Newsletter
Exactly one month after opening the registration for the first Google Play Indie Games Festival in San Francisco, Google announced the winners of this gaming event which took place last Saturday, September 24th. The three most impressive games presented during the festival were Bit Bit Blocks, Numbo Jumbo, and Orbit – Playing with Gravity.
Bit Bit Blocks is an action puzzler made by Greg Batha designed to be played by up to two people on a single device. Kaveh Daryabeygi’s Numbo Jumbo is also a puzzler but with less action and more mathematics as it challenges players to identify numbers and their sums which appear on screen as quickly as possible. Last but not least, Orbit – Playing with Gravity impressed the judges with its unique use of gravity mechanics wrapped around what’s basically a physics puzzler. In addition to that, the game made by Chetan Surpur and Eric Rahman also features a sandbox mode which allows players to literally paint their own universe with gravity. How does one “paint” with gravity, you wonder? Check out the game trailer below to find that out.
In addition to the aforementioned trio of winners, finalists of the first Google Play Indie Games Festival finalists were Antihero, Armajet, Norman’s Night In: The Cave, and Parallyzed. Interestingly enough, all of the puzzle games that made it to the finals ended up winning the grand prize. However, as the winners were decided by a jury of games industry veterans and attending fans which participated in several rounds of competitive voting, one cannot suggest some genre-related bias was involved in the voting process. So, people either really love puzzle games or were simply more inclined to vote for finished products which are already on the Play Store as all three winners are. Among other things, winners and finalists received the Android TV and the Nvidia SHIELD tablet K1, Razer Forge TV bundle, a Tango Development kit, and tickets for the upcoming Google I/O 2017. Orbit – Playing with Gravity, Numbo Jumbo, Parallyzed, and Bit Bit Blocks are already available for download on the Play Store while Antihero, Armajet, and Norman’s Night In: The Cave are slated for release later this year.