As the end of 2017 draws near, the many branches of the entertainment industry have begun selecting the gems for this year. Various industries nominate either titles or individuals who have accomplished a lot during the year of 2017 and award them. The gaming industry also held its own award event, where the distinguished titles of 2017 were added to the annals of gaming. The Game Awards, an event founded in 2014 which is mostly known to the public through their Game of the Year award, took place on December 5th, 2017.

Many representative titles including the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS earned honorable awards in their respective categories, and rightly so, as they were indeed top notch masterpieces. However, the focus in this article is not on the usual AAA titles that you expect to see on the list of nominees for GOTY. This article will mainly focus on 5 nominees for the Best Independent Game for this year.

As it goes with entertainment industries in the current age, small and medium-sized companies often lack the funds need for publicity, especially when they produce and publish a title all by themselves. Nevertheless, these 5 titles introduced here have overcome the usual roadblock of not contracting with a major publisher and found renown among the public through self-publishing and production. Here are the titles that went viral this year and were nominated for a chance at winning not only Best Indie but other awards as well.

Cuphead

Release date: September 29, 2017

Metascore: 88 (29 critics)

User Score: 8.5 (569 ratings)

StudioMDHR’s first title, Cuphead, is a run-and-gun indie game which was produced using the 1930s rubber-hose style animation technique. The team adopted the manual animation technique used by Walt Disney and Fleischer Studios, and the title compensated the dev team’s hard effort with 3 awards from the Game Awards and 2 awards from the Golden Joystick Awards.

The title was released in 2017, 3 years after it was first introduced at E3 2014. The game earned its popularity with its distinctive retro atmosphere, extreme difficulty, and development process. In the game, the player takes on the role of protagonist Cuphead and encounters a number of bosses in order to pay off a debt owed to the Devil. Although the story itself is interesting, it is rather the atmosphere and difficulty it presents to players that made the game so popular. The game makes use of the side-scroller perspective of Megaman and Sonic, and the major chunk of gameplay has players damaging bosses while evading a barrage of flying projectiles. The tension that came from this gameplay drew in skilled players and challenge-seekers and worked as a mechanism to let players enjoy the title much longer.

The gameplay itself is quite simple. It follows the same basic rules of most side-scrolling shooters; advance forward while shooting. An additional feature is that a player can purchase various weapons and Charm with coins you retrieve during the game, giving the player various special skills. This RPG element of progression allows players to more easily advance while also providing some variation in gameplay. The difficulty is extremely high for those who have never experienced this type of game before. You have to damage the boss while evading all projectiles; there are even a fair number of objects on the screen that can hurt Cuphead, so players have to be very wary of their positioning. In addition, the game does not show the health bar of the bosses, so players are unaware of how much health they need to cut down in order to defeat the boss, and this feature can also make the battle tenser.

The development process was not at all an easy one. Brothers Chad and Jared, the CEOs of the Canadian indie game company StudioMDHR, had a great interest in and passion for games, but this wasn’t their first job. Watching 1930s cartoons when they were young, they attempted to develop a similar game to Cuphead in 2000, but they had to give up due to a lack of proper tools. They restarted their process after witnessing the success of Super Meat Boy released in 2010. The developers prepared about 150 character designs for the game, and they even added 30 bosses in the game in order to beat the record of 25 bosses as the maximum number in the Guinness World Records. It was the biggest challenge for the company to complete and prepare the visual design with their given resources; the two brothers, ever determined to complete this passion project, even mortgaged their own house to finance the company.

With all the effort they have put into the game, the title won 5 awards in total from the Golden Joystick Awards and the Game Awards. The game also garnered extremely positive reviews by many game media sites including Metacritic, with most scores at 8 to 9 out of 10. Thanks to its distinct art style and game elements, a number of streamers also made many positive comments about the game.This popularity and high praise with the streaming community helped increase the sales of the game. The title has now become one of the representative examples of a successful independent game.

▲ Review of Cuphead by Videogamedunkey

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Release date: August 7, 2017

Metascore: 83 (23 critics)

User Score: 8.1 (471 ratings)

Developed and published by Ninja Theory, the title drew much attention from the behind-the-scenes of its development process. The game made use of Unreal Engine 4 and therefore has some of the highest quality graphics even compared to AAA titles, and the story of the game, which follows a female Pict warrior suffering from psychosis while attempting to rescue her dead lover’s soul, was also appraised positively.

When it was firstly introduced at Gamescom on December 8, 2014, the developers themselves called it an AAA indie game, and the PC version was introduced afterward on January 9, 2015. Among the many features that made the game famous - the art, graphics, plot, and so on - the most notable one would probably be the realistic realization of psychosis. The main protagonist named Senua suffers from this painful condition, making her delusional from time to time in the game. To make things look more realistic, the company used a motion capture system so that her facial expression can be more detailed. In addition to that, they visited patients suffering from the condition and received advice from Welcome Trust, the non-profit organization, and other renowned neuroscientists. These preparations helped the game to become one of the nominees for the Best Indie Game of the Game Awards 2017.

Even though the game did not win this time unfortunately, it won Best Audio Design and Games for Impact. Melina Juergens, the motion capture actress of Hellblade, also won Best Performance, bringing further esteem to her co-workers and the title.

▲ The process of Hellblade’s motion capture

Pyre

Release date: July 25, 2017

Metascore: 82 (27 critics)

User Score: 7.6 (83 ratings)

Supergiant Games, known for having developed Bastion and Transistor, created the game Pyre, which received a Metascore of 82. With its distinct game elements and JenZee’s art, the title became one of the nominees for Best Indie Game of the Game Awards 2017.

The protagonist, who was exiled from a Fantasy-based society, soon meets others who have been exiled and goes off to fight against other exiles in order to heal their souls. Among the many positive elements of the game, the combat system is the one that received the most positive reviews, and also distinguished the title from others. The developer mentioned that they adopted the systems of Dota, Rocket League, and Transistor, their previous game. Each team has a pyre, as noted in the title, like the core in Dota and goal post in Rocket League, at the end of the base. A team consists of three exiles and the objective is to destroy the burning enemy pyre by throwing a glowing ball at it.

In order to emphasize any failure or consequence resulting from a player’s decision, the developer chose to use a sports-inspired battle system for the game. By doing so, the developers were able to craft a combat system that was not violent but still emphasized the consequences of a player’s actions or failure.

Night in the Woods

Release date: February 21, 2017

Metascore: 88 (30 critics)

User Score: 7.9 (153 ratings)

Released on PC and console in the beginning of 2017, and expected to be on mobile in 2018, Night in the Woods is a story-oriented adventure game with a unique plot and cartoonish art style. Thanks to its popularity, the developer reached the goal of $50,000 within 26 hours on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. They ultimately received 4 times more than the original amount; the additional funds were spent on recruiting additional animation and roguelike directors, which enhanced the title’s quality even further.

Margaret “Mae” Borowski, an anthropomorphic cat, is a 20-year-old college dropout who returned to her hometown Possum Spring, but soon faces an economic depression due to the closing of the town’s mine, a related mystery, and the unknown whereabouts of her long-time friend Casey. Most characters around the protagonist also wear gloomy expressions that somewhat reflect the situation of the depressed hometown. An article from Paste presented an appropriate summation, stating that the game deals with “mental illness, depression, the stagnancy of the middle and lower classes, and the slow death of small town America.”

The gameplay itself isn’t difficult. It is a side-scroller where the player interacts with nearby objects and characters, and learns the gameplay along the way. However, as the game designer Alec Holowka mentioned that they have focused more on narrative than gameplay, the plot is heavier than any other features in the game.

All the Metascores and User Scores on Metacritic are relatively excellent; the title was certainly worthy of becoming one of the nominees for Best Independent Game in 2017.

What Remains of Edith Finch

Release date: April 25, 2017

Metascore: 89 (23 critics)

User Score: 8.1 (272 ratings)

The second title by Giant Sparrow, the developer of Unfinished Swan, which received awards at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), was first introduced in 2014 and launched in the first half of 2017, 3 years after it was introduced. The title was praised for its excellent narrative and became a nominee for Best Independent Game.

The Finch family living in Washington state is known as “America’s most unfortunate family”. For the last 5 generations, every member of the family has met with a premature death, excluding one child from each generation who has carried on the family line. One young lady is about to uncover the stories of the 5 dead family members. The gameplay is similar to other adventure games - Edith Finch, the young lady and sole survivor in the family, explores the Finch house and experiences the deaths of other family members.

The dramatic directing and story earned great acclaim among fans, and placed the game in many categories of the Game Awards including Best Independent Game, and eventually received the Best Narrative.

Here are the 5 nominees for Best Independent Game at the Game Awards 2017. If you start to become fed up with the expensive and content-diluted titles of major companies, give these indie games a try and you may once again feel that sensation you felt when you played your first few games in your younger days. We also wish to see further progress made in the gaming industry through companies exploring new elements and narratives, regardless of the company’s size.