Blind Drive

I always thought it would be interesting for gaming to put on some sort of physical limitation to the gaming experience so that it might herald in new forms /gaming genres. Like, eliminating one sense from the equation and letting the player's hightened experience and anxiety do the rest. In Blind Drive you get to drive a car along a main road just by using the sense of hearing. As you progress and get accustomed to the fact that you don't see the road ahead , in comes music and other distractions. Strangely enough , the experience doesn't come off as fake- despite simple graphics and limited commands available you feel genuinely entertained. Plus you can always remove the statistics from the screen and make it even more life-like and immersive. Highly recommended!

OK/NORMAL

Finally -a soundtrack to your typical vaporwave album cover !This early 90s-inspired third-person 3d delight is everything that a sinister vaporwave genre might evoke. I do not see OK/NORMAL as a visualisation of a traumatised psyche , but a world your normal, everyday, consumer-self might conjure  while connecting the "wrong" dots. If you seek a unique combo of grievances about your gaming self and games of today in a single title OK/NORMAL might just be what you've been looking for.

FELIX THE REAPER

An elegant, overweight harbinger of death named Felix (what a clever name choice!) hopelessly in love with life and dancing and a certain Betty is instructed by the Ministry of Death to terminate people. Playing a full-blown psychopath with eerily whimsical dance moves cavorting in the shadows of a series of cleverly devised puzzle sets / dance floors while being guided by an instructor voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart? If this isn't a recipe for a classic I don't know what is. People can whine all they want about the unsavoury punchlines or slapstick gags or particular unjust deaths or the basic polygonal graphics or the uninspiring ending scene, it is a one-of-a-kind gaming experience for the open-minded.

WHAT THE GOLF

The fans that prefer their games absurd and funny and packaged in a single bundle of joy should look no more. This is probably the best golf game ever made and it's not necessarily even about golf or sports. It might have to do with sporting life, or making sense of the world in accepting and celebrating all of its absurdities, or the fickleness in us. Cats, houses, poles, office chairs, sofas, TV sets - anything can replace a golf ball. Movement becomes golf. The game makes fun of it, makes fun of us, and makes fun of a number of  indie genres and casual gaming tropes and the gaming world itself.
Another instant must-have classic.

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.

PUSH ME PULL YOU

Been waiting for ages to see this gem come out. I  remember seeing people play the beta version  somewhere on Youtube and thinking how great it was to invent new sports. And while at it,  why not alter players to the point of their physical appearance defining the very game? CatDog finally got their own sport and it works beautifully- it is fun, weird, and the controls are easy to learn but impossible to master as the awkwardness of physical movement  is a substantial part of this game and it's charm.  You keep coming back to it, satiating  your sick desire to  see and  be two human bodies seamed at the waist  claiming the ball and owning  their half of  the playground. With different modes and a possiblility to move both heads with a single controller, or share controls with a friend on a single controller, PUSH ME PULL YOU becomes an even more exciting ride. It  will surely become a timeless co-op family multiplayer  classic that everyone will still love revisiting 20-30 years from now.

HOCUS

A 3d puzzle game based on impossible perspective and objects? Yes, please! Although Monument Valley  pioneered the concept of using impossible perspective in a game, it also sugar-coated it  and made it more about construction and the combination of pieces, the lovely designs and the music phrases that accompany movements across moving platforms, while Hocus focuses on the undilluted experience of enjoying the unsettleing and alluring  objects/drawings in the style of Duchamp, Escher, Penrose and McDonald. It's about consciously observing the geometry of each object while trying to find a way out for your red cube. The design is simple and effective , the controls are basic and levels progress with grace, each offering you the same exhilaration you felt when observing Escher's staircase drawing for the first time.

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.

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.

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?

FAR FROM NOISE

Not the most perfect choice for a New Year's post , but certainly an important moment in gaming history. I was about to write something about this game yesterday when I heard that one of my 16 year-old ESL students took his own life by jumping off a balcony of his family apartment. A great kid who was far superior to me at everything he undertook and  was gracious and kind.

The game starts with all the questions a living human faces - fear, doubt, transience of one's physical existence, reality and fabrication in one's life, one's place in the grand scheme of things, the lack of purpose, the loneliness etc The idea for a game is unique - an old car with a young woman inside is balancing on a cliff overlooking the vast  ocean. Aware of the predicament she got herself in, she tries to make sense of it all and reflect on her own life, first on her own and later in a company of a wise deer.The  author gravitates heavily towards and builds the girl's character around his own philosophical views, namely those of naturalism and transcedentalism. The girl came to a place she used to visit as a kid, and you can almost see the storm that goes through her mind as she reflects on her failures and inadequacies. It takes a deer talking nature and natural phenomena such as rain and lightning and thunder to bring her round to a different understanding of life and Universe.

A high level of interaction is successfully achieved solely by using dialogue and  life story building around the main character which is close to impossible to achieve in  textual adventures. Animations liven up the  pace, every details serves the narrative.The game could do without additional intermezzos of poetry, but unlike those recorded lectures in EVERYTHING they are not that demanding and don't grab your attention that forcefully. The conscious decision to not include voice acting and limit the game to texts and background music and ambience is another brilliant way to keep the emphasis on Nature and its grandeur. The intellectual clash between the deer and the girl is reflected in their different use of language, but the rift seems to be growing smaller as the story unfolds. Or not?

Despite this being a game changing title for me, I feel the author is trying to impose his views on us and grin derisively at the world and I think it would be even more ground-breaking if he developed several different characters adhering to different philosophies the player could choose from. This way we only get to see the author's views as the story unravels and him toying with a young mind who might have had  enough. Free will, yes, but moral responsibility first and foremost.

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.

SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS

What a befitting title for this ingenious piece of gaming software. Whether you consider this to be a proper game or not, the idea behind it is absolutely unique,  no doubt about it. And the gameplay is very much true to life, as the trolling and fighting for and against social justice takes place in virtual space, just  as God intended. Progressivists troll, regressivists troll , trolls troll for the fun of it, and everyone looks exactly the same as everyone else , all in a world where it's ok and not ok to have an opinion on anyone and anything and run people down by use of cars if they disagree with the car owner. In a world where fascism is sold as freedom of speech  and the double standards are employed throughout the globe by big players, it is hard even for a politically-minded individual to keep track of what might be going on in this confusing new world.The aptly used pejorative term stresses this feeling  and gives the player a hint of what to expect from the game itself. The game does what it says on the tin, you engage in outwitting trolls until they go online and another troll takes their place, recreating and reliving "real-life"online experiences that are immediately identifiable. Expecting anything else from this game would mean steering away from its intent and purpose, if there be one.

The question is -why would anyone go through such lengths at recreating unpleasant trials and tribulations that everyone of us has experienced online? Is it meant to make us realize  people can't change and that  trying to prove otherwise is a complete waste of time? Does it make us rethink the agressive posture we sometimes assume when talking to a complete stranger or casual acquaintance we're never likely to meet offline anyway? I guess it's about preserving your sanity and reputation , online and offline.

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!

SUPERHOT

I really dislike FPS games. I always did . I didn't like the original Doom,Wolfstein, I didn't even like playing Operation Wolf  in the local arcade when I was a kid. The stream of titles that flooded the market didn't  convert me into a fan, no siree (ok, except for maybe Borderlands). But then Superhot appeared and I was immediately attracted to it . Highly appealingly simplistic yet elegant visual representation combined with sparse use of colours gives this game a truly unique look. Plus the mechanics are impressive, limiting as they are- everything moves when you move your mouse , otherwise time passes extremely slow.The levels/missions don't last for days on end  (you can actually have a good night sleep before a daunting day at work), and each one is a bundle of joy and excitement. The look and feel of SUPERHOT make me almost forget I'm playing a game in  which I'm supposed to kill other living beings.

A masterpiece!

A Foreword

Games should be works of art defying the existing genres, current markets and should constantly defy expectations of both the young and the seasoned. I see playability, graphical capabilities and many other aspects that seem superimportant to us nowadays as secondary to games being authentic pieces of multidisciplinary art.
I'm too old to be playing Mortal Combat 56456, Tekken 234826, Super Mario on Steroids Part 293847 or other rehashes flooding the gaming market. Give me a small indie game that has an interesting twist to it and I'm hooked. Nothing against smart big titles either.
Ygorrr