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.

GRIM FANDANGO

Legendary games need no introduction. Especially when a point-and-click adventure's mythic status gets cemented by the fact that it can't be played on new machines. Whatever impression the new generations are left with after playing the remastered version, they will recognise the unique look and feel to this game.GRIM FANDANGO is one of those games that  managed to concoct the wacky narrative with folk traditions, modern life, visual art, 50s movies satire, film noir cliches, observations on the absurdities of both life and death and cultural diversity. It gets artistic, but not obtrusively so, and only after you've stopped playing and gone daydreaming about it do you realise how visually impressive it is. You'll praise the game for its characters, screenplay, exceptional dialogues (even when some of their elements border on cliched). A seller of travel arrangements for the passing over of his clients into the netherworld tries to deliver with a client after having performed poorly with his previous clients. The story unravels into one of the best ones ever seen in a video game.

Remastered version is as great, looks a tad more polished and has its phenopmenal jazzy OST re-recorded for the occasion.

FOUR LAST THINGS

It was a brilliant idea to use Dutch and Flemmish Renaissance paintings and build an entire game around them. The Dutch were the first to base their art on the more  intimate and non-religious everyday subjects and non-generic landscapes, and  it was extremely clever that the author of the game used those to tell a tale of transgressions and absolution.
You're an everyday kinda bloke of poor physiognomy (which, by default, dooms one to a life of moral and spiritual decay) who comes to St.Paul's church to atone for his sins. But since the said sins were not committed in the parish this church is part of  he can't be pardoned by the cardinal, unless of course he committs sins in the parish  under their jurisdiction. So you set out on a journey of committing all of the seven deadly sins until you're worthy of consideration of a pardon.
This point-and-click adventure plays well, looks beautiful despite the awkward , almost Monty Pythonesque walk of the protagonist, and  the quest for each sin is  accompanied by carefully chosen paintings.Another aspect of the game I truly admired is the use of the contemporary vernacular and not the corresponding  Early Modern English variant. The end will find a believer a tad disappointed, but otherwise you'd be in for a real treat playing the game. It is a bit short, but the 2 hours you'll spend solving puzzles and communicating in the style of the best point-and-click classics of the 90s  is well worth your time.
There's also something else I noticed about the game -some paintings and music don't belong in the Renaissance. Putting Satie and other post-Renaissance/post-Baroque music alongside Bach, Dowland and others can't be a coincidence, there must be something the author wanted to say with this. Is the sin of lust you commit with Goya's Maja Desnuda t intended to be otherworldly and ahead of its time, does it transcend time and sin ?

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!

BOTANICULA

Czech animation schools would always come up with the most mysterious ,wonderful ,intriguing and heavy animated  features of all the European studios. Europe's animation world is simply blessed by having amazing animators from this country. So to have such an extraordinary visual experience in a form of a game  coming from this country comes as no surprise. The visual aspect of the game is so otherworldly, refined, honest and delicate that you see life in all its glory unravel in front of you. A world worth living for and dying for, a world that  awakens your inner-child and makes you grateful for having somebody else out there realizing how precious life is.

The visual component and the exquisite audio accompaniment do overshadow everything else in this game, even though the playability is high. I heard a number of  people speaking about its low replay value, but I do think they're not being fair. After all, what other click-and-point adventure has ever had high replay value? It's about immersing yourself into this wonderful world, leading 5 botanical creatures trying to keep the last uninfected seed of their tree from parasites taking over their home, solving puzzles that  might border on  hard or illogical (just like life itself), collecting items and chosing what step to take at every point. Being directly involved in a changing world we are usually either unaware or oblivious of  makes us wonder what kind of  contribution we're making living inside those as oblivious giants. It's the same horrible feeling that  made me cringe at seeing other kids trying to destroy an ant colony or stretching rainworms.

We need titles like this , titles that spark  the immagination and deliver truths.

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?"

THE NEVERHOOD CHRONICLES

This game was  and still is a personal favourite from the 90s.Yes, it's a simple point-and-click adventure game with a linear structure and simple navigation throughout the imagined claymatian world. But what a magnificent world it is! Wooden and clay sets with abstract, yet easily identifiable architecture  of a highly artistic Demiurge aided by Terry Scott Taylor's  incredible genre-bending soundtrack invite you into a uniquely odd world. So many things I like about video games are featured here: superb stop-motion animation of the characters, awkward posture and coordination of Klaymen along with somewhat tedious walks he takes throughout the game, slapstick humour,silly full motion video cut scenes, puzzles that range from simple to abstract to silly, absense of inventory screens (I always disliked them in games) etc.
A cult classic that will be enjoyed even a hundred years from now!