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!

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.

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.

PARADROID

Though it was later ported to several systems and its life was prolonged well into the early naughties, this gaming phenomenon is largely associated with the good-ole c64. It is still regarded by many as the greatest c64 exclusive ever  to have graced the screens of our TV sets.

Hostile service robots have "gone mad" and taken over a spaceship killing its entire human crew. Your robot is beamed aboard  with a mission to sweep the ship clean deck by deck, removing the unruly robots and investigating everything before pressing the ship's self-destruct button. Unlike many c64 multidirectional shooters, Paradroid doesn't overdo it on desperately trying to make  the best possible shooting experience for a player ,and  makes up for graphic limitations with suspense and nervous anticipation instead, as other units become visible only after you've entered a room. The in-game puzzle of invading other robots CPUs and busting their circuits is a great complement to the shooter and makes this one of the most intriguing gaming experiences of old. Body snatching and destruction  never had a level of sophisticated presentation that high in a game up to that point. The beeping sounds adding to the nervous anticipation and the cold hollowness of an abandoned ship  and the conscious decision to not include in-game music  further highlight  the masterful presentation and enrich the gaming experience.

Paradroid remains a ground-breaking classic and it's easy to realise its value once you've tried it.

NOBY NOBY BOY

This is an experimental game, a game which stretches your character to fantastic proportions, and in which stretches your our understanding of what a game is or could be. Is the absense of  a clear objective , a discernible goal within a game allowed in games? Can we call such games games?

You control a pink four-legged creature called Boy who's in direct communication with the Sun who sends Boy's regards to the Girl. Wierd pop tunes that verge on being annoying to an unaccustomed ear are wonderfully paired with odd controls and camera views and randomly generated sandboxes that inhabit a unique and odd-looking world the Boy lives in. Boy eats  people and objects and stretches and that's pretty much what he does all throughout the game.

The Girl's directly linked to The Boy, and she stretches whenever somebody playing the game stretches.The randomly generated sandboxes unlock planet by planet to all the players as they collectively play a giant single-player game and help Girl reach another planet in the Solar system, unlocking new sandboxes. The author of the game thought it would take years and years to unlock all the planets  and that the interest in the game would wane without gamers ever unlocking all of them, but it only took 2489 days  for the Girl to connect all the planets in the system and get back to Earth . That's how engaging this game was/is to those who played it.

Is this a game about love and finding your significant other? Is it about loneliness and our voracious appetites? Is it about evil in this world , as some might suggest? The critics view the game as a non-game, as an experiment in form  and to some degree I can relate to that. But shouldn't each new  game challenge us and not be just another eye candy to waste time on? It has interesting gameplay, odd mechanics and it's immature, childish, absurd and fun. You should definitely give it a try.

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!