'Unpacking' and 'Inscryption' lead in IGF 2022 nominations

gamedeveloper.com:

The nominees for the 2022 Independent Games Festival Awards have arrived. Whether you're risking it all in an inky black card-based odyssey, or simply organizing your new one-bedroom apartment—this year in indie games is something special.

Organizers of the 2022 Game Developers Conference are thrilled to unveil this year's finalists for the 24th annual IGF Awards—part of the longest-running festival, summit, and showcase celebrating independent games and their creators. Inscryption by Daniel Mullins Games and Unpacking by Witch Beam lead the pack with four nominations each: Excellence in Audio, Excellence in Design, Excellence in Narrative, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

Inscryption is a genre-bending love letter to video games that blends the deckbuilding roguelike, escape room-style puzzles and psychological horror into a spooky package. Quite differently, Unpacking is a zen game about the familiar experience of pulling possessions out of boxes and fitting them into a new home, learning clues about the person's life along the way.

The Independent Games Festival is part of GDC 2022, which will be held in-person in San Francisco and virtually from March 21-25.

Here are the other nominees for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

● Cruelty Squad (Consumer Softproducts): A tactical first-person shooter where players are an emotionally dead combat-substance fueled grunt of Cruelty Squad, a depraved subsidiary company tasked with performing wetworks for its host conglomerate (also nominated for the Nuovo Award).

● Loop Hero (Four Quarters): Players help the brave hero to defeat the Lich that has thrown the world into a timeless loop by wielding an expanding deck of mystical cards, which place enemies and terrain to help challenge