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.

DEUS EX MACHINA

Speaking of brave games that defy categorization, this title from the 1984 shows the programmer's innovative mind. In order to create a unique multisensory, multimedia experience on an 8bit computer, Mel Croucher realised he needed a different approach, Abandoning the (cid) chip sounds altogether for this game, he introduced an accompanying cassette the player runs synchonous with the action on the computer screen. When I was a kid, one of my friends taped this game for me and I played it on the c64 , but without the accompanying cassette for my audio deck the resulting experience was lacking to say the least. Years later I finally got a hold of the audio recording and played it as it was intended. Yes, it is confusing, and self-indulgent , and artsy, but the very idea that the game skillfully combined a collection of audio art, spoken word and forward thinking electropop music from an external audio source with the limiting graphics of 1984 that lend themselves beautifully to the paranoia shown in this game is pure genius. In a series of mini games you try to preserve the life of a being, a failed lab experiment, while acknowledging the absurd ,the comical and creepy, the futilty of action ("creeping, crawling, occasionally floating") and coming to terms with "second childishness and mere oblivion". Ian Dury, John Pertwee and Frankie Howard all made sure their contributions  entertain, confuse the player and leave them with some troubling thoughts. Even if we perceive this game as an interactive video work rather than a game, it is still a brave and singular cornerstone in gaming.

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.

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.

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.

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.