THE NOVELIST

Never have I found a game that explored family struggles so vehemently as much as THE NOVELIST did , nor a story-based game I bought into more whole-heartedly. A struggling novelist fighting his writer's block that's taken a toll on his family comes to a summer house with them in hopes of getting back in the zone creatively while hoping to become a better dad and husband. You play an ectoplasmic entity monitoring their interactions, entering their thoughts and memories and trying to make them reconnect and solve their problems by inobtrusive interventions.

The minimal settings, the sollid, mellow background music, the repetitive movements and locations all allow the player to focus more on the story and feel its grasp more intimately, as it's honest and relatable (despite the fact that some dialogues and thoughts may seem forced at times)

Each time I played it I experienced a different sequence of events, and I didn't find the rndings as limiting and abruptly stupid in comparison to the subtleness of the story that unfolded as other people seemed to have had. Are we really in control of our own decisions, even with benevolent voyeur ghosts by our side?

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!

NO MAN'S SKY

I admit I'm easily impressed with half-decent graphics and decent gaming mechanics and by the "cute factor" that confirms my being a casual gamer. Then there's my distaste of any first-person game involving shooting. And I understand that as such I don't fully appreciate the furore with which gamers who play AAA titles lashed out at the studio behind the game for all the hype and clever marketing prior to its release.I feel their pain, I really do.

But this is every spacefaring child's greatest dream- becoming an explorer exploring a whole universe of worlds . So a lot of them  repeat, and a lot of them are boring, and a lot of stations should be brimming with life since they provide services that require considerable resources etc. But awaken your inner trekker and boldly go where no one has gone before for the simple pleasure of going. I would have made it even more abstract, resembling elaborate Universe simulations appearing nowadays (Illustris?) with even more modest gaming elements, but this is a remarkable feat in itself.

You have to applaud the nature of procedural/chance build-up of worlds, their flaura, fauna, surface, lifeforms, mechanical representations of their respective cultures etc. This aspect alone is sufficient enough to sparkle our imagination like very few gaming titles have so far. Hell, even the soundtrack (not talking about the 65daysofstatic's  ogt album) is procedurally generated by a uniquely designed system -how cool is that?

 No Man's Sky is based on four pillars: survival, combat, trading and exploration, and the three of four pillars may have crumbled. But the pillar of exploration will stand tall as a bold pioneering project for as long as there's gaming.

YEAR WALK

Year Walk was a divination folk ritual in Sweden performed at Christmas or New Year's.The year walker locks himself in a dark room for a day with no food or drink or company. At midnight he circles the local parish church 3 times and blows through its keyhole. He temporarily turns non-Christian and is challeged by supernatural beings and if he passes the test he's given  fragments of what is to come in the year to follow.

The game was originally designed  as a movie script and that is the most unique aspect that sets it apart from other games in the genre. The authors retained the stillness of  native landscapes and stripped the game of everything that would lead us away from storytelling that uncovers beauty in death and terror; their timing and suspense building is impeccable  and we get the impression that we are slowly unravelling a mystery filmscript more than playing  a game.

Daniel  the protagonist is asked by his lover Stina not to go through the ritual . He also finds out she is about to be engaged to somebody else and decides to year walk despite her plea. We're given no insight into what goes on  and nothing prepares us for encounters with mythical creatures of nordic folklore and the meaning of puzzles they present us with. The sounds and music are fantastic , the atmosphere is unreal, and the horror draws upon the collective unconscious where macrocosm meets individual madness...all of this is partially explained in the end when we see the words "it is too late" and Stina lying dead in the field. The journal post-game component of a  modern-day man named Theodore explains what happened in detail.

It is as if we are magically drawn to the darkness behind the ritual that  erroneously justifies the coming of Daniel's madness. The neo-paganism is strong with this one, but I also see the intensity found in early modernist literature of Sweden and Norway (Lagerkvist) present here.

I hate horror and suspense stories, but this game will keep you glued to your seat until its very end whether you like such stories or not.

Another piece of art in the gaming world.

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?"