Glasgow Indie Game Fest Highlights

GIGF returned this year, bigger than before, and in a new venue, the Barras Art and Design center in the middle of the Barras market. And it was crammed! The venue had a great bustling energy all day like the market just outside, and all the talks and workshops were in high demand, so I skipped some which I knew would be popular (like V’s Downpour workshop), to make sure everyone got a go. It seemed like almost every game was also busy the majority of the time, so some on my list I only had to go off watching someone play.

It was a really great day that also reminded me of something James (who is part of the GIGF team) and I talked about after a Games Soapbox event earlier this year, that Glasgow is one of those places where it feels like so many people you talk to have some sort of creative side project, whether it be games, writing, or music, and the city also has so much infrastructure, like Good Press for print distribution, its many many music venues, and Glasgow Zine Library, which makes these projects feel like they can exist in the world and have an audience. GIGF and the Glasgow Games Soapbox and meetups now join all these other things in my mind.

But the other thing about Glasgow is it can kind of feel distant from “arty” “capital” cities, and, generally, people don’t seem to pursue their projects out of the desire to “move up” or catch the attention of more “official” culture. This is good, in the sense that it feels lively for its own sake, rather than just to decide who “makes it,” cashes in their local clout and moves to the big city, versus who doesn’t. It’s a drawback in the sense that I think, because we don’t tend to act like we “need” anywhere else, it also makes Glasgow quite underrated. I’m over going to London for things, but people don’t seem to know why they should come to Glasgow, lol.

GIGF used to be the Southside Games Festival, which was held in a pub 10 minutes from my flat, which probably had room for about 20 people. Now that it has developed into something way bigger, I hope the buzz will make it an event more people are willing to travel for, while still retaining the unique focus. I think this focus is epitomized by the games that stood out to me from this year:

Asterism - Claire Morwood’s talk on using craft materials for game graphics was really informative and inspiring, and you can see the great-looking results in Asterism. The structure of the game is a collection of scenes that use the different craft mediums, ranging from crochet to paper collage to clay, with each set to a music track from an album released alongside the game. I love this sort of gameplay/music synchronization and the visual style is very fun and unique too.

Daemonologie - When the trailer for this one showed that the Witchfinder’s two options for interacting with any character was either TALK or TORTURE I was kind of sold, though it also really amps up the creepiness factor with body horror inflected, stop motion style cutscenes between each day. I ended up handing over the guy I found most annoying to the hangman, and the ending didn’t offer much resolution (probably how it played out many times in history lol) but the game seems to encourage multiple playthroughs to fully understand the situation, so I’m excited to go back and explore it more.

Faceminer - This is a really unique and stylish incremental game that definitely nails both the Windows 95 aesthetic and mind-numbing automation-adjacent job mechanics. While you start out manually facilitating automatic face detection, your operation gradually expands to automating both the classification and generation of face data, pouring your own pay back into PC upgrades and power costs to underwrite working even more. It’s a fun take on the dynamic of so many shitty jobs that maay just also be shitting up the planet…

Ginger - This is the kind of game I would usually say seems like a risky choice for an exhibition or showcase, because it’s so huge (a whole dictionary to page through!) and so opaque in terms of what you’re meant to do. The controls simulate a granular control of parts of the mouth and breath, and more unfolds as you manage to pronounce words from the dictionary. I think it really is a merit of GIGF not only that they’d show a weird game like this, but that the attendees were really intrigued and eager to engage with it. Another example of how you can get away with more than you think sometimes.

How a Body Sounds - A game about performing a strange ritual in a quiet little town that uses the Game Boy Color’s visual and audio limitations to great effect. This one was my pick for the best game of the show, because it gave me that wonderful sense of mystery and dream-logic that I love so much about games, which I can only sum up as “chulip-like.”

I Write Games Not Tragedies - I didn’t get to play this one because it was busy basically the whole festival! But what I did get to spy over people’s shoulders was a hilariously on-point VN with occasional rhythm game interludes that’s not just a nostalgic look back at the dramas of growing up in the early 00s, but also a reflection on the intense emotions and experiences of your teen years that can feel equally a relief to get away from and inaccessible as you get older. I’m excited to play the whole thing when it’s out!

Rainy Day Racer - This one I had played a bit of before the festival. I am totally shit at driving in games and in real life so I really can’t pull off any of the best times or more nimble drifts you can do in this game, but I do love the feeling of just driving around in the rain, seeing a low-poly but super characterful version of Glasgow go by.

Next year, there’s tentative plans to have the festival over multiple days to expand the program and help with the demand issues, which I think is awesome. I’m looking forward to it a lot, and if you’d like to come along too you can sign up for the newsletter on the GIGF website!

And in terms of housekeeping around here, I’ve also been adding things to the #books mini feed as well as the most recent gig I went to. I’ve also added the first issue of the ZINE REVUE to the #zines feed, just one zine mentioned this time but as I work through the stack of ones that have been piling up next to my desk hopefully each entry will include more! Laterzzzz