Advocating for Godot: A report from A Maze Berlin | Opinion

And so to Berlin, where the A Maze indie games festival is celebrating its 15th year, and time continues to make fools of all of us.

At the opening ceremony on Wednesday night, founder Thorsten Wiedemann took to the stage alongside a giant inflatable flamingo to offer humble thanks at being allowed back into the fold, following inappropriate behaviour last year. Once this awkwardness was out of the way, it was time to rejoice at the fact this deliciously esoteric festival has survived for more than three Wii U lifespans, emerging stronger than ever after a funding crisis and the difficult COVID years.

This time around, A Maze Berlin encompasses several satellite events in addition to the main cluster of festival venues – a sign that the event is in rude health, and that the slow-burning indie revolution continues to gain strength. Intermittent rain showers rather spoiled the deckchair festival atmosphere at Silent Green, but the weatherproof underground vaults of the Betonhalle were thrumming with anticipation and curiosity as attendees discovered the oddball delights within.

A Maze is well known for its experimental games and offbeat installations, and probably the most eye-catching one this year was Otherworlds, in which participants donned VR headsets tethered by a glowing white cable to partake in a ritual based on Ukrainian pagan traditions – for onlookers, it somewhat resembled a slow-moving alien maypole dance.

Another standout was Mine Mind, a mixed-reality video installation by Shoto Hayakawa where a solo player takes a seat at a table with a physical board game resembling a chunk of rock. The player is filmed against a green screen, and their image is interlaced with footage of three other participants, who are apparently playing the mysterious game in a cave. As the drama unfolds, the player makes decisions by placing numbered cards on a reader, causing the figures on top of the board game to advance or retreat, and altering the outcome. It brought to mind a cross between the VHS board game Atmosfear and the children’s TV show Knightmare – highly exciting to UK residents of a certain age; everybody else should look them up on YouTube.

In more traditional video game territory, Name of the Will by Zeitgeist Studio particularly caught my eye for its eerie hand-drawn graphics, depicting a downright bizarre mask-wearing cult holed up in a grim tower block. The point and click adventure was Kickstarted way back in 2021, but will finally see the light of day later this year.

Dome-King Cabbage from Cobysoft has had a similarly long gestation – it was first revealed in 2020, and it still doesn’t have a release date – but playing the latest demo of this leftfield visual novel elicited within me a beguiling mix of confusion, delight, and desperation to see more. The melding of claymation with more realistic elements makes it look utterly unique, and every scene was an adventure into the unexpected. Logging on to the protagonist’s computer caused an angry tomato to advertise diapers, before I took an Uber, sorry, Goober ride with a jelly-headed skeleton into a land of giant mushrooms.

Tom the Postgirl from Oopsie Daisies and Arte France was another highlight, with its striking use of a black and white cartoon world splashed with daubs of red. The player takes on the role of a peeping Tom postie who noses into the weird and mysterious lives of the village’s residents. Finally, Phonopolis from Machinarium maker Amanita Design – which is out on May 20 – is a visually stunning game depicting a beautifully animated cardboard world where loudspeakers dictate every aspect of citizens’ existence.

It’s notable that Phonopolis was made using the open source game engine Godot, which was the talk of the town at A Maze. Several indie developers I spoke to were only too happy to sing the praises of the engine, which in itself is no surprise – it’s inevitable that an independent game engine will be attractive to independent game developers.

What was more of a surprise was to hear just how far Godot has come over the past couple of years, and how quickly it has emerged as a serious rival to indies’ traditional tool of choice, Unity. In fact, some of the developers I spoke to at A Maze think it has now surpassed Unity in some aspects – they particularly praised the wealth of documentation available for almost every process on Godot, making it easy to learn new tools.

When Unity embarked on its disastrous implementation of a Runtime Fee back in 2023, many indie developers switched to Godot purely on a point of principle, willing to embrace a more limited tool set in order to throw off Unity’s shackles. But with the advancements to Godot in the years since, the two engines are now on more of an even keel, certainly when it comes to 2D games – and Godot has the added attraction of being completely free.

There’s still some way to go before it can achieve absolute parity. The engine’s 3D capabilities are still somewhat lacking in comparison to Unity’s, for example. But progress has been rapid, and given the pace of change and indies’ willingness to embrace and advance the open-source system, it’s plausible that Godot will eventually catch up to and possibly even surpass Unity on many if not all fronts.

Unity has been busy introducing things like AI tools, but judging by the conversations I had with developers at A Maze, it seems to be losing the battle for hearts and minds, with some citing longstanding complaints about the introduction of unfinished or experimental features that take eons to fix (if they ever are). Unity has changed its leadership and knows it has a battle to regain trust after the Runtime Fee disaster, but the speed of Godot’s growth and the warmth with which it has been embraced by the indie community means that quest to regain trust now has a particular urgency.