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Here are the 2015 Independent Games Festival finalists

A good year for mobile

Here are the 2015 Independent Games Festival finalists
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The Main Competition finalists for this year's Independent Games Festival have been announced, and there are quite a few mobile games in the line-up.

Finalists for the 17th annual IGF will be available to demo at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March.

Out of the six titles nominated for Excellence in Visual Art, half of them are mobile games.

They include the dreamy and cartoonish landscapes of Donut County by Ben Esposito, and the similarly quirky, picture book-like illustrations of Patrick Smith's Metamorphabet.

While we're not sure yet which platform Donut County is headed to, we do know that Metamorphabet is coming to iPad in mid-February.

The detailed, black and white sketches of bizarre iOS puzzler Oquonie also made the list of finalists. Our review called it a "beautiful, unique, surreal, arch, and difficult" experience.

Out of the six honorable mentions for the art category, half were also mobile, including Hyper Light Drifter, Mini Metro, and Bronze Award-winning The Sailor's Dream.

This trend of half-mobile, half-desktop nominees continues into the Excellence in Narrative category, where we have the Gold Award-winning 80 Days by Inkle Studios, Ice-Bound, and Pry; curiously, all text-driven interactive fictions.

The only mobile honorable mention for Excellence in Narrative is The Sailor's Dream.

80 Days was also nominated for Excellence in Design, followed by the Gold Award-winning comic book puzzler Framed.

These were the only mobile games to make the design category, though Desert Golfing and Mini Metro did receive honorable mentions.

Simogo's The Sailor's Dream finally gets a real nomination in the Excellence in Audio category, accompanied by papercraft musical game Ephemerid and the Gold Award-winning retro platformer Shovel Knight.

Rhythmic racer THUMPER also made the list, but we're not sure if that's actually coming to mobile or not. If it does, chances are it'd be Vita, as we've previously covered.

Deep Under the Sky, FOTONICA, Hotline Miami 2, and Smash Hit all got honorable mentions for Excellence in Audio.

Nominated for the Nuovo Award, which honors "abstract and unconventional game development," is the nearly infamous Desert Golfing and the two-player dancing game Bounden, with Ice-Bound included as an honorable mention.

Finally, nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize is 80 Days and Metamorphabet, with Donut County, Shovel Knight, and The Sailor's Dream included in the honorable mentions.

The 2015 IGF awards will be held on the night of Wednesday, March 4th in San Francisco, CA during the annual Game Developers Conference.

Attendees will get the chance to play the nominated games at the IGF Pavilion on the expo floor during the convention.

For a full list of games nominated, including non-mobile titles, head over to the IGF's official website.

Chloi Rad
Chloi Rad
Chloi games, and Chloi writes, and at some point she made the dangerous decision of merging the two. Now she spends her time formulating words about weird games she finds, playing Dark Souls, and also playing Dark Souls.