BATTLEZONE

This game was the first to drop the vector graphic bomb on the gaming world- nothing was the same afterwards. It still looks and plays beautiful and may tickle even a present-day kid's curiosity with just enough sensory data and beauty to try it.And by beauty I mean being able to take any screenshot while playing and use it on a contemporary synthwave/electronica  album coverart before any other design. I definitely see the smooth vector display inspiring the makers of the original Tron movie as well. The game screen is divided to give the illusion of space and  shooting UFOs , tanks and missiles invokes just enough of a wargod in you to be in a state of constant excitement while playing. No wonder it stirred quite a buzz in the day.
Battlezone shouldn't be admired for its historic value but for the very play value that made it a gem among gems.

MAIZE

Though a bit short, this title can easily become another point-and-click classic. In this particular genre, titles become classics  mostly by using humour as their main ingredient. Newer games in the genre that leave some sort of a mark in today's world and age are mostly those exploiting absurdist and  existential humor. And MAIZE has these in copius amounts. We have a teddy bear sidekick with a Russian accent that has no actual value throughout the game and follows you and makes generic and trite comments that we soon grow to love; we have fields of sentient corn and the backstory of a scientific experiment  gone wrong and  awkward first-person movements that make you doubt your identity; the ending annuls your 3-hour efforts to save the new species, and makes you laugh over what you played. Everything else is secondary to the story and the humour - the puzzles are extremely easy to complete and collecting objects is super easy since they're all highlighted.

Sentient corn, people!

THE TALOS PRINCIPLE

The best game ever made in any of the countries that were once collectively known as Yugoslavia!

The game can easily be enjoyed without getting philosophical about androids and volition and laws of robotics and demiurges and the meaning of life and intelligence and communication and the Tower of Babel and be played for the appeal of its puzzles that get increasingly more difficult as the game progresses.The game looks wonderful, plays well and the accompanying music algorithms are spot on.Utmost care is given to all the sets , objects and artefacts. But neglecting the original intention of the creators to perceive of this title as of a philosophical game simply results in dumbing it down. This is one of the most powerful , if not the most powerful philosophical statement in gaming I have seen so far (alongside the unparalleled The Stanley Parable, of course). Making people think about their life and how free in their actions and thoughts they really are as they play the game is the greatest gift  a player can be given.

A game worth every penny.

BEHOLDER

Surveillance State is old news in most of today's world , but the Russians were the first to openly deride it in their art, movies and culture, and so it's only befitting that they be the ones leading the pack when it came to games dealing with this subject.
I loved Papers,Please when it came out , but it was way too broad for my taste. I find  the ominously titled BEHOLDER game approaching the entire thing from a more interested angle. Being a landlord appointed by the State to record activities of all the tenants looking for traces of illegal behaviour you're given a choice- you can either blindfully obey your superiors and  tell on every single person or you can choose to turn a blind eye to what the tenants are doing.You can be friends with some and tell on others.Your finances  depend on your performance, so protecting the tenants might considerably affect your incurred expenses and lead to unsatisfied family needs and to ending your gaming session very early on,  You evesdrop on conversations with guests,peek through keyholes, search the apartments when tenants are away in search for illegal material, rob them of an item or two, or even plant illegal materials in their rooms only to tell on them later on. Anything you do seriously affects everything else. The navigation is simple and effective, and so is the music.
The player is faced with a myriad of moral dilemmas present in this day and age and that's what's most endearing about this title. Great art imitates life.

CLUSTERTRUCK

With so many dear people leaving my country and going elsewhere to work as truckers, I take sinful pride in seeing so many trucks bumped and destroyed in this game. An (ex-)trucker must have been stuck so many time in convoys and terrible traffic jams and have expressed his frustrations to an eager programmer truthfully enough to have these unpleasant experiences turned into a game. It is very common to have people walking atop your truck trying to rob you of your gasoline, tyres or your truck itself while you're trying to get some sleep during nights.

So in this game you may easily be a thug who tries to rob a truck in a convoy when the convoy starts moving. CLUSTERTRUCK is a platform indie game  where the aim is to stay atop moving trucks (moving platforms) long enough to meet the finish line. If you touch the ground, get burnt, or hit by rocks, trees, contraptions etc you die. The pun in the title is thoroughly appropriate, as the game becomes harder with each level making you realise the first few levels were just training ground for the onslaughts to come. You decide whether you run or sprint before jumping, and you can slightly correct your movement while in air.Takes some getting used to, As the levels become wackier and more addictive, you get style points and acquire skills. You can only unlock two skills total at any given time , but once you've amassed all 14 of them you will have a whole lot of features to choose from : slow-falling , taking a double jump,  beaming yourself elsewhere, using climbing hooks, jet packs etc.

Fresh ideas that become unique gaming experiences are not hard to come by at all.

LSD DREAM EMULATOR

When I was a kid I greatly enjoyed game intros and scene demos displaying the graphic capabilities of the C64. They were done with utmost attention to  detail and they were messy and loud at the same time and you would often leave the demo amazed at what was achieved there. The hunger for Amiga and C64 demos never stopped  and it became a noble tradition to this very day. The C64 demos we've seen in the competitions and displays in the last four years far exceeded anything we've seen on these defunct machines so far.

Playing this title back in the 90s I had the feeling that the creators of the game absolutely enjoyed the demos we all did. Based on a dream journal, LSD  is an first-person exploration game where the player navigates a surrealist world. If you bump into a wall, you're transported to another surrounding, and bumping into creatures, people, animals and anything in between will get you introduced to a unique surrealist surrounding. After a 10-minute dream you will "wake up" and be presented with a graph  of your progress and states induced, and when you get back to the game, a new dream may easily be influenced by the previous one. After  experiencing a certain number of dreams you earn the right to "flashbacks" that transport you back to previous dreams you could relive in a number of ways. The experience is  further intensified by IDM contemporaries such as Warp Records' mu-Ziq.

I think this concept should be taken further and be reintroduced into the gaming world with only slight alterations. A player might  enter key words and phrases of a dream they dreamt and provide other sensory data remembered so that the algorithm could generate a chance world the player could traverse.A sort of  No Man's Sky  for the exploration of synapses, sold for the price of your average indie title.