Last weekend featured the inaugural Glasgow Indie Games Festival in Scotland, featuring demos, talks, and game-themed slam poetry. The event was sold out, but ReadWrite Gaming was lucky enough to get hands-on with some games. Many of the games at GIGF have development teams of just a handful of people, making them all the more impressive. Here’s our roundup of what to keep your eyes open for!
Valley Peaks won Best in Show (as voted by attendees) and the demo stand was in use for the whole day. It’s a first-person game filled with frogs with a love of climbing, and it’s your job to put a radio at the peak of each of the local mountains. As a game, it’s as though A Short Hike and Death Stranding had a child.
A beautiful, wholesome environment and cheerful characters are the set dressing for movement puzzles that rely on using the left bumper for your left hand and the right bumper for your right hand. Climbing is satisfying and fun and reaching the top of a mountain and seeing the gorgeous game world splayed out before you was rewarding.
Valley Peaks releases on Steam on July 24, 2024, and will come out on the Nintendo Switch in the future.
Take on the role of Morgan, a teenage girl whose grandfather has left her a metal detector. Explore the quaint Cornish island of Glasden, help the locals, and maybe uncover some mysteries while you’re at it.
The characters in Morgan Metal Detective are charmingly drawn and fully voiced, complete with Cornish accents. The first task you set out to complete is to help a hapless fisherman recover the engagement ring he lost so he can propose to his love, which sets the tone excellently.
It’s a cozy, comforting game, a “love letter to childhood Cornish holidays” and takes inspiration from games like Firewatch and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, both beloved indie titles.
There’s no release date for Morgan Metal Detective yet, but you can Wishlist it on Steam to keep up with release news.
Apartment Story is a game about a love triangle and a single gun. On the face of things, it’s a Sims-like life management game where you need to keep struggling journalist Arthur afloat so he can continue to eke out a meager existence.
However, there’s a deeper story unfolding around you as you make cheese sandwiches and watch adult videos, and it will quickly affect how well you’re able to manage the minutia of Arthur’s life. Your roommate is away but Diane desperately needs to get into his locked room. What does she need? Will she forget about it when she and Arthur hit things off?
The art style has a retro, low-poly look while still being detailed and engaging, and despite the short demo, we left wanting to know what happens between Arthur, Diane, and the locked door.
Originally planned for a March release, Apartment Story will now be released on 26 September 2024, and you can Wishlist it on Steam now.
The Enjenir is a very silly physics game. Build intricate, delicate structures in the gridless building system only to watch them fall to pieces as you try and walk The Enjenir across them, QWOP-style.
With the myriad tools available to the player, every level in The Enjenir can be solved in an almost infinite number of ways. Do you want to get over that gap with a bridge, a catapult, or something else? Anything is possible in the physics engine of the game… as long as you can guide The Enjenir to the objective.
On top of hilarious building hijinks, the game looks fantastic and has a glorious “medieval lo-fi” soundtrack to build along to.
The Enjenir is out in Early Access now and has tons of levels ready to go.
While we couldn’t feature every game, every demo was fun and there were some truly novel ideas there – check out the full roster of games on the Glasgow Indie Games Festival website. And if you love the wholesome vibes brought by Valley Peaks and Morgan Metal Detective, check out our roundup of the latest Wholesome Direct.
Featured image credit: Glasgow Indie Games Festival
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