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.

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.

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.

CUPHEAD

There's been a lot of nitpicking about this game. It's nothing more than a collection of bosses, the Cuphead character lacks character, we've all waited too long for this and it doesn't live up to the hype etc.Forget that.

From an era of animation that produced hundreds of cartoons that are now banned for their social,racial,chauvinist undertones  comes a game celebrating the years of uncertainty and fear dressed in cuteness and duelling with the devil.The distorted world Cuphead's living in is a map, a menu for the voracious and lost,  depicted with faded colours. Characters are monomaniacal and blind to anything around them.The authors have they even toned down  the racial  and chauvinist stereotyping of  some of  Max Fleischer and Tex Avery's cartoons  (Mexicans, East-Europeans, Italians).They softened it down but still retained the characteristic physical features for characters and bosses. The fact that the devil is also entitled to the souls of the bosses you fight with to free your soul of smelling your own flesh roast till there's no tomorrow only goes to show you how thorough the game makers were in outlining the story. Why go there? Why not?An era that had dance marathons  deserves to be presented in the form of a game as it is eerily similar to contemporary experience.There's almost an educational value to this game.

But there is so much more to this than making a threnody for the Roaring 20s and the frightening 30s - it's a fun and highly addictive game  requiring skill and alertness acquired through trial and error, just like the favourties from the 80s and 90s we loved as kids. If nothing else , Cuphead should be praised for all the love, painstaking exploration and creativity put into it.

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.

FLOWER

This game  evokes a powerful set of emotions, not unlike those I felt playing Journey. Albeit another game from the same team and implying the idea of a voyage, and whether perceived as a life's parable or not, it takes the player on a voyage of pure emotion, the one of tracking and observing the fate of a seemingly insignificant thing in nature such as a simple flower petal. Hardcore gamers probably rolled their eyes in horror when they first saw this game, but it takes only a bit of streching to accept it for what it is - a marvellous, pioneering, genre-bending gem. You go from light to dark,  enthropy to order, cityscapes to country landscapes, chaos to creation in joyous motion that gives you a sense of genuine freedom, and all of that is accompanied by music that suits each particular change along the way. No enemies to kill or mame or hurt in any way

A tale of a windmaster dancing with a single petal- who can resist embarking on such a great adventure?

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!

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.

JOURNEY

Probably the best game I've ever seen and played. The mere thought of making a game out of a life parable (imagine Piers Plowman made into a game :) ) and  succeeding in bringing all aspects of a regular human experience into a 2-hour gaming fun is a feat in itself. Everything befalls our beloved ethereal creature we guide through this life's journey: the loneliness and dignity of human experience,longing, growth, companionship. the beauty and mystery of life, the acquisiton of knowledge and experience, facing nature that is closer to Tarkowsky than Von Trier, wearing the ever-growing mark of  a seasoned soul. Our hearts slowly melt with passion and love and at the end of the game , when our character reaches the end of the road and passes on, it is very hard not to shed a tear. I know I did.Never have I felt such warmth in my heart while playing a computer game.

A true masterpiece of gaming if ever there was one.