The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is a celebration of gaming's hidden gems. On March 27th, five games will compete to win the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Every weekday until then, Shacknews will be highlighting a finalist, exploring what makes each game so unique.

This is one of the most humbling experiences I've seen in games. Richard Hofmeier's Cart Life tasks you with running a retail cart--albeit with a lot of personal baggage along the way. Whether you play as Melanie, a recent divorcee that lost her job, or Andrus, an immigrant in search of a new life, you'll have to overcome the struggles of everyday life as you try to scrape on by with your meager earnings.

Cart Life does a great job of conveying the stress of operating a cart, through timed exchanges, having to manually calculate and distribute change, and hilarious typing exercises that distill the banality of cart set-up. But, it's the human aspect that makes Cart Life so special.

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