The Independent Games Festival has announced its list of awards finalists for 2016, with top nominees including Her Story, Undertale, Darkest Dungeon, That Dragon, Cancer, and the brilliantly-named Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
A total of 26 games are up for awards, taken from an initial field of more than 750 entries that was winnowed down by experts in different disciplines from across the industry. Categories include Excellence in Visual Art, Design, Audio, and Narrative, as well as the Nuovo Award for “more esoteric and shorter-form games,” Best Student Game, and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize.
This year's Grand Prize contenders are Darkest Dungeon, Her Story, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Mini Metro, SUPERHOT, and Undertale. These obviously aren't the biggest commercial games of the year, but we've been quite impressed by many of them. The “captivating crime thriller” Her Story earned an outstanding score of 90 in our review, Undertale managed to beat it by a single point and was Tyler's personal pick for 2015, Darkest Dungeon has been consistently impressive even in a pre-release state, and SUPERHOT, well, anything that necessitates all-caps has to be good, right?
The winners will be announced at the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 16 during the 30th Game Developers Conference, which runs from March 14-18. The full list of finalists and honorable mentions is up at IGF.com.
