GDC Nominees For the Year's Best in Indie Gaming

Nuovo award finalists line up.

March 19, 2014

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This year at the Game Developers Conference the year's best in indie gaming will be recognized at the 16th annual Independent Games Festival. These finalists are up the Nuovo Award, a category to recognize the best in original, abstract and unconventional indie gaming.

While some of these games have crossed the chasm into the mainstream – like Papers, Please - having huge success there are many others, like the maddeningly psychedelic Luxuria Superbia, you're going to want to get your hands on. Need to take a break from the mainstream? These are some of the best outsider games of the year.

SoundSelf

In SoundSelf players must use their own voice to travel down a tunnel of light in a "sensory exploration." This elegantly simple little game is completely mesmerizing like a concise one-hour acid trip.

Creator: Robin Arnott

Game Website: http://www.soundselfgame.com

Save the Date

This is a love it or hate it kind of game. Save the Date is more of a visual novel than a game where players sit down for a nice meal with friends and then the timeless themes of humanity unfold in front of you. A little ambiguous? You bet it is.

Creator: Paper Dino Software

Game Website: http://savethedate.paperdino.com

Perfect Woman

Perfect Woman is a game where each level is a different phase in a woman's life. Players start as a child and pose in front of the Xbox Kinect sensor in various ways, the better a player poses the more "perfect" their rating becomes. Perfect Woman features a branching set of choices that create a character story creating conflicts that must be weighted on past events. It's like a life-simulator.

Creator: Peter Lu and Lea Schönfelder

Game Website: http://www.perfectwomangame.com

Papers, Please

Oh boy you won the lottery! What are you going to do now! In Papers, Please you have to report to the Ministry of Admission Checkpoint and take on the task of deciding who to let through the border. This very successful little game created by a ex-Naughty Dog developer where players must do hard work to figure out who to let in and who to keep out of their new society.

Creator: Lucas Pope

Game Website: http://papersplea.se

Luxuria Superbia

Where do you go in a game with no story or characters? You don't do anywhere in Luxuria Superbia, it's an abstract musical journey the user is meant to relax and enjoy. The games tunnels are inspired by flowers and as the player you must "be nice" to the tunnel by gently touching the tunnel walls.

Creator: Tale of Tales

Game Website: http://luxuria-superbia.com

Extrasolar

Extrasolar is part video game and part social experiment giving player the chance to control droids on a distant planet. Players must help by controlling rovers and examining the new planet one photo at a time. But soon the story on Earth starts to overtake the exploration and the player finds themselves in the middle of a vast conspiracy. Images are not reloaded but are rendered in the cloud and delivered to the user of this web-based game, making each play through completely different.

Creator: Lazy 8 Studios

Game Website: http://WhatIsExtrasolar.com

Crypt of the NecroDancer

Let the rhythm take control. It does in no matter what in Crypt of the Necrodancer, a rhythm-based dungeon crawler, err make that dancer. The hero must come back from the undead to slay the Necrodancer and recover her stolen heart or "be a slave to the rhythm for all eternity." Players have to move on the beat to navigate procedurally generated dungeons while slaying zombies, skeletons, dragons and bobbing their head.

Creator: Brace Yourself Games

Game Website: http://necrodancer.com

Corrypt

Corrpt is a little puzzle game that takes a note from classic low-memory arcades. While the puzzles are simple at the start the music and complexity grow until the player realizes something else is at work. Watch to the end of the video above to see what I mean.

Creator: Michael Brough

Game Website: http://www.smestorp.com/