Book Review: Indie G Zine Vol. 2

The follow-up to a successfully Kickstarted first volume, Indie G Zine Vol. 2 is a small softcover artzine celebrating the indie gaming scene. But don’t let its somewhat diminutive size–it’s 7″ x 9.75″, smaller than a normal piece of paper–fool you, because its 118 pages are bursting with a deep and palpable love for indie games, their creators, and the artists they inspire.

A true collaborative effort of the creative arts, Indie G Zine Vol. 2 highlights 50 different indie games. For those who would rather buy the book and be surprised, feel free to scroll down past the list ahead. But for those who want to know in advance, the complete roster of featured games includes:

I don’t own the first Indie G Zine, but from what I can tell the format doesn’t appear to have undergone any changes for this second volume. Each game is allotted a two-page entry featuring a unique work of full-page fanart alongside a two to three paragraph review, preview, description, or general introduction penned by one of the many contributing writers, including game journalists, PR folk, and game creators. Each game’s website and Twitter handle are provided so you know where to look to find out more, while each contributing artist is spotlighted with a quote about the game as well as their website and social media destinations.

Capping things off is a section of about 10 pages at the end featuring brief Q&As with some of the developers. So after you’ve been introduced to all of the games, you get the chance to gain at least a sliver of extra insight about them from the creative minds that brought them into the world for us all to play and enjoy.

The overall presentation of the zine is fantastic. The pages may not be huge, but the paper stock is a solid weight and the print quality is superb, providing a high-quality canvas for the vibrant colors and diversity of art styles of each piece to leap off the page and instantly capture your imagination. Something about the cover, a sort of collage of character heads from the highlighted games, just makes me smile and want to see how many of them I can recognize and name.

On the negative side, the book has an alarming number of grammatical and formatting errors, as if the whole thing was hurriedly proofread. None of the errors are too serious, mostly just small things like some paragraphs missing line breaks between them, a rare instance of two words running into each other without a space separating them, incorrect usage of common words like its/it’s, their/there, and your/you’re, or a word with a blank space where a character should be, like the printer glitched and missed a letter.

If you’re at all an admirer of indie gaming, reading through this book and taking in all of the wonderful artwork will in some magical way make you feel like you are a closer part of the passionate community of creative talent that makes indie games so special. While the first volume continues to be sold out, Indie G Zine Vol. 2 is currently still available in its first edition. I suggest you snatch up a copy right quick, before it’s too late.

Buy From: Indie G Zine Vol. 2 is available from Fangamer for $22.

Disclosure: A copy of Indie G Zine Vol. 2 was purchased by VGBlogger.com for review purposes.