My fellow writer Emily and I were planning on going to many game conferences and conventions this summer, but obviously our plans couldn't come to fruition with COVID-19 making it completely unreasonable to hold large events.
However, digital cons like Indie Arena Booth, created in playable MMORPG fashion, were the next best thing and still very much worth the experience. The team of developers that built Indie Arena Booth from scratch in just a few months deserve all the praise for making a whole game with a huge map of booths that we were able to roam.
While Emily and I couldn't do in-person photo ops, we visited dozens of booths in-game and took plenty of photos of our experience as if we were actually there together — because we were, in spirit and in a Discord call.
Making Digital Memories
During our adventure, we posed next to a very large Frigg head in the Welcome to Elk booth, a pack of foxes in Endling, next to bowling alleys in Date Night Bowling, and a cool archway in Mindcop. We watched trailers on the large in-game screens together in booths like Coffee Talk, Boyfriend Dungeon, When the Past Was Around, and, ironically, Land of Screens.
We went up and down escalators from Serenity Forge to Finji, and stood at the makeshift bar in Nine Lives Noir deciding were to go next. We walked down the black and white city in Genesis Noir, traversed the blue and white streets of Orwell, and wandered colorless paths of Chicory: A Colorful Tale.
It was a blast learning more about games we had been following as we made our way through our hit lists and shared games we were interested in with each other. As two squirrel-brained individuals, we often strayed from our pre-written lists and went up or down random escalators with interesting titles and discovered even more indie games — with awesome booths — we hadn't even considered or heard about before.
After each discovery, we were only more enticed to keep going due to our curiosity about what the next booth might look like and what other unseen games were out there.
All the Photo Ops!
If you're curious about many of the moments I mentioned earlier and haven't checked out all those booths yourself yet, here are just a "few" pictures of some of my favorite stylized booths from my adventures with Emily. Plenty of these games still have demos, giveaways, and other events going on this weekend, so definitely go check them out while you can — and maybe get some cute photo ops with friends.
In case you were wondering, the gray antelope ghost is Emily and the blue haired girl with a galaxy blob body is me!
We'll be continuing our adventure this weekend — see you at the next booth!
