Continuing our coverage of this year’s Boston Festival of Indie Games, we present the second half of our Bagogames BFIG Superlatives! If you missed it, check out part 1 here!
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Best Platformless Platformer – Dash
Initially a project created for a course at Cornell University, Dash has gone on to become fledgling studio Speedy Chalupa’s first title. In Dash, you control a bird whose flight is restricted only to gliding and darting at enemies and waypoints. To successfully negotiate each level, players must quickly dart from one target to the next while avoiding obstacles and increasingly tricky enemies.
The learning curve’s steep, but once grasped, this platformer offers an immensely satisfying sense of accomplishment, especially when you find yourself completing levels that initially appear impossible. This sense of player self-improvement corroborates the game’s traditional Far East aesthetic and “Way of the Warrior” vibe. Dash should be available on Steam next summer with appearances on Android and iOS devices soon to follow. To get in on the upcoming beta, sign up here.
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Best Fungus Since the 1-Up – Mushroom 11
Both technically and visually one of the most impressive games at this year’s BFIG, Mushroom 11 offers an intuitive and immensely fun gameplay experience. Drawing inspiration from a TED talk on mushrooms’ ability to stabilize carbon counts, the crew at Untame fashioned this gorgeously rendered, 2D puzzle platformer, in which you control and manipulatable an amorphous “thing”.
The catch is that you don’t actually push or pull the object. Instead, as the object always has the same amount of cells on screen, you move by “trimming” off cells to instantaneously grow them on the other side, creating a sense of movement. This clever device allows you to complete the game’s mind-bendingly rad physics-based puzzles while shifting, twisting, and chopping your protagonist to bits. Mushroom 11’s targeted release date for PC and Mac is February, with iOS and Android devices soon to follow. The studio is also in talks with Sony and Nintendo to bring the game to both Vita and Wii U.
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Best Yang For Your Buck – Ying Yang BANG BANG
Ying Yang BANG BANG is a phone-optimized touchscreen game in which you guide a black or white dot down a corridor while collecting shapes of the same color and avoiding shapes of the opposite color. The twist is that not only can you tap the incoming shapes to change switch their color, but your piloted dot also periodically switches colors.
While colors of opposite color make you shrink, matching colors make your dot grow. The larger you become obviously makes it increasingly difficult to avoid incoming obstacles, allowing the gameplay difficulty level to scale naturally with the player based on their performance. Better players will receive a better score, but they’ll be facing a tougher challenge to achieve it. Ying Yang BANG BANG will be available in October for iOS and Android, with a possible appearance on Windows phones later on.
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Most Charming Bout of Insanity – Vivian Clark (Soda Drinker Pro)
If Soda Drinker Pro was the monotony of your everyday life, Vivian Clark would be your psychotic split personality. Accessible only as a game (thinly) hidden within Soda Drinker Pro, Vivian Clark is a sight to behold, pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a game while tossing you around a world akin to the imagination of an ADD-addled 8-year-old. Think Wario Ware on Acid. According to Will Brierly, Cambridge local and developer of Vivian Clark, the game was inspired by both the song “Think About Your Troubles” (from Harry Nillson’s acid-inspired album and animated feature, The Point), and the HBO sketch program, Mr. Show.
The “levels” are accessible in seemingly at random instead of any decipherable order. Furthermore, while each of these “levels” appear to be nonsensical non sequiturs, many of them actually occur in the same world, placing you in new, radically different roles. This allows for your previous performance to actually influence how you experience the next “level”. Soda Drinker Pro, complete with Vivian Clark, is currently looking for votes on Steam Greenlight, available now on PC, and will be arriving soon on Xbox One.
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Grooviest Use of Tofu – A Tofu Tail
Despite sounding like PETA’s answer to Super Meat Boy, A Tofu Tail‘s nothing like the twitchy platformer. Instead, Alchemedium studio’s title is more of a relaxed-paced puzzler where you must guide a man turned cube of Tofu on his quest to retrieve his stolen body. To complete each puzzle, you roll across tiles that match the current color of your cube, which can change by absorbing differently colored orbs. New mechanics are then slowly introduced, ramping up the difficulty of each new puzzle.
Developer Ryan Brolley’s background in mathematics, namely Graph Theory, is evident in each puzzle as every movement is critically important, especially in the more complicated maps. One misstep early on could unknowingly doom you to an inevitable dead end, making the instant restart button a welcome necessity. While there’s no solid release date yet for the game, A Tofu Tail is said to be nearly finished. The game’s slated to release on PC, Mac, and Linux.
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Tell us: Did you get a chance to check out BFIG this year? If so, what were your favorite titles?