When historians look back at the year of Twenty-Sixteen, they will obviously talk about how much of a landmark period this has been for the video game scene. Fascinating new names came left, (far) right and center, much to the surprise of the game journo elite. You’ve already learnt what the best of those were from, well, everyone, but did you know people also make rad small indie titles that aren’t short-lived Pokémon fangames?

It’s daunting, finding actually fun games and all with the increasing pool of games and attention the site gets, so that’s why this year I setted up a crack team of expert judges to go out and find the solid, fun, interesting titles that Game Jolt has to offer. And in a year’s first, we partnered with the lovely site staff to enable for all GJ users to find the very best in the Month of Play voting stage. We called it The Jolties, and by the end of the year we aimed to find the Game of the Year 2016.

So without further ado, by popular vote, the first US female president, and the top 5 ranking freeware games of Game Jolt in 2016!

5th - A Trip to Yugoslavia

A Trip To Yugoslavia by @bunioxd1 has you first of all Google whether Yugoslavia is a real place (update: not anymore). Before you can lament on your abhorrent lack of modern history knowledge, you are plopped into the middle of a fictional insurgency of <insert mysterious government here> in middle of Serbistaniagaryland, fighting your way to survival by scrounging for arms and resources in the various enemy squads encounters throughout your tale. Tough decisions dictating your next actions await in this Full Motion Video set-up, boasting some lovably-indie video shots (as well as surprisingly not-terrible acting to beat), spruced up by an intuitive “rewind, pause and forward” feature menu to enjoy the wealth of narrative paths designed by the developers without the frustration of constantly re-loading saves as if you were on a Phillips CD-i.

4th - Sara is Missing

Set out on a mobile device interface reminiscent of those adorable flash Window PC simulators on Newgrounds, Sara is Missing from @monsoonlab pulls you into an ever-twisting horror thriller which is somehow all majestically played out on just a phone display. Exploring the rather charmingly-crafted texting and media history gradually lets you understand the character of our missing protagonist, with your completition of tasks always leading to unexpected and horifying if not traumatising places, acting out a grand scheme which masterfully puts Sara’s homely life woes to an endearing contrast with the absolute terrors of a mysterious cult (who apparently spend their days organizing masked orgies and beheading the uninitiated for shits and giggles).

3rd - windowframe

When a Game Maker game opens up in windowed mode, what is your first reaction? Pressing alt+enter of course, to break away from the shackles of a non-fullscreen gaming experience. Yet Daniel Linssen’s (@managore ) windowframe actually requires this sinful way of play—your actions can move the program window around your monitor display. The main gimmick is your magical-projectiles-of-resizing-windows, where you can physically narrow down the frames of the literal display… yeah, really, it’s nuts! And in the bizare reality that intrusively plays ontop of your desktop, there’s a well-designed set of levels and boss fights to force you to constantly try new things with your special tool.

Also try out the developer’s atmospheric desert-survival and camel-finding title Sandstorm, which was a finalist for The Jolties this year as well and mumble mumble should’ve won.

2nd - Boneborne: Prologue

Making games with cutesy, bizarre, fantastical creatures and caricatures, made from the imaginations of LSD-tripped minds, is all the rage these days, and yet as any non-beanie-wearing-hipster-gamer who has spent a lonely night slightly drunk browsing Tumblrs curating cute and experimental projects to try and find blissful solace in weird video games would tell you—it’s hard to do weird, well, right. The not-really-Megaman-esque action narrative platformer Boneborne: Prologue does it right—right up yours by murdering you because you only have one goddamn hit-point in this darned game. And still you somehow have the biggest flippin’ smile as you appreciate the wonderous quriks condensed into this little adventure.

As the “prologue” in the title suggests, this was made more as a demo with the game’s developer @daneelgames suggesting further development of Boneborne into a more fully-fledged title, which I would very much be excited to see.

1st - Debrysis

In the vein of bullet hells such as Touhou and DoDonPachi, Debrysis is about dodging balls—made up of pure evil energy, coming in multiple neon colours, sized big and small—and killing shit. Just like the Japanese classics, none of it makes any sense, although this game doesn’t have the excuse of being written in a language that’s basically a picture book for 4 year olds. Also you’re in a military-grade buggy with a machine-gun-tank-barrel-gatling-turret-laser-beamer-hybrid attatched, because God Bless America (and the highest rate of gun deaths in the world). Yeah, it seems the voting public were sick of all the impeccably-crafted thought-provoking artistically-merited games above with this one.

And so, it gives me the honour of presenting the simply good ol’ fun shump known as Debrysis as Game of the Year 2016! My congratulations to the developer, @grouzdev ~

Don’t worry though, we’re not quite done yet! Now we can get back to some more impeccably-crafted thought-provoking artistically-merited games in the judge’s choice awards below!

Nearly as good as Owlboy Award - Down Ward

Game Jolt isn’t necessarily reknowned for it’s collection of video games of the shiny and polished mantlepiece-variety, although I say we’re all about that raw youthful energy. But in every Jolters long-entrenched despair that itch.io has all the upper-middle-class artsy stuff which the journo-twitter-metropolitan-connoisseur types lap up, we will always bloody hark on about Down Ward, which is adjusts monocle quite exquisite caresses moustache if I do say so myself. Seriously, holy sh*t does this game look pretty. Oh yeah and it’s a platformer thingy were you’re an owl doing stuff it’s very fun WHO CARES IT’S GOT CRISP-LOOKING PIXEL ART.

Innovation in Pottery Award - Zen and the Art of Transhumanism

Transhumanism is all the new age rage these days, and in the endless academic debate on how human’s mind and matter will look like in years to come, the much-beloved @Deconstructeam submits an exploratory art piece depicting a future where nude, hairless, genderless operators make crafted pottery pieces in all sorts of curved and indented shapes, where you are tasked with assessing the needs of clients to create just the right life-upgrading module. But can technology satisfy the yearnings of man’s soul…?

Most Helpful Ghost Award - Dead Man’s Crossing

Being stuck on a privately-owned never-ending rip-off train journey forever has been pretty boring for you, the train operator. And so, being a ghost and all, you seek to meet all your transparent passengers’ unfullfilled wishes before you can at last find redemption from the chains of the living world. Dead Man’s Crossing plays out on a “train journey in limbo”, where you can stop anywhere throughout to venture outside on quests attributale to the conversations you have with other lost souls on board. It’s all quite charming.

Excellence in Energy Inefficiency Award - Lampshade

You know, lowrez and clunkily-controlled platformer games with pitch-black back-drops are the worst and need to die. Yet @MNWS ’ lowrez and clunkiy-controlled platformer game with a pitch-black back-drop breathe in Lampshade supersedes this trite trope that has plagued freeware indie games by being quite the innovative puzzler revolving around lighting things up (what’dyaknow), and I even had to get pen and paper to be a real milford-coat-detective, making me reminisce of 80s text-based dungeon crawlers a la Collosal Cave Adventure on a Commodore 64… even though I was born just before the turn of the century, so that must be quite the feat!

The Electric Love Potato of 2016 Award - ARMAGAD

If a game is strange for strangeness sake then I’m not interested, but if it’s ARMAGAD then er, I’ll take it this infatuating amalgamation coming from Natalie “The Last Adobe Flash User Alive” Lawhead’s numerous and wonderous figments of imagination (surely induced by the snorting of crack cocaine). Really I’m just scratching my head here in explaining how there’s this deus ex machina cast who gives seemingly nonsensical tidbits of wisdom that ultimately leaves one perpetually pondering on the purpose of life; but you can just try it for yourself.

Oh and technically the full name of the game is “ARMAGAD (also Tetrageddon Games)” but the bracketed bit broke the text line and is pretentious but I guess now I feel the need to comment here on it’s absence so maybe the name does mean something oh god what is life.

Guy we want to love, but really hate Award - David DeCarmine

David DeCarmine, who you probably know as @CROS on Game Jolt, founded the site in it’s current iteration in the late 2008, and after waves among waves of annoying little brats in the ways of Slendytubbies, Five Night’s at Freddies, and PewDiePie fans coming over to the site, as well as the pessimistic edgy teenagers (who don’t actually play indie games) constantly shitposting and whining on that lovably-unlovable chatroom we have, it is crazy to think he still hasn’t sold out to Curse and live out his years making the Final Fantasy fangame of his childhood dreams.

But no, he loves the developers of indie games as well as those who play them, and you see that philosophy into the site’s aggressive but elegant “getting people to play your game” design—as opposed to simply offering some pretty-looking mantlepiece. He embraces popular gaming culture, for all it’s disinterest in good games so much as perpetuating the short-lived trendy zeitgeist of now, creating an environment where developers can thrive making quality games by attracting a mainstream audience.

And he’s worked tirelessly throughout the years—except for that time he was learning Turkish just to propose in his future wife’s native tongue—even if the site may seem to progress slowly as happens when being a small team providing a service for the millions of visitors amassed over the years. We fawn over the man whenever he pops online the chat (which you’re probably only on in those moments in life when you hate yourself), yet we all have had a dark thought of resenting him after frustrations with a lack of GODDAMN MULTI-USER-OWNED GAME PROFILES ALREADY and such. But following the development of GJ, from seeing the regressed 960px grid fixed-width design blossom into a clean and responsively widthèd fully-featured hub to best highlight all things indie, I have grown an appreciation for the man which I think we would all be better to have.

Many thanks to the judges (specifically, the judges who actually did something looking at you nik): @Jupiter_Hadley , @1-UP_Nuke, @Benal, @DarkBloodbane , @Carpetwurm , @Fromfame , @FrankenMan , @Fernando , @JeFawk , @SmallBoss , @FilthyButtnugget, @Extreme_Z7, @Diptoman and @Linkronny !

In particular, I thank DarkBloodbane for the 61 games he judged (because he’s an addict and has problems), Jupiter “play-all-the-games” (but not this time, pah!) Hadley for 57 games judged, and 1-UP Nuke for 21 games judged because I can’t quite give myself 3rd place with my 55 tally as I happily offer the following great commercial titles (kindly donated by their respective developers) to these most diligent volunteers with:

• Beeswing by the most f*cked up in the head game developer ever, @jackspinoza

• Gebub’s Adventure by @orange , who can somehow get away with using MS Paint for a commercial game

• Innoquous 5 by the man who’s too busy making tons of dosh from his font-making endeavours to make games, @NAL

• Magic Wand by the legendary “hey remember Space Funeral?” @thecatamites

• Ruby & Majesty: Treasure Team by @TheWzzard , who’s aforementioned game won joint-3rd in last year’s Jolties and now I’m confused because it was free then but became a commercial project which was contrary to our rules so erm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Thunder Gun: Revenge of the Mutants by the scar-er of innocent 11 year-old minds by induction of bedtime nightmarish creatures (I speak from experience), @rotten_tater .

Without their hard work there would be none of this, so yeah, give them your thanks!

And with that, I wish you all a good year ahead. I’m pretty doubtful it’s going to be a nice time in general but hey, I’m sure even more great freeware games will be coming out on Game-Jolt-Dot-Com in 2017! I think we’re going to need them~

#bestof #free #gamejolt #jolties #gjbroadcast