IndieCade 2012, an annual festival celebrating independent games development, will be taking place in Culver City, California this October. The festival showcases a shortlist of nominated games, a number of which we saw at E3 this year. The festival also hosts an award gala.
Last year, Fez and Johann Sebastian Joust were big winners. This year's nominees cover the full spectrum, from the wandering and dreamy to the coldly narrative. Some, like last year's JS Joust, don't require screens at all. The rest span the array of nearly every platform. Some are created by studios you've heard of, some by universities; still more were created by individuals who judiciously applied time and passion.
We've covered and played a bunch of them here at Kotaku this year. And while there's never a bad time to try out an indie game, now might be a great time to look at these 36 if you haven't already.
- A Closed World (Singampre-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
- Analogue: A Hate Story (Christine Love)
- Armada d6 (Eric Zimmerman and John Sharp)
- Beat Sneak Bandit (Simogo)
- BlindSide (Aaron Rasmussen & Michael T. Astolfi)
- Bloop (Rusty Moyher)
- Botanicula (Amanita Designs)
- Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
- Chroma Shuffle (Sifteo)
- Contre Jour (Maksym Hryniv)
- Dreams of Your Life (Hide & Seek)
- Dyad (RSBLSB)
- Find Me a Good One (Andy Wallace)
- FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
- Gorogoa (Jason Roberts)
- Guacamelee! (DrinkBox Studios)
- Hidden in Plain Sight (Adam Spragg)
- Hit Me! (Kaho Abe)
- Hokra (Ramiro Corbetta)
- INTERFERENCE (Eric Zimmerman & Nathalie Pozzi)
- International Racing Squirrels (Playniac)
- Open Source (Super Soul)
- POP: Methodology Experiment One (Rob Lach)
- Prom Week (Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz)
- Qasir al-Wasat: A Night in-Between (Aduge)
- Reality Ends Here (Jeff Watson, Simon Wiscombe, & Tracy Fullerton)
- Renga (wallFour)
- Splice (Cipher Prime)
- Staccato (NYU Game Center)
- Super Space ____ (Alexander Baard & David Scamehorn)
- Tengami (Nyamyam)
- The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden)
- Unmanned (molleindustria)
- Vornheim (Zak S.)
- Wooden Sen'SeY (Upper Byte)
- Yamove (NYU-Poly/NYU)
This year's awards will be given out on October 4.