AI DUNGEON

In the early-to-mid 80s textual adventures were almost as equally popular as arcade titles as they allowed for the imagination spread its wings. The players would easily transport themselves into some imaginary world and didn’t even require the accompanying images that some late 80s titles had. There was one thing that kind of spoiled the fun - you were extremely limited in your variety of answers and actions and syntax and the content that the author of the adventure intended for you. We would nevertheless have a go at writing obscenities or absurd instructions in hope of triggering an intelligent response. Enter AI Dungeon.
This game allows you to make any appropriate or inappropriate comment, action, detour, and anything you type gets immediately recognized and responded to by AI. There are virtually no limits as to what you could write on the screen. As a result, the main story frame, if there be any, can be cut short as many times as you like with as many bizarre things as you like. I sense this game could even be a great creative writing exercise on how many new narrative episodes or subplots to add without completely destroying the main plot.

This is exactly what we;ve always wanted from a textual adventure. A genuine breakthrough.

KNIGHT QUEST

I love it when game makers are brave enough to tackle board games that have existed for centuries and combine them with other gaming genres. Knight Quest is a unique endless runner-chess hybrid. Your knight piece  prances around evading or taking other moving chessboard pieces against an endless chessboard or 45 different levels collecting keys and treasure chests along the way.To make things real, your piece has to wait for its turn to make a move and thus those who like chess but are not particularly good at it would feel as if their skills at playing chess have significantly improved. This game makes people feel good about themselves, it amuses them and has a high replay value. Another instant casual gaming classic.

RUN AN EMPIRE

Pokemon Go was a revelation and paved the way for games to come, but very few games have ventured into this area since. Another game did go even further into getting people out of their homes and arcades for a unique gaming experience - Run an Empire does not only expand on what a strategy game could be, but it also makes the running application meaningful for those who are not diehards needing no external stimuli apart from the Sun and the track or the road..
Using a real map, players go for catching hexagonal tiles , and  running through an area marked by a hex more times than others enable the player to claim the area and build structures ,encampments objects etc. Now, I know lots of people cringe at the very thought of gamification and think games should be games and not means to achieving short-term real-life goals, but I believe Run an Empire  shows us one of the many possible ways of introducing new concepts into the stale world of gaming and dealing with the mundane in real life. At least we can now do away with boring running track routines and stops -we can look at them as checkpoints.
I wish someone else in my area played it, would love to have some competition,

HOMO MACHINA

Not realising this was a game tribute to the work of a certain Fritz Kahn, I played Homo Machina and thought "Wow, somebody made Osmosis Jones into a game with an early 20th century industrial feel, how come nobody thought of that?". The entire game is based on Kahn's illustrations that appeared in his "Das Leben Des Menchen" book series almost a hundred years ago. The series and the game transport us to technical and societal advancements of the Weimar Republic. By depicting the processes of a human body as  machines, his intention was to introduce the inside of a  human body in a way that would be more appealing and easy to grasp to a common man. Aided by a group of graphic designers and architects , he would depict ears as cars, sight and speech as a mental movie projector, the human body as an industrial company with a number of departments and facilities with a firm power structure, the internal organs as landscapes where scientist shrunk to microscopic proportios study blood and glandular cells (sounds familiar?). The game is organised around these clunky designs and bygone industries , and  patience and precision with puzzles gets you through Chapters, each dealing with a different bodily function.
Now, people can say the game is too short and lacking more features, and that the original designs were wrong , but I applaud the effort of the game designers in trying to essentially make a gaming tribute to some man's work. I hope this catches on and that somebody made a game tribute to Alan Turing.

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S

You're a night watch monitoring the animatronics via surveillance cameras and trying to keep them from running  out of Freddy's.The animatronics get homicidal at night and your job is solely to look at cameras and avoid contact with them while occasionally securing the doors and putting on  the lights in the halls (not covered by cameras) to your left and right.And all this for a meagre $120 a day.The phone calls from the previous watch include all kinds of scary details and events involving animatronics and it builds beautifully into the scenery your experiencing with cameras buzzing, poor lightning, ominous illbient sounds, radio sounds and your own scatting sounds aimed at mustering courage. Your job is to get through all seven days until you're fired for not doing your job properly.

This game was probably the most played title among my 7-9-year olds pupils. When I asked them what it was about the game they liked so much that still played it after 3 years or so they said things like this: " Pizza places scare me...old music playing is scary, but camera sounds make me calm...you can hear yourself think...it's scary and funny...it's cute and scary...there are lots of stories about me...you get to look trough cameras...it's easy to play and bears are real". So everything that a good survival horror has minus the need to cater to older audiences, aiming at the very essence of what was scary about our childhood- loneliness and darkness. Very few games went there and did it the right way.

LEVEL UP LIFE

A number of applications attempting to gamify a certain area of life have appeared in the past decade or so, mostly in areas like fitness or work or organisation , and mostly in isolation. I've always admired the fact that applications came dangerously close to being games at times, while still managing to persuade the "serious" users they were running an application en route to self-betterment,. But what if we actually wanted to gamify any and all aspects or tasks of everyday life and  have them presented as itemised characteristics? The textual adventure, the role-play ,the pixelated graphic design of LEVEL UP LIFE all appeal to the intended age group - a struggling 30-to-40 year olds , slackers by design. And its not just about the cute exterior- the game will help you with your goals just as any self-help book or time management course would. You choose 13 areas building your culture, talent, power talent, charisma through daily, weekly, monthly or unique tasks.

If you appreciate blurring the lines between an application and a game  LEVEL UP LIFE might just  be the right title for you.

ANOTHER LOST PHONE : LAURA'S STORY

Feeling ill at ease with passages of deeply personal reminiscences found in  artists' autobiographies?Feeling as if you're encroaching upon their privacy while catering to their self-gratification? Then this game is not for you.

We've all grown into wonderful underachievers turning to other people's woes and failures for comfort and we can't help it. If you found somebody's phone in the street, would you explore it  before returning it? Would you bother looking for wifi passwords, data, e-mail and social media content, calenders and business communication to find out what happened to the owner of the phone? By exploring and testing Laura's phone to pick up the pieces  you test yourself on how far you can go.

Looking at another person's smartphone through your own phone adds to the creepy Big Brother feel to the game and the concept itself is original, simple and elegant. marinating in juices of an intriguing story that unravels in a surprising way.

SHADOWMATIC

Another great game the greatness of which lies in its simplicity. You solve puzzles by manipulating shadows to get a recognizable shape.. Spatially manipulating  oddly-shaped object (or a group of objects) rotating at the centre of the screen being  lit by a sigle light source  proves to be much more of a challenge hat one would initially think.The game appeals to our childhood fascination with shadows and playing shadow masters and puppeteers and is highly recommended to both kids and adults. Loads of fun for your ios/android!