Boston may not be the town that comes to mind when you think of gaming but there's a thriving community there working on everything from AAA to smallest indie.  The Boston Festival of Indie Games is on its fifth year acting as a showcase for area talent, although "area" is purposefully broad to include New England and its surroundings, and the pool of talent it draws from is vast.  The Indie Games part of its title covers both video and tabletop gaming, with the latter being on the first floor of the MIT Johnson Athletic Center and the videogaming part requiring a hike to the (non-air conditioned) third floor.  The stairs didn't seem to pose too much of a problem, based on the volume of people walking through the repurposed indoor track that had been turned into a show floor, and the attendees looked like they were having a great time checking out everything they could get their hands on.

There were a few dozen games on display so there was no chance to play everything, but I did look at as much as possible in my six hours walking the show floor. One of the fun aspects of the festival was the program handed out at the entrance that had a pair of ballots included with it, one each for the tabletop and videogame rooms, and every game had a box you could cast your solitary vote inside. After the show floor closed at 6PM there was an awards ceremony that, sadly, I couldn't stick around for, with trophies given out in several categories including Audience Choice. The following list of games is just about everything I got to see in varying levels of detail and presented in no particular order, except for the final game in part three of this series being the one I cast my ballot for.

Tailwind: Prologue- This is a Humble Monthly Bundle original from earlier this year, and currently in the process of being expanded into something bigger. It's a vertical shooter with two major wrinkles for the genre- you're falling instead of flying up the screen and you don't have a gun. What you do have is a deadly exhaust and a dash move that acts as an insta-kill for anything in its path. Fly with the left stick, move the target with the right, and use the trigger to dash to the reticle. Enemies drop glowing pink powerups that charge a slow motion ultra-move, letting you paint enemies with the target for a few seconds before the ship does a mega-dash across everyone you've marked for death. Tailwind is a wonderfully fast and kinetic blast of arcade energy and I'm very strongly looking forward to seeing it expand.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU34756/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqr2Xn1w7X4

Anamorphine- Very pretty, surrealist first-person narrative where you're walking through the memory of a relationship, from the start to whatever end it may meet. The demo opened in a half-circle of rooms connected to a central area with a glowing cello floating in the middle, and heading over to it saw the fade-in of an apartment that was in the middle of a move. The low-key music is coming from a woman playing a cello, and walking over to her sees the apartment turn into lines that fade away as you end up in a fantasy valley filled with vivid glowing trees and pods that sprout into huge and rather pretty plants. Each sprouted plant adds an accompanying track to the cello, with the last placing you in an auditorium where the quartet is playing on stage. The auditorium is filled with mannequins watching the players in immobile attentiveness, and heading up the center aisle to the stage sees the quartet freeze. As it turns out the stage is now a painting on the wall and the memory you'd been walking through is now fully explored, putting you back in the starting area and ready to investigate the next memory. There's no voice, no data logs, and the story is told by exploring the environment. It's a beautiful and strangely compelling experience.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU34756/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSdLj3Gk39k

Perception- This is the second developer show I've seen this game at and the second I haven't been able to play it due to the crowd waiting its turn. Seeing as this is the game that won the Audience Choice award it's no surprise it was hard to access, and hopefully the next convention I run across it at won't make it three-for-three. Perception is a first-person exploration game where the protagonist is blind and uses a form of echolocation to make her way around. The entire game is rendered in deep navy and black, with the world coming into focus using white outlines around its details. It makes for an ethereal view that coalesces out of nothing when the sound bounces off the objects in the room, and while there's no doubt it's not a particularly realistic depiction of blindness the echolocation provides a unique look that makes Perception stand out while also hiding information in a way that brings more tension to what already looks like a good ghost story.

Intern Astronaut- No matter how hard you try or prepare the first day of work is always a learning experience, in much the same way as sticking your hand in a blender. Intern Astronaut is a game for the Gear VR putting you in the seat of the title character, desperately trying to manage all systems and hold the spaceship together. The dashboard is an array of buttons, switches, and dials, and the power needs to be regularly recharged by manually working a crank. Instructions flash on screen above the dashboard telling you what to hit next, and whatever the task may be its button is hiding somewhere in the unfamiliar layout. Adding to the fun is how different tasks need different movements, with buttons requiring a press, switches needing an up/down slide, and dials requiring rotation, and the power is constantly dropping so you'll need to attend to that during all that spare time you've got. Plus, of course, the button layout changes with each new game. The basics are fairly simple but this absolutely needs VR to work, because first finding the right button on the dashboard and then getting a cursor over to it would take way too long. Try not to let the pressure get to you.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU34756/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHoyoxQZFp8

Floor Kids- Mobile-only dance game where you've got a crew of two and are out to recruit the best urban dancers you can find. Each encounter is divided up into three selectable stages- Busking, Freestyle, and Battle. Busking is an Ouendan-style performance where the cues show up on screen in time to the music, and freestyle is the same scenario but without any cues, letting you string your own moves together. Battle puts you up against your hopefully-new recruit, as you test moves against each other so your crew gains a new member if you win. The entire game is presented in a super-cute and sketchy art style that works perfectly with the animation. There were character sketches on the display table showing the strength of the hand-animated art, and if there had been one available for the awesome female b-girl dancer I'd have been unable to resist seeing if they were for sale.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU34756/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op4lrauQv0Y

Stage Fright- Learn to play a keyboard and don't freak out. This starts like a simple Rock Band-style music game, with notes scrolling down on two sets of lanes, one for the left hand and one for the right. The demo only had three notes per hand, which I strongly appreciated having never done anything with a keyboard before, and it didn't take too long before I was tapping out the simple patterns of what I can only assume was Easy mode. The problem comes in when the narrative enters into play, which is that of a young man having issues keeping it together. The note track briefly flips upside down, the entire screen distorts with interference, terrible images flash, but the show must go on. Ignore the images and interference and play like a pro, burying the horrors down deep where they won't interfere with your playing. There's plenty of time to go slightly nuts when not putting on a show in front of a large audience. Disclaimer- that's probably not the message the game is going for, but as anyone who has ever bulled through a really bad day at work can attest, it's probably the best way to handle the situation.  You can actually download this one now, pay what you want, at itch.io.  Be warned that it's a bit buggy at the moment, with notes that show as being hit falling off as a miss, but hopefully that will be fixes as the game gets updated.

Yankai's Triangle- In which it is clearly demonstrated that triangles are bastards. This puzzler is about touching triangles to rotate them into place, then attaching them to an inner triangle based on lining up patterns at the points. It's super-easy if all you've got is a single internal triangle with three others to rotate around it, with the pieces auto-connecting with a satisfying click, but each time you complete a set of three the entire structure pans out to reveal a new tier to configure. You can click on the center to drop back to the one you were working with before if things don't line up quite right, and when things start running multiple layers deep you'll frequently need to dive back to the middle and completely reconfigure everything to fit the new information. Some puzzles are only a few layers deep and others seem like they go up forever, and the designs on the triangles get more intricate as the game progresses. I didn't have time to learn it's systems in a way that would let me reconfigure the outcome four layers deep from what had seemed a successful run when it all of a sudden crops up with problems, but I could tell they were there, waiting to be discovered.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU34756/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpdWRYd-hIg

And that's part one.  There's a lot more to come, ranging from big names to student projects and everything in between.