IGF Awards Semi-liveblog Challenge
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on October 12, 2025
The Independent Games Festival is underway, giving the indie game developers of the world a chance to accept awards in t-shirts, possibly recently washed. Let’s list the winners!
Since I’m doing it on an iPhone, it should be interesting.
The Digipen students walk away with first kudos for Tag: the Power of Paint. Possibly the first instance of a 4chan smiley on an awards show stage. First winner in the main competition is Cortex Command for technical excellence. That’s $2500 in สล็อต ya pocket!
Next up is excellence in u31 visual art… which Machinarium wins. Go Czech Republic!
Excellence in design is nabbed by Musaic Box. The game’s creator says spaceeba! Because he speaks Russian.
BrainPipe scores the excellence in audio award. That results in some on stage beard action and another lost opportunity for Q-games’ PixelJunk Eden. Poor Baiyon.
Innovation goes to Jason Rohrer for Passage Between. He’s more put together than I expected and leads us into a great joke. You had to be there, I suppose.
We break u31.com เข้าสู่ระบบ for a Mega 64. This one is “If you’re not indie F**K YOU!” It was funny.
The Direct2Drive award is up. Osmos team just got PAID.
The audience award just went out, going to technical excellence award winner Cortex Command. The creator thanked everyone, then took his shirt off. Dude was about as ripped as any indie game developer ever.
For the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, we have the following to choose from: Blueberry Garden, CarneyVale: Showtime, Dyson, Night Game and Osmos.
Winner? Blueberry Garden! That’s $30,000 in prize money, thanks to a little contribution from Mountain Dew. Pretty nice little payday. Shirts stay on.
That’s it for the IGF awards portion. Go and play these games, because Brian Crecente voted on them and he probably picked all the good ones.
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