Top Honors Given Out at the 16th Annual Independent Games Festival; Lucas Pope's Papers, Please Receives Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Indie Game

SAN FRANCISCO, March 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Lucas Pope's Papers, Please received the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game and its accompanying $30,000 cash prize this evening at the 16th Annual Independent Games Festival, hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2014 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.  The inventive and evocative game centered around the protocols and moral challenges of working as an immigration agent under a dictatorial regime was also honored for its achievements in Narrative and Design.

The other top honors at the IGF included the award for Excellence in Visual Art, which went to Gorogoa, the charming and ingenious puzzle game from Jason Roberts. Gorogoa presents a lovingly hand-illustrated world that playfully transcends dimensions to create a brain-teasing series of interconnected puzzles. The recipient of the Best Audio award was DEVICE 6, a puzzle game transposed into a literary and aural narrative in which the typography of text itself forms the game map. The wholly unique gameplay experience culminates in an engrossing visual and audio gameplay experience that defies conventional classification.

This year's Nuovo Award, which honors abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development, was given to Luxuria Superbia, a musically and visually resplendent title that uses the player's touch to stimulate in-game sensations of pleasure and joy. Absent any characters or underlying narrative, the game is focused entirely on the experience of traveling through a series of tunnels to make them "feel good" and affect their colors and plumage through the player's tactile inputs.

The award for Best Student Game went to Risk of Rain, the intense action platformer with rogue-like elements from developer Hopoo Games hailing from the University of Washington. The game presents over 100 items from which players can put together the tools needed to find the teleporter back home. Finally, the community-driven Audience Award was given to The Stanley Parable, a meta game that explores, mimics and parodies traditional gameplay conventions with a pervasive omniscient narrator providing a clever and funny voiceover through a guided tour of a single man's quirkily monotonous existence.

All finalists and winners for this year's competition are playable at the Game Developers Conference at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC Expo Floor in San Francisco's Moscone Center through Friday, March 21.

The IGF awarded the following games as recipients of its 16th Annual Awards:

Excellence in Visual Art ($3,000)
Gorogoa (Jason Roberts)

Nuovo Award ($5,000)
Luxuria Superbia (Tale of Tales)

Excellence in Audio ($3,000)
DEVICE 6 (Simogo)

Excellence in Narrative ($3,000)
Papers, Please (Lucas Pope)

Best Student Game ($3,000)
Risk of Rain (Hopoo Games - University of Washington)

Audience Award ($3,000)
The Stanley Parable (Galactic Café)

Excellence in Design ($3,000)
Papers, Please (Lucas Pope)

Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($30,000)
Papers, Please (Lucas Pope)

The Independent Games Festival – which also included a two-day Independent Games Summit on Monday, March 17th and Tuesday, March 18th as part of GDC – was established in 1998 by the UBM Tech Game Network to encourage the rise of independent game development and to recognize the best independent game titles, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival has honored the independent film community.

Organizers would like to thank this year's kind supporters of the IGF, including Microsoft Studios (Platinum Sponsor), Valve (Platform Sponsor), DigiPen Institute of Technology (Platinum Student Showcase Sponsor), and Le Cnam ENJMIN (Gold Student Showcase Sponsor).

The IGF offers finalists both global exposure and more than $50,000 in cash prizes to each year's winners.

For more information about the IGF, and its finalists and winners, please visit http://www.igf.com.

About the UBM Tech Game Network 
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SOURCE UBM Tech Game Network