All the winners from the 2019 Freeplay Festival Awards!
This year marked the 15th anniversary of Freeplay, Melbourne’s Independent Games Festival, a week of talks, events and workshops, and it’s pinnacle events the Freeplay Awards.
The awards celebrate the skill of Australian (and New Zealand) independent game developers across ten different categories, including the Freeplay Award category for the best entrant.
The awards ceremony was held at Clik Collective in Kensington, and developers and friends gathered to celebrate indie games, and the community as a whole.
The winners of each category for the Freeplay 2019 awards are:
Fast paced and visually intensive, Jumpgrid is a wonderfully challenging game about teleporting between nodes on the screen while avoiding the many colorful and geometric hazards constantly forming and shifting.
Check our our PAX 2018 interview with Ian on Jumpgrid - PAXELSIFT: Jumpgrid
A cinematic 3D visual novel set in a contemporary fantasy version of Melbourne, Necrobarista’s art nods deeply to the aesthetics and design of anime, giving it a distinct visual flair.
Check our our PAX 2018 interview with Route 59 Games on Necrobarista - PAXELSIFT: Necrobarista
Skyward Journey is a game about controlling wind currents to gather lost birds, to lead them on a journey home. Soothing and beautifully crafted, its audio combines gentle and calming music mixed with bird calls, wind and waves.
As the name suggests, you play as a frog, who is a detective. Equipped with your trusty detective’s magnifying glass, you journey to a haunted island where you find clues, question suspects and try to uncover a grand mystery.
A fantastically creative take on board games and food combined, The Edible Games Cookbook contains a dozen games best played with family and friend, where eating the pieces is a requirement.
Like a poem but in the form of a game, Novena combines beautifully mood setting music and delightfully crafted visuals into a powerful story as you journey to the ocean to ask it why it no longer grant’s people wishes.
A light based installation work which was publicly displayed within Melbourne, The Common Campfire uses motion sensing equipment to make the ‘flames’ of the light flicker higher and brighter the more people crowd around to watch it. The warmth of this campfire in turn is created by the people or strangers that stand by it, not from the campfire itself.
Described by the judge as a great repurpose of “boob jiggle physics”, Pigeon Game is an adorable game about befriending, feeding, holding and petting round, squishy, purely adorable pigeons.
Toripon is a game about taking photos of very cute birds to share on social media to grow your online following. Explore your spacious apartment filled with birds, take silly photos, share them on social media within the game to unlock more birds and fun secrets.
A visually unique, multimedia experience with a whole lot of cyan, New Ice York is a wacky adventure where you play as the Top Agent investigating who froze the city overnight, why they did it, and to eliminate them no questions asked. Bare knuckle box, interrogate, and solve puzzles to get to the bottom of the mystery of the frozen city.
