CULTIST SIMULATOR

Somebody said the best way to earn a million was to start a cult, and this game allows you to do exactly that. Being your sole source of income, the cult must thrive and grow in numbers and strength which is somewhat easier in an era where even high intellectuals would gather around ludicrous clubs such as "The Ghost Club". People are more conducive to the acceptance of such ideas, but the cult leader in you has to act, interact, learn, build a following and be dedicated, passionate and sane throughout all business operations. Time and resources management paired with experimentation is what the game is about. The devil's playground is a card table so everything you do is a card game simulation that requires some wit on your part. Many wrote off this game as a fad , but the way it is devised and structured make CULTIST SIMULATOR another unique page in gaming history.And I find it disorientingly fun.

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.

Art Style: ORBIENT / ORBITAL

I found out about this game only well after I played Everything for the first time, and though it has a much narrower focus  it must have been a huge influence on it. Orbient / Orbital is a brilliant puzzle /life simulation /God simulation  that sucks you into its world straightaway. Controlling (or being) a white star with its solar system consuming or making other stars and planets into their satellites for the sake of self-preservation while orbiting red stars to be able to travel  and using your gravitational and anti-gravitational pull to attract or repel celestial bodies etc is made super entertaining and playable here. The visual identity of the game is excellent - you can easily appreciate its  minimalist, elegant design and it doesn't stand in the way of your playing sessions. The controls are easy to master and the music progresses and becomes more complex as your sustem enlarges.

Misdirection or not, this game and the entire Art Style series is another great example of how big gaming companies can still  introduce novelties in gaming. A true work of art, period.

LEVEL UP LIFE

A number of applications attempting to gamify a certain area of life have appeared in the past decade or so, mostly in areas like fitness or work or organisation , and mostly in isolation. I've always admired the fact that applications came dangerously close to being games at times, while still managing to persuade the "serious" users they were running an application en route to self-betterment,. But what if we actually wanted to gamify any and all aspects or tasks of everyday life and  have them presented as itemised characteristics? The textual adventure, the role-play ,the pixelated graphic design of LEVEL UP LIFE all appeal to the intended age group - a struggling 30-to-40 year olds , slackers by design. And its not just about the cute exterior- the game will help you with your goals just as any self-help book or time management course would. You choose 13 areas building your culture, talent, power talent, charisma through daily, weekly, monthly or unique tasks.

If you appreciate blurring the lines between an application and a game  LEVEL UP LIFE might just  be the right title for you.

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.

FLOW

It's a game about a microscopic being going about its daily business in a water-like microworld, eating other microscopic organisms or using them to cross to other planes, growing and evolving and becoming more complex as it goes further into the deep, arriving at a black mass where its journey ends. Simple and cute, I know. But the sensation you're left with way surpasses the game's premise, same as with JOURNEY - it's about the trip itself more so than anything else, but unlike Journey where I traversed sandy expanses with ruins left behind long-gone civilization and felt the journey  reflected a uniquely human existence at its core, Flow  finds you in a primordial soup where you're every living being that ever lived rising from and giving itself to the cycles of matter. It's about  womb, water, blood, fear of Microcosm and Macrocosm intertwined. You can't die in this game. Everything's in flow.

ALTER EGO

The oldest bildungsroman in gaming I can think of was a welcome relief from genre's dominant fantasy subject matter during the 80s. ALTER EGO was  made by a psychology professor and sometimes the playing resembles answering an extensive questionnaire about your life and its travails while living a part you're assigned. On the other hand, introspection isn't bad.  You walk through  life replete with choices you make as a male or female (though including other genders would have been great) of many dispositions and a number of moods. You can give truthful answers or not, be benevolent or malevolent, and each answer determines the way your afterlife plays out. Sets of questions are grouped under icons on the screen that cover an area of life -emotional, social, defining moments and rights of passage, intellectual life and the accruement of knowledge etc and there are thousands upon thousands of questions appearing randomly. Your aim is to develop into a functional human being without dying in the process. Deliberately making wrong decisions  will also enable you  to have a differennt kind of fun and see how you can end your life in the game - and again, there are dozens of ways to do it.
The replay value and the fact that Alter Ego was one of the very few games in my c64 collection  with a "save game" option made playing this game a truly unique experienc. It could have done with some music and maybe some funny fx to spice it up, but  nevetheless it's ace.

911 OPERATOR

Simple ideas always win and so do interesting concepts. It was about time somebody made a 911 operator simulation. Not that anybody dreamt of being a 911 operator in a video game, but since it's here, we can say the experience comes as close to the real thing as possible... or so I'm told by an acquaintance of mine who works in the field and has played the game. You receive emergency service calls and have fire departments, police and paramedic teams you can call and dispatch. You make on-the-spot decisions on the level of urgency of received calls that range from pranks to cat problems to math homework problems to bomb threats to any type of known hazardous situations in this day and age. After downloading a map of almost any major city online, the simplified but excellent graphics intensifies the whole experience, and the fact that there are upgrades and a career mode only adds to the replay value of the title. If they only made more content  this would be the most brilliant simulation games ever made. I hope they make such upgrade one day as the game itself is well worth it.

YOUTUBERS LIFE

Yes, art should imitate life. And yes, why not transpose modern-day experiences into a simulation? This game is about all the little facets of becoming a Youtube professional. You progress from creating a Youtube alter-ego and chosing your preferred type of content and your humble beginnings of a Youtube enthusiast sharing your flat and your computer time with your roommates all the way up to having assistants and making your content in a rented mansion.You take baby steps and take care of all the little details , including nutrition, energy level, finances, deadlines, comments, followers, buying equipment and enhancing video quality of your videos. All the intricate details make this title anything but a lifeless, generic simulation.
Whether this game should be considered a breeding ground for the aspiring Youtubers out there, or whether it helps your "online" presence is unclear, but  participating in a simulacrum of a simulacra must be rewarding  and strangely appealing.

LITTLE COMPUTER PEOPLE

I value this game over any other "God"-simulation or pet simulation as it blends the two concepts before each of them properly appeared in video games (feel free to correct me if there were previous uses of any of the two in video games or electronic games of any knd) . I absolutely adored being a caretaker for the little people who "lived" inside my computer in a wonderful two-storey dwelling.

When a new little person  is generated by the computer  they go about their daily routines and you can initiate contact or they might do it. They won't be coerced into talking to you. They decide whether to talk or play poker or play a piano tune for you or to themselves or otherwise. Using cuss words or hurling sarcasm at them will only get you further from them complying to your requests. A "pretty please" won't help either.This is exactly what makes this game so intriguing- at times I felt as if I was bullying them or encroaching on their privacy. I felt bad. And giving them gifts in forms of records, books. computer games didn't help. Sometimes I would go for days without playing the game, that's how uneasy I was about the whole thing.The only thing I had to do was to leave them food and see to their drinking water  to keep them alive. And so the pretense of little people living inside computers worked - I thought about  my characters starving to death or dying of thirst while I went about my own daily routines.

My late father finally said the disc had to go.

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!

GODUS

True, this is yet another life simulation game, but with a truly unique twist to it! You're God and you can go about it as you please, whether as an angry god or a benevolent one or something in between.You can see a civilization prosper or send them into oblivion if you so please. You manipulate the flora and fauna, sculpt the landscape, manipulate people's breeding, beliefs, life and test their faith. It feels awkward and fulfilling at the same time, playing God-you're omniscient and omnipotent. Or are you really a true god? The use of cards and steady progression of actions you take makes me wonder if god the player be just another god answering to a supreme god in a pantheon of gods. Be as it may, it is still a wonderful opportunity to test your worst and your best human qualities within this game, be them God-like or not.