Right after A Short Hike won the Independent Games Festival Awards grand prize final evening, the Game Developers Choice Awards declared Untitled Goose Game the game of the 12 months. Other games to win prizes Dev Choice Awards embrace Disco Elysium, Control, and Baba Is You – some great things. They additionally handed the Pioneer Award to Roberta Williams, the Sierra co-founder recognized for journey games from Mystery House to Phantasmagoria.
The Game Developers Conference itself was postponed on account of Covid-19 considerations, however the awards nonetheless went forward livestreamed on Twitch (the place GDC have been streaming talks too). While the IGF Awards are fairly broad in scope with a squillion judges, the Game Developers Choice Awards are restricted to games launched in 2019 and determined by a smaller and extra tightly-controlled group of builders. But it’s once more, not like many different awards determined, primarily builders judging builders’ work.
Your winners in the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards are:
Best Audio – Control
Remedy’s superpowered third-person shooter does have some cracking noises when smashing extradimensional entities with fireplace extinguishers utilizing your telekinetic powers. Great music too. And all of the sounds of the spooky movies and voiceovers? Very good. A deal with to the ear.
Best Debut – ZA/UM for Disco Elysium
It is wild that the studio’s first game is so hanging and so assured and so wholly itself.
“It’s a great, bleak rumination on the failings of humanity on a macro and micro level. But not without hope,” Alice Bee mentioned in our Disco Elysium review. “A masterpiece, but flawed, and proof positive that if ZA/UM can do flawed masterpiece for their first outing, they might already be chipping away the flaws in time for their next.”
Best Design – Baba Is You
This intelligent wee puzzler is a few pleasant little rabbit, Baba, who must turn out to be all kinds of different components of the degrees. Baba is you at first, obvs, the character you management. But what does it imply when Baba is you and weak and Baba is Baba – all on the identical time?
Our Baba Is You review declared “this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of ‘Oh no, how will I ever do this one!’ so quickly followed by, ‘I AM A GENIUS!’ It’s a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one.”
Best Mobile Game – What The Golf?
Not simply on cell, this bizarre and wacky golf ’em up shakes up the game of stick and ball in new methods each stage. It’s golf however with eggs. It’s golf however you’re driving a automobile. It’s golf however soccer, full with defenders attempting to intercept the ball. It’s golf however Portal. It’s golf however snowboarding. It’s golf however Katamari Damacy. It’s golf however you launch the golfer. It retains developing with new jokes and surprises for lots longer than I’d anticipated.
Innovation Award – Baba Is You
Further demonstrating fairly how totally different the IGF and GDC awards are, Baba Is You really received an IGF award for excellence in design way back in 2018.
If you dig Baba, do see The Mechanic’s talk with its creator about a number of the trickiest phrases for Baba to be.
Best Narrative – Disco Elysium
You know who fell actually, madly, deeply for Disco Elysium’s story? Old Man Alec Meer, who said it “offers a dark mirror to my mid-life crisis.”
Best Technology – Control
Not realizing what applied sciences most impressed the judges, I’ll simply say I favored sprinting by way of a corridor of desks like a dickhead simply to observe them collapse into their part items items at my mighty contact. Lovely destruction, bit overly eager. It has loads of different tecnotrickery too, thoughts.
Best Visual Art – Control
It is a game which had me mashing my screenshot key each time I went someplace new, and particularly at moments like the Ashtray Maze. Or when nothing occurred, when merely a load of brokers floated in mid-air in an workplace. Loads of rooms spring to thoughts however to me the best-looking half was scenes combining live-action video with the game world. Gorgeous.
Best VR/AR Game – Vader Immortal
It is my understanding that VR movement controllers have been invented to play lightsabers, and anything is simply winging it.
Audience Award – Sky: Children Of The Light
The studio behind Journey are again with a free-to-play explore-o-dealio which appears to be like a good bit like Journey? Alrighty!
Game of the Year – Untitled Goose Game
This was undoubtedly the breakout hit of the 12 months, an idea and protagonist which propelled Goose Game to be ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE and THRILLING TO MANY. People who I by no means knew had any curiosity in games needed to speak to me about Goose Game.
Katharine mentioned in our Untitled Goose Game review that “brief as it may be, Untitled Goose Game leaves a lasting impression – much like the geese of my youth.” Alice Bee additionally had a childhood connection to the goose, although extra as a result of she grew up near a similar village and was so happy to ruin this loathed place.
Pioneer Award – Roberta Williams
They say she’s pioneering “for her influential work in the graphical adventure game genre with titles like Mystery House, for creating the landmark King’s Quest game series and for co-founding Sierra On-Line with her husband Ken Williams.” A great shout!
Ambassador Award – Kate Edwards
Edwards is the co-executive director of the Global Game Jam, the large annual gamesblast which this 12 months boasted 48,700 builders making games in 934 locations throughout 118 nations. She was the chief director of the International Game Developers Association earlier than that.
You can see all of the notwinners and honourable mentions in the list of nominees.
Disclosure: I’m pally with a number of the House House lads off Goose Game. I say “pally”, I imply “am acquaintance of, who once forced one of them to eat an awful amount of mayonnaise squeezed straight from the bottle after shouting swears at him.”
