Visual Design Award
Mini Mini Golf Golf
by Three More Years
Mini Mini Golf Golf is a sci-fi narrative experience like no other. As you discover tunnels through spacetime and unravel memories of inevitable climate collapse, identity and responsibility collide at the fault line of our planet’s future.
The metaphor of a childhood memory rips open the fabric of spacetime and connects you with a mysterious and bizarre entity from the future, injecting thoughts and ideas into your trails as you navigate a virtual underworld of memories and resonances.
Live Action Award
labRats
by cirqueSaw
labRats is a remote interactive live performance built in cirqueSaw’s bespoke browser-based platform. Pulling inspiration from retro games, cyberpunk, escape rooms, silent films, and immersive theatre, it blurs the line between reality and unreality, wonder and horror. Audiences play as rats in a mysterious experiment tasked with working together to take control of their lives. Whether they choose to escape, take over the lab, or deconstruct the reality of the experience itself is entirely their choice.
Audio Design Award
Fretless: The Wrath of Riffson
by Ritual Studios
Fretless is a turn based Guit-RPG where Instead of collecting swords and shields, you battle with guitars, synthesizers, and riffs! Upgrade your pedal board, collect instrument mods, and explore a vibrant world full of music!
Tabletop Design Award
Beacon Patrol
by Shapes and Dreams, BrutalHack
Beacon Patrol is a cozy, cooperative tile-laying game where you and your friends explore the calm waters of the North Sea as Coast Guard captains. Place tiles, move your ship, and slowly build a beautiful coastal map together in a relaxed, no-pressure setting. Inspired by the physical board game, the digital version adds new modes, unlockable ships, and cute seagull companions – making it an easy, charming pick-up-and-play experience for anyone who enjoys strategic but soothing co-op games.
Performance Award
Uncanny Alley: A New Day
by Virtual Worlds Company / Ferryman Collective
Set in a dystopian future, Uncanny Alley: A New Day follows protesters escaping imprisonment with the help of hacker Gh0st and her self-aware Service-Bot, Atom. Navigating a decaying city ruled by Adaptive Learning Industries, participants choose whether to flee to a new metaverse or stay and fight. This live VR production explores autonomy, resistance, and identity, with audience interaction shaping events. Built for headsets like Quest3, it pushes technical limits to blend interactive theater and gaming into a groundbreaking experience.
Narrative Award
Some Goodbyes We Made
by Safe Flight Games & Joey Schutz
“Some Goodbyes We Made” is a minigame collection about saying goodbye. It consists of 11 short minigames, each preserving a precious farewell memory.
In this game, players will experience many different kinds of farewell stories, including moving houses, graduation ceremonies, quarrels with friends, and more. You’ll see how the protagonist preserves the sadness and depth of their goodbyes in each minigame, and perhaps recall the goodbyes of your own life along the way.
Impact Award
A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe
by Quail Button
It is a point-and-click stealth game where the goal is to make sure nobody talks to you. You’ll get to experience an average week of Giraffe’s life as he does exciting things on his to-do list, such as going to the laundromat, perusing antique stores, purchasing groceries, and working out at the gym, all while making sure the incredibly sociable citizens of Friendly City never have a chance to speak with him so that his head will not explode.
Mike Sellers Systemic Design Award
Cairn
by The Game Bakers
Cairn’s realistic simulation allows intuitive climbing: find the best holds and place your hands and feet seamlessly with simple controls. Adapt your posture, effort and balance —if you’re not careful, you will fall!
You are free to climb anywhere. Explore the mountain, read the rock face from the ground and plan your route carefully to reach the top. Solve problems while on the wall to navigate difficult sections. You can climb on anything, so choose your path wisely!
Developers Choice
The Sentient Severed Arm
by Null And Void Games
In The Sentient Severed Arm, one player takes on the role of a sentient severed arm and is experimented upon by the other players who are role-playing as power-hungry alchemists and necromancers. The alchemists and necromancers must work together and against one another in order to pursue secret powers over Life and Death.
The game includes short instructions, and unique playbooks for alchemists, necromancers, and the arm. Players are encouraged to embrace ambiguity, embodiment, critical suspicion, and silliness.
Innovation in Interaction Design Award
Mini Mini Golf Golf
by Three More Years
Mini Mini Golf Golf is a sci-fi narrative experience like no other. As you discover tunnels through spacetime and unravel memories of inevitable climate collapse, identity and responsibility collide at the fault line of our planet’s future.
The metaphor of a childhood memory rips open the fabric of spacetime and connects you with a mysterious and bizarre entity from the future, injecting thoughts and ideas into your trails as you navigate a virtual underworld of memories and resonances.
Jury Prix Award (Tie)
Wednesdays
by The Wednesdays Team
Like so many other children, Tim was a victim of sexual abuse.
Twenty years later, Orco Park, a video game from his youth, will bring his past back to him, and with it a host of questions: How could this have happened? Who could have seen it? How did it affect him when he was growing up? What is ‘normal’?
Discover a frank and human, tackling the subject of sexual abuse within the family without taboos, but not without accuracy.
Jury Prix Award (Tie)
A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe
by Quail Button
It is a point-and-click stealth game where the goal is to make sure nobody talks to you. You’ll get to experience an average week of Giraffe’s life as he does exciting things on his to-do list, such as going to the laundromat, perusing antique stores, purchasing groceries, and working out at the gym, all while making sure the incredibly sociable citizens of Friendly City never have a chance to speak with him so that his head will not explode.
Innovation in Experience Design Award
Uncanny Alley: A New Day
by Virtual Worlds Company / Ferryman Collective
Set in a dystopian future, Uncanny Alley: A New Day follows protesters escaping imprisonment with the help of hacker Gh0st and her self-aware Service-Bot, Atom. Navigating a decaying city ruled by Adaptive Learning Industries, participants choose whether to flee to a new metaverse or stay and fight. This live VR production explores autonomy, resistance, and identity, with audience interaction shaping events. Built for headsets like Quest3, it pushes technical limits to blend interactive theater and gaming into a groundbreaking experience.
Grand Jury Award
Cairn
by The Game Bakers
Cairn’s realistic simulation allows intuitive climbing: find the best holds and place your hands and feet seamlessly with simple controls. Adapt your posture, effort and balance —if you’re not careful, you will fall!
You are free to climb anywhere. Explore the mountain, read the rock face from the ground and plan your route carefully to reach the top. Solve problems while on the wall to navigate difficult sections. You can climb on anything, so choose your path wisely!
The Trailblazer Award is an honorary prize given to a working creator who has made both great contributions to the field of games and captures the independent and pioneering spirit.
Sara Thacher has filled her career on creating playful interactive experiences that often cross and combine physical and digital. She is an executive creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering, where she is responsible for the development of new attractions and experiences at Disney parks around the world. As creative director, she’s applied her passion for bringing the adventures of the screen to the real world for both Star Wars and Marvel franchises. She started her Imagineering career as a project leader in Research and Development where she has received multiple patents and developed the TEA Award-winning Haunted Mansion: Ghost Post.
Prior to Imagineering, Sara served as executive producer and experience designer at the immersive entertainment company Nonchalance, where she co-created the groundbreaking and Indiecade-award winning experience, The Jejune Institute. She serves on the board for the Immersive Experience Institute and the Peabody Awards where she helped expand the fields of eligible work to “interactive stories that matter.”
The Vanguard Award is presented to an independent studio that has been working in the space since the beginning, before indie games became a major part of the game industry.
Based in Copenhagen, Triband is an attention-seeking orchestra of people who want to make the world laugh with silly and surprising comedy games. Their game WHAT THE GOLF? was a bona fide indie hit that won numerous awards, including ‘Best Mobile Game’ at the 2020 Game Developers Choice Awards and the Grand Prize at IndieCade Europe. The follow-up WHAT THE CAR? won the 2024 DICE Award for Mobile Game of the Year, and they recently released WHAT THE CLASH? – a PvP game where every card you play is a new game mechanic.
The Game Changer Award celebrates an individual who has impacted the gaming landscape in a significant way, a positive disruptor who has brought a paradigm shift to our community.
After a 10 year public relations career in the consumer and tech industry, Sue Bohle entered the game industry as Atari’s first PR agency. Over the next three decades, she launched products for Atari developers, iD, Activision, Crystal Dynamics, Dreamworks, 3DO, Warner Bros, Infogrames and dozens of indie game companies from the U.S., Europe and Asia.
She also worked for industry conferences. In the tech world, she was a consultant to CES. In the game world, her firm also built attendance for the Game Developer Conference (GDC) from 2000 to more than 25,000, making it the dominant industry event, and grew Penny Arcade from a single fan event to multiple expos.
Becoming interested in why games were so addictive, she helped promote some of the earliest learning game companies and then founded Serious Play Conference to help grow the industry for games that could be used in training or education. Today, SPC is the dominant industry even for serious games, worldwide, serving the market for military, corporate, healthcare, education and nonprofit training and educational products.
The Bernie DeKoven Big Fun Award recognizes creators significantly furthering the field and impact of new, big, and physical games.
Based in Bristol, UK, Alistair Aitcheson makes playable stage shows, interactive livestreams and alternative controllers. His shows allow everyone in the audience to join in – whether they be taking part in games that get them running all over the auditorium, or sending secret messages from their phones to direct the action on stage.
Alistair believes that everybody is an artist. He is committed to using games and technology to create safe spaces where audiences can take creative risks. Having trained as a clown with Bristol legends Holly Stoppit and Igne Barkauskaite, he is inspired to find joy in failure, and to acknowledge his players as equal partners in the creative process.
He believes everyone should leave his shows saying “it would have been different if I wasn’t there.”
Beginning his professional games career in 2010, he made his first trip to IndieCade in 2015, where his codebreaking installation Codex Bash won the Media Choice Award. He returned in 2017 with his debut stage show The Incredible Playable Show, which was given the Jury Choice Award. He won the Performance Award in 2022 for his livestream art-making game Artholomew Video’s Stream Challenge.
He also hosted IndieCade’s Beyond Screens Alternative Controller livestreams for three seasons, alongside artist and game-developer Tatiana Vilela dos Santos.
Alistair is currently developing interactive clown performances, mixing drag, improv and technology. His latest show, “My Date with Pierce Brosnan” sees him as a clown on a date with a talking dummy of Pierce Brosnan, whose lines are provided by the audience. Every show is different, with the personality of his celebrity beau entirely determined by his audience’s anonymous (and unfiltered) input. It has been performed across the UK and made its international debut at the Queerness in Games Conference 2025 in Montreal.
