The Offworld Guide to the 2009 Independent Games Festival

The Independent Games Festival has become a bedrock institution for the games industry, especially within the past few years.

Apart from being a celebration of inspired and auteur design -- design with passion -- it's also become a fast-ticket to getting noticed by console makers eager to bring the best of the fresh talent exclusively to their download services.

Braid, World of Goo, Darwinia, Everyday Shooter, Crayon Physics, Audiosurf -- all truly became names of their own following IGF successes. In the spirit of looking forward, then, and because Offworld's initial mention of the 2009 winners amounted to little more than a rote list of names, I've taken the time to sit down with all of this year's finalists and try to contextualize each entry (bar those cases where my hardware unfortunately failed me).

Inside you'll find as many video demos as I could muster, links and mentions to those games currently available to try for yourself, and an independent summary of each of the 22 finalists this year. As with our Offworld 20 best games list, any comments can be left via this page below.

On to the guide...