THE NIGHT JOURNEY

The Night Journey is an art installation as much as it is a computer game and, being a decade-long art project , it managed to prove art belonged in gaming.Your choices and actions inform on the hazy landscape, changing it all the way to an ineviable darkness of the nightfall.Viola's responsive installation/world /archive is combined with timeless poetic passages by famous mystics. Our deeply emotional reaction to this game and its artistic stimuli transcends the notion of a gaming experience. But then again, why shouldn't our gaming experience include our observations on and experience of art and art exhibitions?

KIDS

The second interactive animation by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach presents another compelling meditation on the human condition. This time it has to do with crowd mentality and the clean slate mind of a child. Growth implies conformity and willing to fall over the precipice if others do so. Even if they reject to follow others they will eventually be misled by somebody else. The dark chasms kids fall into is dark and milky and resembles intestines, and digestion is painful. It is invigorating to participate in a massive flapping of hands or singing in unison or swimming through dark waters of life in company, but do our attempts at establishing connection with others really bring us any closer to understanding our own life? Or could this game be about something else entirely?

PLUG AND PLAY

I thought it was time people used actual video art/ video works in gaming. Sure, Plug and Play is confusing and outright bizarre as a video game , but it works perfectly well as a piece of art sending a powerful message to the viewer,the player. A nightmarish meditation on connectivity and isolation where people and circumstances are sockets,plugs,coins and fingers shows us a life full of half-uttered sentences,emotional and verbal outbursts,the hurting within and outside groups, and all of that is exceptionally depicted with brilliant , hand-written animations and the sparse sound and musical accompaniment highlights.This interactive animation has come closest to a true game of art I've ever seen.

PASSAGE

A genuine piece of art, this game excells at unravelling the entirety of human existence and eliciting a strong emotional response in a player in just 5 minutes of its running time. During these 5 minutes the main character gets to live his life, find his significant other (or not) , attend to his livelihood (or not), witness the passage of time and die. Different lifestyle choices yield different results  and affect aging, physical and emotional decay, though naturally, the end result is uniform and unavoidable. Looking at its rudimentary graphics and controls one has to acknowledge the skill in the game designer  to make a bold statement from such a finite gaming experience. It's free to download, it questions the preconceptions in gaming and leaves you thinking. It's among the first 14 games  included in MoMA's permanent collection for its artistic statement. Try it.

EVERY DAY THE SAME DREAM

Ever since I've read Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" every game that resembled a life parable and had metaphysical and philosophical considerations at its core turned into a unique gaming experience for me, and each title seemed to approach it from a different angle.The name, the simplistic, but stylized and highly effective black-and-white graphics with sparse coloured details and depressing instrumental indie/lofi pop, sounds and noises  pretty much reveal  what you'll be doing throughout - fighting or giving in to your sense of alienation and your 9-to-5 job.With different choices come different outcomes of a single boring work day that you just can't seem to wake up from. Each attempt  seems to slightly affect the next iteration of your "groundhog day".The 5 persons you interact with bring you closer to finishing the game and to your final release.

Whether  you consider this title to be a game or not, or whether it qualifies as a game by modern gaming standards, EVERY DAY THE SAME DREAM is a unique point in gaming history  and another great effort on the part of indie game makers to make real adult games that open new horizons for games, indie and otherwise.

EVERYTHING

When I was 9 I thought it would be great if someone made a game in which you could be a platform, a sprite, a boulder,a trap, a contraption, the hero's arch enemy or anything else but the hero. Someone beat me to it (Tim Winsky http://indianastone.twinskygames.com/ ) and the result is wonderful. I recently realised , though, that there are people who went way further than what I thought leaving the confines of your average video game concept could mean. What if you could play everything within a game and be a microorganism, a plant, an animal, a boulder, an island, a natural phenomenon, a celestial body, a galaxy and so forth, all within a single game? Add some metaphysical humour and unease ,beautiful music and passages of recorded narration by the inimitable Alan Watts and you got EVERYTHING the game. It rewards reflection and patience, and as you ascend or descend by experiencing the interconnectedness of forms in the pool of  universal consciousness you realise you can listen to its thoughts, receive and sing its vibrations, and become a vibrating sequence yourself. Entering and leaving forms (even those such as oil rigs, boots and snowmen) as you gain knowledge through experience of being leaves you asking "What am I supposed to want here?" (Alan Watts again). Playing it over and over again, I suppose.

This is the best game I've ever played. Period. Nothing comes even close.

HUMAN: FALL FLAT

Now this is what  I call gaming entertainment! This may easily be the most successful attempt at putting one's dream into a computer game.No gory details, no beheaded beasts, no visits from spectres or ancestors, just your own inadequacies, the fear of failure , loneliness and curiosity that you get punished for on a daily basis.The landscape is simplistic and stripped of  any detail that could be inconsequential  to such a dream.  Bob is naked, wearing only a protective helmet , and fears heights. Accordingly, he solves puzzles by moving different objects around and pushing buttons while walking across floating islands so that he could address his fear by jumping off the platform and falling flat onto another level.To spice the feeling of inability to run things and limited physical movement while we dream , Bob is innately clumsy. In order to get Bob through all the 12 levels you have to master the awkward mechamics (OCTODAD  comes to mind)  that's integral to the game's value and charm. Failure is awarded by laughter in the proud tradition of slapstick humour and  narration borders on misanthropy. This is the kind of dream you can easily see yourself waking up from in a pearl of sweat.
And if you want to introduce your friend to this nightmarish world, there's always the split-screen cooperative multiplayer mode. Enjoy!

THE STANLEY PARABLE

Stanley is just another nine-to-fiver living a stale life of crunching numbers and doing meaningless repetitive tasks at work, a man with no family to come home to . The sudden disappearance of all his colleagues leaves him alone in the building with just an eloquent inner voice at his side telling him what he should do. The voice is annoying, controlling , laughing at his condition, incredibly discerning and intelligent. The game is all about starting again and again, finding alternate ways to come to a meaningless end for Stanley, or sticking to a silly routine like playing the baby game and pushing a single red button for 4 hours without a single pause  until the game recognises you as a God and you come out victorious. How can you not like that? The game puts our tenacity, sense of identity, belonging, orientation, purpose, irony, obeying or disobeying our inner voice to a serious test, with an illusion of choice being the main ingredient of the game. THE STANLEY PARABLE laughs at life, games, the gaming industry, our use of time, rendering them all obsolete.

"Onward Stanley...to destiny. Wouldn't whenever we end up be our destination, even if there's no story there? Or to put it another way- is the story of no destination still a story?"