Today is a holiday in Germany and I spend most of the day watching the trailers of all of the IGF (=Independent Game Festival) trailers. This year there were 512  game submissions with trailers to the competition, so this took quite a long time and now I’m sick and tiered of ever watching footage of some indie, twin-stick shooting game ever again.

Luckily there were also some trailers that really got me and presented game ideas I never encountered before. Here is a list with the 10 games I found the most fascinating:

1.Alelas Island

It’s about a cat with a guitar. It reminds me of the music system for Cell Tune. I just have a soft spot for procedurally generated music ❤

2.Chuchel

Don’t know about the gameplay but this seems quite charming.

3. Disco Bear

I quote: “Disco Bear is an interactive narrative that follows a polar bear through tragedy, depression, and his journey back to the dance floor”

I think: Games with poorly photoshopped in pictures of animals is a totally underexplored genre that merits our fullest attention.

4.Echo

The combination of high tech server farms and an abandoned palace is really unsettling. And the idea that the enemy AI is trying to mimick your playstyle is certainly intriguing.

 5.Hello Neighbor

Some stealth games try to build deep systems that are proposed to create emergent situations with infinite replayability. This game however seems to feature dense, handcrafted environments and enemy behaviour. And that’s pretty cool.

6.Keyboard Sports

A game that uses YOUR WHOLE KEYBOARD. And also in a very intuitive way. Never seen that before.

7.Nidhogg 2

Insane artstyle, insane gameplay, insanely fun?

8.Proxsi

A game you play by surfing the internet, writing emails to the imaginary characters and stalking them on social media. Plot twist: The evil guy you are trying to find is real and you wake up with a horse head in your bed. This would truly take gaming to its next level.

9.Rain World

One of my all time favourite games and the only one in this list I actually played. The creatures in this game are the best and most frightening I’ve ever seen in a video game.

10. Taiso

While there are thousands of games that use rotation of the phone as an input, I’ve never seen one that takes it to this extremes. Probably for good reasons..