While at the GDC I had the supreme pleasure to play some of the excellent independent games on display at the Independent Games Festival. If I had to sum up what I saw in one word, that word would be “Delightful.”

If they were cakes, I would call them “toothsome.”

However, since we all know now that the cake is a lie, I’ll just highlight two of them that I enjoyed the most, that made me say “Wow, how can an ARG do this?”

The first one is Fez. You can think of Fez as Super Paper Mario on steroids. In it, you control a little white guy who wears a Fez. The little guy walks around the world, jumps from platform to platform, climbs ladders… the usual stuff. The unusual stuff is that you can rotate the camera, which flips over and then re-flattens itself as a 2D image once more, making platforms that are “really” far away suddenly close and reachable. This is all done in a retro 8 bit art style.

It makes me want to make an ARG that gives the players access to a world of 8bit representation. It also makes me want to make an ARG that’s all about different points of view, literal or emotional. What if we could give our players a way to look at characters and situations from different angles? Literally?

Game number two is World of Goo. It’s a game where you arrange little blobs of goo into leaning towers. It’s a puzzle game. It’s also amazing how expressive a little ball of goo can be if you stick eyes on it. The gameplay is also really fun puzzle stuff.

It makes me want to design an ARG that does not feature humans as central characters, but instead small guys with expressive faces and a limited vocabulary.