Last Friday the 2011 PAX 10 winners were announced. Culled from more than 100 submissions, ten of the industry’s best and most original indie games have been selected for the 2011 PAX 10. These 10 lucky developers will have free booth space at PAX Prime, where they will be seen by the tens of thousands of gamers that will attend the convention at the Washington State Convention Center on August 26-28, 2011.
The PAX 10 was created to provide independent game developers with a way to get exposure at PAX Prime to the gamers, media and industry professionals. Winners are selected by industry experts. Gameplay, originality and overall fun-factor were taken into consideration by the judges.
“Every year the showcase of new indie gems are one of the highlights of the show,” said Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade. “In always chasing the next big blockbuster, too much of our industry is dedicated to making the same game over and over again. The PAX 10 is one way that indies with innovative game concepts can get in front of the community.”
This year’s winning entries are:
- A Flipping Good Time (PC) – Digipen Institute of Technology – Players will have a flipping good time in this fast-paced free-flowing 2D platformer as they flip and fly through an expansive underground world using the fluid nature of gravity to avoid hazardous terrain.
- Antichamber (PC) – Alexander Bruce – Journey through the depths within a non-Euclidean labyrinth where geometry and space follow unfamiliar rules, and many obstacles are a matter of perception. Players must create, destroy and manipulate matter in this mind-bending psychological exploration game.
- Atom Zombie Smasher (PC, Mac, Linux) – Blendo Games – The zombie apocalypse is upon us! Take strategic command of mercenary forces to conduct massive rescue operations using military forces such as snipers, artillery crews, and orbital bombardments to hold back the undead while the civilians escape.
- Fez (XBLA) – Polytron – Guide Gomez, a 2D creature, on a voyage of discovery into the mysterious 3rd dimension. Change his perspective and look at the world in a different way.
- Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony (PC) – Final Form Games – A neo-classical top-down shooter for up to 4 players set on 17th-century British Colonial Mars with a new twist on the genre. There are no shared pools of health or lives; so long as any player survives, the team can be brought back from death.
- Snapshot (PC) – Retro Affect – Pic, a robot camera, can actually absorb objects into photographs, removing them from existence! By pasting pictures back into the world, captured objects – everything from doors, light, even copies of yourself – can be used to solve puzzles.
- Solar 2 (PC) – Murudai – In this open-world, sandbox game set in an infinite abstract universe, players are the planets. Play constructively: grow your system, nurture life and attack enemy life in huge battles. Play destructively: crash into objects and cause chaos, use orbiting objects like wrecking balls and steal planets.
- Splatters (PC) – SpikySnail – You play as a group of semi-suicidal, liquid filled Splatters that get their kicks by igniting in colorful confetti bombs of liquid. Crash into spikes, ride the slides, Air-Strike into bombs or do just any stunt-combo you can think of. With every new maneuver learned, each show becomes more spectacular.
- Vanessa Saint-Pierre Delacroix & Her Nightmare (PC) – Bad Pilcrow – Standing between Vanessa and freedom are platforming mechanics. The twist? Her two-dimensional world lies on the surface of a three-dimensional cube, and players must rotate each face to find clever solutions to a wide variety of problems.
- Word Fighter (iOS & Android) – Feel Every Yummy – A one-on-one word battling game that mixes rules from popular word games like Boggle and Scrabble and wraps them around a competitive fighting environment. Think “Street Fighter” meets “Words with Friends”, or word games mashed together with “Super Puzzle Fighter”.
