OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE FROM ANALGESIC PRODUCTIONS PRESS DIVISION
-FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION-
Hello. I am pleased to announce we were nominated for the Grand Prize at the 2020 IGF!
Wow, that’s amazing! Seriously Marina and I weren’t expecting that at all. We usually submit to the IGF for fun, not expecting much. Anodyne 2 was pretty good, so I thought we’d maybe get an HM in one of the categories but this blew our expectations out of the water. Thanks for all the judges and jury who played our game, and, based on some blog posts I’ve been seeing – fought for it as well. When it comes to our unconventional ways of game design, we really need our players, fans, community – to help us out in getting others to check out our work.
It’s somewhat fitting that we only got a nominee in the Grand Prize category – as Anodyne 2 really is the sum of its parts, something you have to experience in full. For all the 99% of players who played through the game and have been saying so much nice stuff about it: thank you! We’re really glad you played and seriously it’s great to be seeing all these comments every day.
To the 1% who quit before Dustbound Village and decided to review the game anyways for some reason: you’re probably at least halfway through, so please finish the game!
Anodyne 2 can’t be coherently judged without finishing it. Sorry but it’s true. Despite what some formalists might say, you can’t have a well-formed opinion of Anodyne 2 without finishing it. We’ve taken surreal spaces, multiple storytelling tones, classic gameplay textures, contemporary themes, a bunch of subversions, and mashed it together into our new genre: The Analgesic Productions Game. You have to play all of an Analgesic Productions game to understand it! If you can play 50 hours of Death Stranding or 100 hours of Skyrim or 100 hours of whatever, you can get through 8 hours of (the very streamlined) Anodyne 2.
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If you didn’t know, we do have a history of submission to the IGF. Anodyne 1 received an HM in the student category back in 2013. Even the Ocean… did not receive anything! Oh well! According to our download stats from then, a lot of judges played it though, so perhaps it was divisive. Divisiveness is interesting…
All Our Asias got a HM in Nuovo in 2019’s IGF. That was really nice to see.
But we play to win and now it’s our time to win!! Hahahahahahaha! Just kidding. Or…?
More seriously, we do really believe in the quality and uniqueness of Anodyne 2 and it’s exciting to see it recognized in this way. It’s not just Marina and I who are thrilled, but also the community of players, supporters, who enjoyed playing the game.
It would be cool to win, but it would also be cool to see it go to a game like Eliza, which was one of my favorite games in 2019. Or A Short Hike or Mutazione, neither of which I have been able to play yet (though I’ve had my eye on Mutazione for a while!)
Also, like, just putting it out there, but… nothing personal to the dev teams! but! it would be pretty cool to see Anodyne 2 beat a game like Goose Game (1m+ copies sold!) or Slay the Spire (1.5m+ copies sold, lol!). Anodyne 2 hasn’t even sold 1% as much as either of those games. Lol! Imagine what we would do with that money! We’d scale, IPO, and make a battle royale early access randomly generated roguelike zelda-like dating sim! (I lied: we would give it away to other developers, small independent games writing outlets, and grassroots organizations. I would also keep some of it to fund my Caloriemate, peanut butter, and Magic: The Gathering habits)
But it’s cool to see our game alongside those other names nonetheless. We’re honored to have our name up there and I hope I can judge the IGF in future years to try to get the next generation’s amazing games up there as well.
See you all at the IGF!!!!
(And if you noticed the new name – I’m considering a new online/artist name – Melos (based on Melody, music-related) – from now on, but don’t worry about what you call me in person just yet! Sean or Melos is fine.)
ambient-melodic 