#39. The 76th Annual Legally Distinct Indie Game Death Match Battle Royale - Live!

Welcome, welcome to Indieventure's second-ever episode recorded in-person! Your fabulous trio of hosts recently secluded ourselves once again in a caravan in Yorkshire and this time our resulting nonsense is even more unhinged than last year's "live" episode.

What began life, several months ago, as an idea for a fairly straightforward character-led Vault episode has instead brought us here, to Indieventure's Legally Distinct 77th (you'll notice it changes a few times) Annual Indie Game Death Match Battle Royale!* Surprisingly this originally had very little to do with the fact that we're all quite into The Hunger Games and there was a new book out recently, but as you might guess it does come up.

So, what's the plan? Well, quite simply, we fed 24 characters representing 24 indie games into a Hunger Games simulator and riffed on the results. I won't list all the contestants here but suffice to say if you've ever wanted to see a touching battlefield romance develop between Big Ron and Ábramar, know how Harold Halibut would emotionally reconcile himself with going on a killing spree once the red mist receded, or see if Tim the Terrible Boy will ever finally get what's coming to him, then I'm really glad that we've found an audience for the highly specific shared sense of humour we unleashed the day we recorded this.

The winner has the honour of having their game crowned the best indie game of all time, unless we don't like the outcome, in which case they just get bragging rights.

As a disclaimer, I just want to make it very clear that we're all highly media literate individuals who did actually read/watch and understand the point of The Hunger Games, but we also just love a bit that goes on far too long. If you want to sink to our level and try out this ridiculous concept for yourself – maybe at your next dinner party! – we used the BrantSteele Hunger Games Simulator, which also has a bunch of other franchises pre-programmed as well as letting you write in your own characters.

We may have realised halfway through that we've slightly uncomfortably aligned ourselves with the Capitol in this episode, but you know what, that only makes it even more appropriate that we end like it was any other regular week, ignoring the screams while we talk about our latest batch of hyperfixations. Rachel has been playing Promise Mascot Agency; Rebecca recently had a video game themed weekend seeing the Until Dawn movie (bad) and attending an Animal Crossing: New Horizons event at a Sea Life Centre (good); and Liam has been reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney and Saltwater by Jessica Andrews, the latter of whom turned out to have been in his English class at school! Small world.

* No indie game characters were hurt in the making of this episode. All involvement of indie game characters was overseen by the Indieventure Association for the Ethical Treatment and Enthusiastic Promotion of Indie Game Protagonists (Except for Tim the Terrible Boy)

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can't get enough of us!