14th International Games and Playful Media Festival from May 14-17, 2025.
A MAZE. / Berlin 2025 – 14th International Games and Playful Media Festival: from May 14 to 17 at silent green Kulturquartier and Panke Culture, Berlin Wedding. The A MAZE. Award Show took place on Friday, May 16, at silent green and online. Presented by Tim Rogers, with the international jury and a music performance by Dogshow. And these are the winners…
DIGITAL MOMENT AWARD
Some Goodbyes We Made
Safe Flight Games, Joey Schutz
It’s truly magical when you play a game that not only engages you, but also moves you.
This year’s winner is a heartbreaking and heartwarming example of that. It takes you on an emotional journey, where you get to experience feelings that are deeply personal and yet relatable.
Through a series of whimsical memories, carefully crafted minigames and a personal narrative voice, you are invited to reflect on the many forms of goodbyes and to consider what it actually means to part ways with someone or something you love.
Laudation by Tanja Tankred
HUMAN HUMAN MACHINE AWARD
Synch.Live
Hillary Leone and the Synch.Live Team
The HUMAN HUMAN MACHINE AWARD celebrates a game that uses digital tools not to distance us, but to bring us back to each other. Bring us back to our instincts, our awareness, and our humanness. This year’s winning project does something quite rare: it makes technology feel ancient. The award goes to a game that reminds us what it means to be human, even if surrounded by light, tech, and code. It also asks something really simple but, somehow, deeply complex of its players: to connect and to become a single, moving organism.
It’s part performance, part experiment, part play. It’s really satisfying to see a digital project that resists spectacle and instead centers human connection. It’s a little chaotic, deeply clever, and somehow feels both primal and futuristic at the same time. This is work that doesn’t just include digital elements, but it transforms how we use them to relate to each other.
Laudation by Aluta Null
LONG FEATURE AWARD
THRESHOLD
Julien Eveillé
The long feature award is for complex games that immerse players in rich worlds full of detail. This game, while it might have looked smaller at first sight, surprised us again and again as we unraveled its many layers with each choice and playthrough.
It presents a simple routine that has you going around doing all sorts of tasks. But things slowly turn around and present a different face. Everything gains a new meaning, even breathing. And going off the beaten path is equally exciting and unsettling.
After finishing it, we started talking and sharing our experiences, and even then, we kept finding more layers hidden underneath. In our eyes, this seemingly small game now looked huge, dense, and complex.
Laudation by Luis Díaz Peralta aka Ludipe
EXPLORER AWARD
Flora
You enter a space. It is dark. In the centre is a glowing surface on which glittering objects move. To the music they spin around themselves, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.. The world casts its spell over you. And you realise that there are other people in the room and you want to join them. You begin to move and shift objects. You immerse yourself completely in the world.
The interactive installation described here is an outstanding realisation of how the parts of our ecosystem are interconnected. A multitude of metaphors develop in the joint game that relate to the influence of humans on natural processes.
We, the jury, were very impressed by how the players are invited to explore the space, listen to and become part of a larger cycle. We think that in order to develop a response to climate change as a society, we must first understand our own actions. This is done here in a technically and narratively very beautiful, playful and poetic way.
Laudation by Sarah Reimann
AUDIENCE AWARD
Breaking News by Danil Bialo, Tamir Herzberg, Evyatar Cohen was selected by all participants as the winner of the Audience Award out of all exhibited works.
MOST AMAZING AWARD
despelote
Julián Cordero, Sebastián Valbuena, Gabe Cuzzillo and Ian Berman
You walk across the soft grass of a familiar park, through the gentle hum of adult conversations you can’t quite decipher but somehow feel comforting, along the fragile yet warm roads of a hometown that feels like your own. And then it dawns on you. This place you remember is somewhere you’ve never truly been, not once, not even in a dream. As the boundary between the creator’s memories and the player’s own quietly fades, we are reminded of a simple truth that the most personal stories can often be the most universal. In this way, the game becomes a gift, offering a glimpse of what it means for games to be an art of experience, shared not with spectacle but with quiet, heartfelt grace.
Laudation by Somi
WINGS AWARD
Curiosmos
Céline & the Silly Stars
WINGS is very proud to return to A MAZE. and present for the third year in a row the “WINGS Award”. Our mission at WINGS is to offer funding and opportunities to gender-diverse teams, amplifying the incredible work they do in games.
The WINGS Award highlights outstanding games where women and other gender marginalized developers hold key positions. Selected from 5 incredible nominees, this year’s winner will receive the award alongside a 2.000€ prize.
This year’s winner begins with silence.
A slow unfolding. A quiet invitation.
To feel small and powerful at the same time.
A game that hands you the universe. Literally.
A playful, poetic sandbox where you build your own solar system from scratch: sculpting planets, pulling moons into orbit, adjusting gravity, playing with atmospheres, and even sparking life.
It’s the kind of game that makes you feel powerful and small at the same time, like a cosmic engineer with a glue stick.
It was made by a queen that slays. Always has. But since 2022, she hasn’t just slayed solo, she gathered a crew to bring this celestial vision to life.
AND NOW?
Public Play Day, Saturday, May 17th
is for the whole family to explore the amazing alternative and independent games and playful media world of A MAZE. / Berlin. Kids until 12 getting in for free, family passes are available. A MAZE. shows the best of arthouse gaming including alternative controller games, vr experiences, indie games. There are some community talks and game design workshops for everyone interested in game creation. This year there is also a local multiplayer tournament, an analog market and special crafting workshops: nerdy masks and temporary tattoo making. Get your scissors and pencils ready, set, go! program: https://2025.amaze-berlin.de/schedule/
