Indie World Order - IWOCon 2021 (2021)

 

Composer: Various Artists
Console: Indie PC, Steam
Game Release Date: 2021-03-26
Bootleg Release Date: 2021-03-26
Runtime: 54:35, 19 Tracks

Bit of a short post today. I was originally going to cover a different game but I "completed" this earlier this week and I am currently too swamped with work to actually get this out. April is always the busiest month for me. 

So anyways I would like to cover IWOCon 2021. IWOCon stands for Indie World Order, a group of Indie game developers who, in 2020 banded together to hold a games convention dedicated to upcoming indie games. I know very little of the 2020 event other than it was also virtually held. Holding a convention in 2020 would prove to be extremely difficult what with the pandemic and all. Anyways, fast forward to 2021 and IWOCon is ready for round 2. I had originally heard of it through another game dev I am familiar with tweeting about their game being included in it. 
The concept was also pretty unique to me and I just had to try this out. The game has you choose an avatar and run around various islands each with their own booths. From what I understood there was no themes with the islands and the booths were scattered around randomly. There are also tons of secrets within the world that make things even more interesting. Roller coasters, hidden caves, platforming tests and more are all hidden. I mainly played it for the trailers but the few things I found were interesting. I think you could also find coupons for various games within the islands. Aside from the easter eggs there are hats and birds around that you can equip on your characters hidden in various booths. 

I had originally planned to play through it with my friends but my sister became interested in it and we figured to just blitz the whole thing with her. I found a whole bunch of neat games. The games I saw that looked super interesting were Shadows of Aya, Figment 1, Demon Legend, MonochromeRPG, Coromon, Bulletville, Deadlane, Kristala, Conscript, What the Duck, Mystiqa, Sayri: The Beginning, Lenin the Lion, Zniw Adventure and 8-Bit Adventures. There were lots of cool and unique games displayed there. Unfortunately my backlog is huge so who knows when I will get to that game. Either way, it's amazing to see so many neat games in development. There was also Nanokin but I have been excited for that game long before IWOCon enacted a booth for them. 

The only issue was that the game was a little janky. Controls were a bit stiff, the game was poorly optimized, falling in the water would cause you to respawn and then because you don't know what happened you would run off the dock again, menus would not go away (specifically the roller coaster) and the game took a long time to load. Hell, the look of it just felt...off. Music would not stop playing while watching the game trailers so early on I just turned it off. It's still being updated so maybe that will be fixed in the future. Either way, the brief songs I did here fit into the library music and stock music categories. It's just chill, easy listening music. It fits with the easy going nature of a games convention. All that aside I did really enjoy myself and I will be looking forward should they do another con next year. I don't go to conventions often but this actually did fill that gap somewhat. Having a multiplayer would made it even more cool but I get this isn't a huge operation. What they achieved so far has been outstanding. 

E3 is apparently planning a virtual event to compensate for lack of physical attendance. I'm a little skeptical they can actually pull it off but I will be watching. Knowing the endless uninteresting streak E3 has it will probably just be some VRChat event or just a stream, maybe with an interactive JavaScript site.

 
The soundtrack is free through steam so I have no need to post links to it directly. IWOCon is also free to view so if you feel like it give it a try. 

Download: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422300/IWOCon_2021/