multiple opponents can be devastating.
Download Mayhem Intergalactic (Price: $19.95; feature-limited Demo)
Poesysteme
It's The Sims meets magnetic refrigerator poetry! In this quirky IGF 2008 finalist, you begin with a blank world -- a deserted window of whiteness -- then right click anywhere to conjure a dialogue menu that lets you add single words or "genetically spliced" combos with periods. You then have to feed and care for your roaming lexical creations with food and companions. Feed them vegetation composed of apostrophes, slashes, carets, and asterisks and they'll mate, giving birth to neologisms that'll boggle the trendiest dictionary.
Words can become friends, lovers, enemies, even spawn entire families as you add food units and shepherd breeding practices by introducing impassable obstacles. Or you can always let your words starve and watch as they cannibalize each other (it's up to you). At some point, you'll want to save your progress and read your entire poesysteme in full, preferably out loud and in the company of others.
Download Poesysteme (Freeware)


RoboBlitz
IGF 2007 prizewinner RoboBlitz comes powered by the Unreal Engine 3.0 and looking like it. It's a visually striking third person physics-driven puzzle game about a technician robot, Blitz, who has to save the world by powering up a Space Cannon to blow an evil invader out of the sky. He'll accomplish this by visiting six space stations in any order and getting all the obligatory equipment primed and powered up.
Blitz rolls around and somehow balances on a uni-ball, has little jets that let him jump short distances, and can grab barrels, boxes, and pretty much anything that isn't nailed down with his pincer-like arms. You'll need to use all of his basic abilities and others added by finding "Upgradium" to solve the game's crafty puzzles.
Of course it wouldn't be complete without physics-derivative combat, which RoboBlitz dishes up in spades. Bash enemies with objects at hand, or swing those objects in 360 degree arcs to bash them backwards. And that's just for starters. Eventually Blitz gets a hovergun that causes whatever it's blasting to float in the air, and a point-to-point gun that crams two distinct objects together, forming a bond. Recommended for fans of puzzle games that reward freeform experimentation.
Download RoboBlitz (Price: $14.50; Feature-limited demo)


Aquaria
Bit Blot's Aquaria won the IGF 2007 Seumas McNally Grand Prize and clearly deserved it. It's arguably the most visually stunning 2D side-scroller you've ever seen, full of lush hand-drawn art that's like falling into a Disney cartoon, only darker and more densely textured. The game's luxurious ocean world consists of labyrinthine tunnels connecting rooms that vaguely resemble the insides of a geode, occasionally opening out into vast chambers that show off complex underwater ecosystems.
Controlling a greenish web-footed amnesiac named Naija who's searching for her family, you hold the left mouse button to swim, or move it away from Naija to make her cling to rock wall or bound off and speed away. Right-click and you can brush a ring of colored symbols with your pointer that correspond to musical notes that play harmoniously with the graceful background music. Matching specific note-colors to like-colored objects hatches collectible objects like recipes that can be employed to "cook" dishes that boost Naija's abilities like speed and defense.
Eventually you'll learn to transform into Naija's darker offensive alter ego and fire projectiles to attack enemy creatures. But while combat is both satisfying and essential, the best parts of Aquaria may just be the most downtempo ones, as you glide along secret underwater currents and explore hidden areas in search of clues to Naija's storied past.
Download Aquaria (Price: $30; Feature-limited demo)



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