A Closed World

GAMBIT. Play it on the GAMBIT website.

A Closed World is a simple JRPG-style adventure about what life can be like if you are homosexual. That’s quite a rare thing in games, and I could probably reel off an entire column’s worth of words on that alone. In this heavily metaphorical game, you venture into the woods to battle demonic versions of those who’ve caused you trouble in real life: your family, your partner’s family, and your partner him/herself. After each face-off a beautifully drawn cutscene plays out, advancing the story as it does.

I’m not sure how I feel about the way that the theme is dealt with, so I don’t want to talk too much about that. I’ll just say that I’m glad a game has chosen to tackle this subject matter, and that I hope others will go on to tackle it in a more interesting manner. I also hope another, similar game comes along which is A) slightly longer, and B) more invigorating to play. You can get to the end of A Closed World in just a few minutes, even though it feels more epic in scope than a short-form title, and none of the battles are remotely challenging. Perhaps that could work as a statement itself, although I’m not sure it’s the statement the game is trying to make.

Wandering around the woods between fights yields very little of intrigue, which is a shame. But this is still worth playing. After all, it’s a game about what it’s like to be a gay person in a hetero-normative world, and I’m not sure there are any other videogames about that.

Thelemite

Mikolaj Kaminski. Play it on Newgrounds.

In Thelemite you play as a computer programmer, which is why it’s natural that you should end up a mutant superhero who can run at 50 miles per hour, cause explosions with his fists and climb up walls at will. It’s all part of a medical test that went awry, you see – but it’s fortunate that you turned out like this, as an entire band of mutants has been created too, and they’re taking over New York.

It’s a high-speed, side-scrolling beat-em-up that’s basically Prototype in 2D. Impressively, quite aside from the ludicrous story, it manages to create that same sense of immense power without the need for an extra dimension. Well-timed power-up usage leads to even more carnage: it turns out that there are few things more entertaining than smashing through a whole bunch of enemies on one go, even if there’s a bit of – uh – ‘collateral damage’. Awesome music complements the game’s astonishing pace, and later scenes see you battling enemies that are roughly the size of a million planets piled on top of each other. Huge, silly and supremely satisfying.

Sketch Quest

VFS Game Design. Play it on Kongregate.

This is an action-platformer that’s not only rendered in a wonderful hand-drawn manner, but also demands you put your own drawing skills to use. Weapons, equipment and various other game-world items all have to be drawn into Sketch Quest at different intervals, and all can be customised with lots of lovely colours and shapes. I made my sword look like a Christmas tree and painted my hat red, green, blue, black and white.

The game itself is fairly simple, but it’s the presentation that carries it. It looks delightful, for one thing, but it’s all just so endlessly lovely. Your enemies include killer penguins, bees with frowny faces, and rugby players who charge towards you then stumble backwards, dazed and concussed. And apart from the chiming music, almost all the sounds are made by someone’s mouth, and are just brilliant. I played this through with an enormous grin on my face, and I think you will too.

Keys of a Gamespace

Ludologique. Download it from the official website.

Ludologique, a team at the University of Metz, make ‘expressive games’. They believe videogames can be used to tell stories that tap into our minds, and explore the minds of characters. Keys of a Gamespace is an example of what they can do with this idea: a profoundly moving point-and-click adventure game, filled with fresh ideas and creative storytelling methods.

You play as Sebastien, and your partner is not happy. She wants a child, but you’re obsessed with your job as a videogame developer. One night she leaves to spend the night at her parents’ house, encouraging you to use the time to clear your head. So you do. Each of the game’s levels are memories from your past, and as you explore them one by one you begin to piece together the reasons why you’re so afraid of taking the plunge into fatherhood.

It is at times an unsettling game, playing with some fairly hard-hitting subject matter in extremely effective ways. The game’s tone flits from beautiful to disturbing, and asks you to make some big decisions along the way. I just wish the English translation had been a little less clunky, because at times it snapped me out of what was otherwise an incredibly engaging, gorgeously presented and confidently delivered game.

Söldner: Secret Wars

Wings Simulations. Get it from MoFunZone.

For some reason that I will never pretend to understand, several people have asked me why I’ve yet to include Söldner: Secret Wars in my roundup of the week’s best free PC games. I’ll give you a clue: it’s because it’s rubbish.

Absolutely, extraordinarily, impressively rubbish. You could make an argument for saying it’s so awful that it becomes hilarious, but this is a column about the best free games on the internet, so it still feels a little disingenuous. This is a first-person shooter in which enemies get stuck in the floor, can frequently shoot you through walls, and sometimes just disappear altogether, right in front of your eyes. There are vehicles, and foes often use them to spectacularly run each other over. Söldner’s ‘training’ missions haven’t been touched by a development hand in the years since the game came out, so they’re just as ludicrously broken as ever. They’re free now, but remember: once, people were expected to pay for this.

Of course, the reason this has been re-released is because the community has patched up the multiplayer side of things. Which means it’s now ugly, messy but at least vaguely playable if you can manage to get some other people involved. Somehow, it developed a bit of a community, who seemed to like it’s wide open maps and – I don’t know – something. But it’s really nothing to write home about. The utterly abysmal state of the singleplayer, however, very much is.

There. You’ve made me imply that one of the worst first-person shooters in the world is somehow one of the best of a given time period. Are you happy now?

Ruins

Cardboard Computer. Download it from the developer’s website.

Absolutely gorgeous, Ruins is a game in which you play as a dog, chasing rabbits, and engaging surprisingly well-written conversations that branch the game’s story depending on the dialogue options you choose. The game world is starkly painted in muted reds and blues, the eponymous ruins and your canine friend silhouetted over the top.

To begin with it’s abstract, difficult to penetrate. Then you play to the end and an engaging, genuinely moving story begins to surface. But it takes multiple playthroughs to grasp all the subtleties contained within the narrative. Each time you’re likely to find something different, leading to different interpretations of the same sequence of events.

Aside from the brilliant, understated writing, Ruins’ two great achievements are the dog and the camera. The dog trots along with uncanny realism, while the camera swings elegantly around the small game world, always smooth, always pointing you in the direction you need to head in. This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it to be an endlessly fascinating game, and a properly touching tale.

Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero

PLA Studios. Play it on the official website.

In Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero, which is a delightfully ridiculous name, you build your own tracks and then race around them, your character a strange 3D stick-man. The track designer is basic and intuitive, and – most importantly – features things like sharks and dinosaurs.

Sharks and dinosaurs!

So the resulting speedboat ride is wonderfully barmy. It’s all played out in a sort of angular, block-coloured 3D that reminds me a little of Darwinia, so you’ll find yourself dodging dinosaur heads and riding through the mouths of sharks all up close and personal. It does a lot visually with limited resources, and the music is absolutely wonderful.

Plus: sharks and dinosaurs!

Antagonist

Jonathan Whiting. Play it on the dev’s website.

It’s a game about running away from an enormous red spinning-top thing with what appears to be a sight line coming out of it. In this high-speed platformer, you’ll be dodging its movements, making daring leaps for safety, and trying to avoid the numerous spike traps that litter the levels.

Antagonist is a simple but effective game, one that manages to deliver a surprising amount of tension as you try to evade your enormous red foe. The suspense is ramped up further by your character’s movement, which causes you to skid just a little when you try to stop. Mistime your runs and you can find yourself sliding over the edge of a platform to your bloody, spiky death. It’s basic, but it’s fun. I think you’ll like it.

Valve. Get it from Steam. But hurry up!

I never thought for a minute that I would get the chance to write about Portal in this column. But by way of sneaky half-rule-breaking, I do. Because one of the greatest PC games ever made is now free – not forever, but until Tuesday, which is enough days away from the time of writing that I’ve decided it still counts.

You know the score, surely. It’s a first-person puzzle game in which you fire one portal to jump through and another portal to emerge from. In doing so you’ll learn to overcome a variety of increasingly complex environmental obstacles, and Valve’s expert level design means that while you’ll scratch your head on a number of occasions, you’ll always experience the most beautiful moment of realisation when you work out how to apply your existing knowledge to a new scenario.

It’s made even better by a fabulous story, one that starts with refreshing subtlety but builds, slowly, suspensefully, before releasing in a phenomenally climactic final hour. It’s one of the most dazzling, innovative, smart and hilarious computer games ever made, and if you haven’t tried it yet, you now have absolutely no excuses. Grab it before the 20th, and three of the most special gaming hours you’ll have are yours to keep forever.

Digmaan

RWSB Games. Grab it from IndieDB.

Digmaan is a game made in First-Person Shooter Creator, which always sets alarm bells ringing. It’s fixed-resolution, blocky, doesn’t like widescreen formats, and textures occasionally clip and overlap with one another. One time an enemy fell out of the game, and another time one got stuck in a wall. It’s an ugly, broken mess, carried by a story so flimsy it might as well not be there: the aliens are invading, and via some sort of unexplained teleportation and regeneration science you’re taking them on… while your army buddies stand around doing not very much at all.

But my goodness, there’s the basis of something good here. Your extra-terrestrial foes attack from a distance with pinpoint laser accuracy. At first I thought it was just awful game coding. I kind of still think that. But it works. This is a game where it only takes a hits of bullets to fell a foe, just as it only takes them a few shots to down you. It’s extremely rare to be able to get close enough to see an enemy in all its gruesome glory – most of the time, you’re crouching behind cover, sprinting from place to place, popping up every now and then to take a pot-shot in the hope of landing a bullet where it needs to go. You’ll die a lot, but you respawn nearby with the world as you left it, BioShock-style, so it never gets too frustrating (unless you completely run out of ammo, with no way of finding any more, which caused me to reload an earlier save a couple of times).

It’s hideously unpolished, in the way that all FPSC games are. But it’s also got more of a spark, more tension and atmosphere, than any I’ve played before.

Netpack

Royal Paw. Download it from the dev’s website.

It’s an absolutely brilliant idea. Pac-Man, reimagined as a roguelike – a version in which you can take your time, eat one pellet at once, plan your moves, and utilise inventory items on your quest to rid the levels of foes.

And it is a proper quest, too. There’s nothing in-game to explain it, but the readme file comes equipped with a big story, explaining why you’re here. You’re an explorer, searching for the revered Mace of Four Winds. And you’ve finally laid your hands on it, at the bottom of a massive network of caves. The only problem is, having stowed it away in your backpack, you’ve realised it’s haunted. And that’s why you’re in trouble.

Amusingly, there’s even combat, in the most perfunctory sense: you simply move into a ghost to battle it, and the game tells you how much damage you’re doing to one another with each press of an arrow key. This is a really smart reinterpretation of a classic. I think you’ll like it a lot.

Forget-Me-Not

Nyarlu Labs. Download it from the developer’s site.

Another interpretation of Pac-Man, Forget-Me-Not is about as far removed from its slow, careful pace as it’s possible to get. This is Pac-Man reimagined as an even faster-paced arcade game, one in which a whole load of other game mechanics come into play.

Originally released on iOS, Forget-Me-Not sees you shooting your way around procedurally-generated levels that fall apart under the strain of your blasting. As well as collecting pellets, you’ll automatically fire at anything in your way – which sounds simple enough until a bit of the map breaks off, forms a wormhole that loops it back round behind you, and you suddenly realise you’re about to die because you’ve been shooting your own behind for the last ten seconds.

Power-ups can be exploded for extra goodies, and they keep appearing for as long as you’d like them to, so it’s tempting to stick around in a level past the point where you could move onto the next one. Take too long, though, and everything goes dark, a ghost appears, and it’s a race for the finish line before you’re doomed.

I’m almost certain that, in my half-hour or so spent becoming hopelessly addicted to the game, I haven’t seen anything close to every secret it has to offer. You can even have a go in two-player mode. It’s fabulous. Thanks eternally to Phil_Lapineau for pointing it out in last week’s comments thread.

The Night Circus

Failbetter Games. Play it on the official website.

A word of warning from the get-go: this is both a social game that requires you to log in via Twitter or Facebook, and essentially an advert for a soon-to-be-released novel. You’re never forced to share anything on either social network (the game makes a point of mentioning how reasonable it is about this) and the fact that it’s promoting a product didn’t bother me. But I know some people are funny about that.

It’s a card game. But it’s also a sort of choose-your-own-adventure title. At any point you’ll be able to deal yourself between one and six cards, each leading to a different area of the Night Circus and a different strand of the story. Within each situation you’ll be afforded various other decisions which affect your path through this world.

It’s almost entirely text-based, but the writing is strong, the storytelling well-paced and intriguing. You’ll find yourself held back unless you allow yourself to be a slave to the social functionality, but it’s perfectly playable – if a little more sluggish – if you don’t.

Doppler

Luke Todd. Grab it from TIGSource.

As oddly shaped space debris falls to Earth, your job is to collect the rainwater that comes with it. You’re a scientist, you see, and it appears to have fascinating properties. The weather’s gone crazy, and it’s up to your character to work out why.

Of course, this is a fast-paced arcade game, so you’ll not be doing much laboratory analysis. Instead, you’ll be running around the environment, avoiding the falling rocks and collecting the water as it plops down from above, ready to be analysed during the short dialogue sections that arrive between each level.

It isn’t a long game, but it is decent fun, and a title whose level of challenge ramps up nicely as things progress. The forecast’s good for this one.

Hollow

Connor Ullman. Play it on JayIsGames.

In this platformer, filled with short levels of intimidating obstacles, you’ll step into the skeletal shoes of a small chap who’s got stuck in the depths of the Earth. The levels are masked by darkness, only the immediate area around you lit up, and you’ll face a variety of troublesome foes on your way.

Hollow likes to throw some hefty challenges in your direction – insta-kills are frequent, but it’s okay, as you’re never set back very far. The twist is that jumping on your enemies’ heads won’t do a thing to stop them here. Instead, you’ve to use your own head to smash through them at high speeds. This causes a bit of damage to your character, though, so if possible it’s always best to run away.

Its pleasing art style would lead to an atmospheric title were it not for the hideous music. Turn it off instantly before it makes everyone in the room want to kill you.

Victory

Refrag. Play it on the Ludum Dare website.

Victory is, according to its developer, “a simple puzzle/platformer that attempts to discuss the compulsion towards achievement, pressures of modern life and one’s need for escape.” What this translates into is a fast-paced and increasingly action-packed title in which you must reach the top of a platform-filled level before big white walls at each side close in on you and crush you to death.

It starts out simply, but introduces more complexity as it progresses, asking you to create variously sized boxes to hop upon when the jump you need to make is too high. The level design, too, increases in difficulty, and by the end you’ll be button-bashing at extraordinary speeds to escape your environment before the timer runs out. It’s stressful stuff, in the best possible way.

There’s also a story that appears in fragments alongside each level. I didn’t find it to be an especially interesting or profound one, which is fine, as long as you don’t get the impression that the game thinks it is. Which I sort of did. It’s also a bit annoying to try to read the text before starting the level, especially later on when you’re asked to move at breakneck speeds. That could’ve done with a little more thinking through.

Oh, hey, did you notice how the names of the last two games I wrote about spells ‘Hollow Victory’? I quite liked that.

Rizzoli and Isles: The Masterpiece Murders

Pastel Games. Play it on Kongregate.

Also available on iPad, Rizolla and Isles: The Masterpiece Murders is a simple but highly polished detective story that sees you hunting down and analysing evidence relating to the grizzly death of a young lady in her apartment. You’ll be dusting for prints, attending autopsies, speaking to a variety of potential witnesses and, back at HQ, scratching your head as you try to piece all the elements together.

Your only interaction with the game is to click on things, and it would have been nice to see – say – more traditional adventure game dialogue trees, or similar. But it’s immaculately presented, with beautiful hand-painted scenes that put most of the competition to shame, and the atmosphere remains consistent throughout.

It’s not a very long game, and it ends with a strange abruptness that seems at odds with how steadily the tale builds to that point, but you shouldn’t let that put you off: this is a smart and intriguing title that certainly held my attention for its duration.

Lu Pei’s Dream

Biggt. Download it from the developer’s website.

I like how Lu Pei’s Dream, from its opening scene of a girl next to a park bench in the sunshine, steadily descends into madness as the game progresses. When you prick your finger on some sort of spiky fruit, and accidentally start bleeding all over the place, things take a turn toward the surreal as the sky turns red, a washing machine explodes, and fish get caught in a weird suspended animation.

It gets much stranger from there, each new section of what is generally a lightweight puzzle-platformer adding something even less expected into the mix. But it always makes sure not to sacrifice its status as an invigorating game just to make sure it’s weird and wacky.

You should know before starting that left and right move you around, down is your use key, and space is a special key, because the game doesn’t bother telling you. It also only contains text in Chinese – but there’s not a lot of it, so you should be able to muddle your way through regardless of whether you’re familiar with the language.

Sake Express Pro Wrestling

Mooosh. Here’s a direct download link.

Welcome to a veritable explosion of completely bonkers gaming nonsense. Here is a game in which you must swing your mouse around and hammer both buttons to make your character punch a stream of psychotic angry pandas as they race towards you, the whole thing presented like a bizarre Japanese game show designed to tear the very fabric of existence right in front of your eyes.

That might all sound a little over-excited, but the intensity with which Sake Express Pro Wrestling launches colours and sounds and pandas at you is quite something. Controlling the game can be oddly fiddly at times – it’s a top-down view, with you moving a cursor around to change directions, but the speed makes it difficult. And it is completely bizarre. But if you like having your senses assaulted and the word “Japan!” pretty much screamed in your face for a game’s duration, you’ll probably get on with this one.

The Man Who Sold The World

Nick Yonge. Play it on the developer’s website.

Afforded the opportunity to save humanity at the end of the world, but only if you prove that humanity deserves to be saved, what would you point to as reference?

This is a simple but thoughtful platformer about things that define us as human: about love, courage, and spirit.

Inhabiting the bodies of three people back on Earth, you must prove to those in charge of the balance of the universe that the human race is one worth preserving. It’s narrated in strange, enigmatic riddles, and not all of it makes sense immediately, but after you’ve bounded around three distinct environments things become clearer.

Some of the later sections involve navigating complex areas with sometimes difficult controls, which is unfortunate, because elsewhere this is lovely. The developer is currently looking for new ways to expand the concept. I’m intrigued to see what he does next.

Damp Gnat. Play it on Kongregate. (Immediately.)

Hmm. How to tell you about something quite so extraordinary, quite so unexpected, without spoiling the magic…

It’s probably safe to tell you that you’ll be playing a game of crazy golf on what looks like an insane modernised version of an M.C. Escher piece. To start with it’s pretty colours and curves, but look a little closer and you’ll realise that it’s a vast city, drawn isometrically, stretching upwards into the sky. The game begins with a series of meteors slamming into the ground, thus creating your first hole.

It’s safe to tell you that its fixed and uncomfortable viewpoint means you have to really think about the aim of your shots, but it’s absolutely never fiddly or frustrating. It’s a game that requires precision, but the physics are spot-on, even adapting to the specifics of the environment. Each hole offers a new challenge, but the rules remain the same. You never feel cheated out of that birdie, or anything but ecstatic at that hole-in-one.

But what I can’t tell you about are the things that elevate it above being just a fun and pretty diversion. The way what begins as a straight-forward game of crazy golf grows so magestically, so surprisingly, and so consistently. Wonderputt is an endlessly, joyously creative game. It deserves to be universally played and celebrated.

Fear is Vigilance

Randomnine. Play it on the developer’s website.

From the creator of Beacon comes a strange little game about shifting free safety alarms to students in a park. A version of Fear is Vigilance was released a while back, but now it’s been updated, and it’s rather good, in its own quirky way.

Unfortunately, no one’s that interested in your safety alarms, even though they’re free. So, back at home, you hatch a plan. If you go to the park at night and beat people up, the next day people might be more inclined to buy a safety alarm.

And so it goes. Each day you hope people are a little more scared, and a little more inclined to take one of your alarms. What starts with a smile quickly takes a dark twist, but it’s always entertaining, whichever part of the game you’re in.

No Place Like Home

Sachka Sandra Duval, Reynald François. Play it on JayIsGames.

You’re in a bathroom, the sink covered in a thick brown dirt, the mirror smeared. “They’ll tell me when it’s time to have a wash,” says the protagonist.

This is a particularly dark, impressively atmospheric room escape game, one that’s as much about unraveling the mind of a thoroughly disturbed character as it is about finding the key to the front door. Few of the puzzles are especially interesting (although few are irritating, either), but it’s the story that propels you onwards – a story that riffs on The Wizard of Oz in some compellingly strange ways, told via collected notes, your character’s musings, and the environment around you.

It’s immaculately presented in all its grimy detail, taking on an art style that sits uncomfortably between two poles, its soft colours and blurred edges giving way to unsettling scenes of a life gone wrong. This is one of my favourite room escape games in some time. It’s a shame so few are this interesting.

The Book of Living Magic

Jonas Kyratzes. Play it on Kongregate.

This is a surreal, quaint and prosaic point-and-click adventure about a girl from the city of Dull. She’s bored there, feels like she doesn’t fit in, only makes herself happy by going around hitting people over the head. Which can’t be good for her interpersonal relationships. One night she dreams of the Book of Living Magic, which promises to make everything better. So she sets off in search of it.

With a unique art style, some excellent writing that flits between serious and silly with absolute precision, and a focus on conversation and exploration over and above puzzles, The Book of Living Magic has a real sense of identity. What might put people off is the simplicity of interactions, which don’t stretch much beyond clicking on someone to either exchange an inventory item or have a chat about something. But it’s all so lovingly crafted, with such attention to detail, that I found myself not really caring. You might. But it’s well worth a try either way.

The End

Preloaded, Channel 4. Play it on the official website.

The End is many things. It is, ostensibly, a platform game, in which you leap from place to place and collect stars, and eventually a key, which unlocks later levels. You’ve also a trick up your sleeve which allows you to turn shadows into solid platforms to help you on your way.

But it’s also a Facebook-integrated social game. At various points, you’re asked big questions. Questions about life. And your answers end up being plotted on a graph, shared and compared to those of the rest of The End‘s player base.

And it’s also a sort of puzzle-based board game at various points, whereby you battle what amount to boss creatures on a hexagonal grid. It’s a brave combination of many genres, pieced together in a way that’s presumably intentionally confusing. That’s quite a brave decision in a title commissioned by Channel 4.

There are some fairly significant problems, unfortunately, especially early on when tutorial tips prevent you from moving for seconds at a time, even after you’ve read them. And the platforming is competent but unimpressive. The game also isn’t too great at explaining itself sometimes: I like the ambiguity, but there are occasions on which this doesn’t seem to be part of the game design, and is instead a result of some dodgy planning. Still, it’s immaculately presented, atmospheric, and a hugely commendable idea. I just hope people push through its foibles to the point where they can experience it.

Hide

Andrew Shouldice. Download it from Super Friendship Club.

This is a low-definition, 3D horror title with a remarkable ability to be scary without once making you jump. The aim is to find the five locations dotted around the world, without being caught by the horrific thing that stalks you as you do so.

The visuals are blocky, blurry and noisy. And it’s dark. It’s difficult to navigate, and even while sprinting you move stiflingly slowly. Dotted around are balls of light, floating gently to and fro. Stray too close to one and it’s a rather abrupt – and genuinely frightening – game over for you.

Hide‘s biggest triumph is its sound design, with growls and sirens and heavy breathing dominating. It absolutely demands to be played with headphones on, rivaling the likes of Amnesia with its disorienting, haunting audio track. That the developer comments on the download page that he doesn’t usually incorporate sound into his games… it is beyond belief, given how extraordinarily well it’s used here.

Lee-Lee’s Quest

Marcus Richert, [adult swim]. Play it on the [as] website.

Of all the surprisingly decent games appearing on [adult swim] recently, Lee-Lee’s Quest is the one that’s most in line with the brand of surreal, silly comedy that the network became known for. It’s a very straight-forward platformer in which you bounce around and collect stuff, but what’s really important here is the context to it all.

Your girlfriend’s been kidnapped. Only – uh – she hasn’t really. It’s just that your character’s a bit insane. See, she’s not been kidnapped; she just went out with a friend. In fact, she’s not even your girlfriend. Or, indeed, a girl. As your lost companion tells you at the start, “I just happen to have long eyelashes and like pink.”

Regardless, off you trot to find her, slaying anyone who gets in your way. Who, generally, are just other folks trying to get you to calm down. Naturally, before too long a star pickup has stolen all your clothes, and people don’t take very kindly at all to your running around naked.

It’s utterly mental, wonderfully scripted and voiced, and while short it’s always funny. There is an achievement for stealing from an old man. And for killing him. “Oops,” the game says to you, but you can tell it’s secretly grinning.

No Longer Subject To Judicial Review

NiallM. Play it on the website.

A fascinating game, No Longer Subject To Judicial Review nevertheless requires you to suspend disbelief a little. The game is introduced with a letter from the Prime Minister, and the idea is that as the current legal system is failing, court cases are now decided by a public jury in a “virtual courtroom”, with everyone casting their votes based on the evidence presented. Which amounts only to a list of articles from various newspapers. Hmm. What this all adds up to, though, is a game that’s supposed to teach us about the dangers of believing everything we read in the media, and raise questions about how we can ever be one hundred per cent certain about someone’s guilt or innocence.

You read the articles and click on the stuff that you think is relevant. When you’ve gone through it all, you cast your verdict, the evidence stacked up for and against different characters. There are multiple endings, all of them intentionally ambiguous. I’m going to say that I really like this, in an odd sort of way. But perhaps you shouldn’t believe me.

Heroes of Newerth

S2 Games. Sign up on the official website.

Hey, look, Heroes of Newerth is free-to-play now! It’s a tower defense/strategy hybrid along the lines of Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends – and, in fact, designed to maintain that game’s hardcore attitude. Across a multiplayer arena you’ll take control of a selection of ‘heroes’ as you do battle.

It’s tightly designed and often rewarding – if you’re good enough. Last time I checked, I wasn’t. And people weren’t happy about that. HoN’s community, historically, has been extremely unforgiving to those who don’t know what they’re doing. It is not a beginner-friendly game.

Presumably this free version is designed to help mitigate that in some ways. It requires you to purchase tokens to play certain game modes or as certain characters. Pay some money or play for long enough and your account will be upped to ‘verified’, which means you can play games against only others who have verified accounts – hopefully this will mean the new players can learn in peace while the experienced guys get on with their own fun.

(There’s more info on Heroes’ free-to-play version in our big ol’ interview!)

Soul Tax

Jarod Long, Lauren Careccia, Brad Snyder. Play it on Long’s website.

Created as part of a development competition on enormo-web-community Something Awful, Soul Tax sees you taking control of a ghost, possessing people and ultimately killing them. This is because you owe eight years’ worth of ‘soul tax’ – although you didn’t know it. Since you died all that time ago, you’ve been happily plodding along doing meagre little hauntings… but now Death has shown up, and it turns out you were supposed to have been harvesting souls for him since the moment you died.

It’s kept fresh by the new abilities that your victims acquire throughout the game. Which, of course, means more tricks up your sleeve when you possess them. In what is essentially a very simple game, seeing what’s around the corner in this way proves rather satisfying.

Is also knowingly silly, and well-written. I laughed a lot. Maybe I’m just weird, but this is right up my alley.

Alight (In Dreams)

Twofold Secret. Play it on Newgrounds.

In this exploration-platformer, you play through a man’s dream. He’s dreaming that he’s in the house he grew up in, he can smell smoke, and he has wings. He dreams of flying a lot, he says.

Outside, the garden disappears into a void, but platforms lead over to the other side. Naturally, you begin jumping. Your wings don’t really let you fly; you can ride on currents, but generally you’re limited to a triple-jump system that feels both adequate for what you need to do, and restrictive enough to make the game impressively stifling despite its freedom.

As you explore the world, across a series of levels, the man delivers chunks of monologue which go some way to explaining what on Earth all this is about. The story itself isn’t especially surprising, but the writing is always strong and understated, and for a game that’s so low-def it absolutely exudes character. Artful but not pretentious, this is well worth a try.

Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog

Thecatamites. Download it from GameJolt.

The weirdness of this game cannot be understated. For one thing, it’s called Murder Dog IV, but I cannot find any evidence of Murder Dogs I, II or III. And for another, it’s a game in which you play as a dog, defending yourself in court as you stand accused of several gruesome murders.

It’s obvious you’ve done it, the game tells you, so it’s about generating an understanding of how the court works, and manipulating the evidence to go in your favour.

This is achieved in a manner not entirely unlike the Nintendo DS series Ace Attourney. Only more PC and more indie. You have an interface via which you can use, eat or destroy evidence/jurors/witnesses. But eating a witness probably isn’t going to help your case that well.

You’ll also be cross-examining people and generally doing what you’d expect a murderous dog in a courtroom to do, I guess. Supremely funny in its own special way – and there’s a surprisingly in-depth game lurking below the surreal comedy.

Dead Cyborg – Episode 1

Endre Barath. Grab it from the game’s website.

This is an absolutely superb adventure game offered on a donations model. It’s free to download and play, but there’s a ‘donate’ button on the menu screen. I downloaded it for the purposes of this column, and now I’m pretty sure I’m going to donate a reasonable sum, because oh!

It’s a first-person, 3D adventure. Think Penumbra when it didn’t try to be about combat. You awake in a cryogenic tube, apparently with no memory, and it seems something has gone very wrong wherever you are. Everything’s broken and delapidated. Radiation spills everywhere. Robots wander around, guarding corridors. The old amnesia trick might be overdone, but the sense of exploring a scary new world is phenomenal.

This is a game that knows how to ramp up the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the puzzles don’t always match – many are about scanning the scene for objects you may have missed, and the ones that aren’t have a tendency to slip into obscurity now and then. Still, there’s a walkthrough available should you need it. And I’d thoroughly recommend that you have a go at this. The first episode will last you a couple of hours, most likely, and there are two more instalments to come.

Sweatshop

LittleLoud. Play it on the official website.

Once again working on behalf of the UK’s Channel 4, LittleLoud have created Sweatshop, a game designed to teach about the ills of dodgy factories around the world. It’s slightly more up-front about its educational nature than their last game, The Curfew, was – but it still understands that the best way to teach is to make sure the lesson is fun.

You’re an aspiring sweatshop manager and it’s your job to hire, fire and hopefully not injure or kill your increasingly dishevelled workforce. There are many different facets to consider when embarking on production. Kids are cheap labour but slow and inexperienced workers. Other workers have areas of specialism – such as putting together hats or shirts or shoes. You’ve to hire the right people, in the right quantities, to construct your products by the time the raw materials reach the end of the conveyor belt.

It’s an exceptionally funny game at times, but there’s some dark humour involved, and it only gets darker the further you push into the game – and realise that, ultimately, you’ve lapsed into the habit of ruthlessly overworking your employees, and you barely even noticed it happening.

Adventure: All in the Game

Akril. Download it from BigBlueCup.

Oh, this is smart. And just a little bit knowing. It’s the follow-up to a 2008 game I’d never heard of, but totally intend to go back and play now. Baically: an adventure game about adventure games – their past, their present, their problems, and how to fix them.

Games commentary in game form might sound just a little bit worrying, but developer Akril has made it work better than you might expect. That’s thanks in large to a hilarious script that references (either explicitly or implicitly, depending on your adventure game knowledge settings. Yes, I know) a whole host of titles from adventure history.

More than that, the story sees you entering a range of famous adventure titles from years gone by, and the art style and puzzles change up to reflect the title in question. And while the parody is laid on thick, it’s never spiteful. This is, at its heart, a love letter to the adventure genre – an examination of why players fell in love with it, warts and all.

Prime Minister’s Questions

Pixel Politics. Grab it from the dev’s website.

This is a game in which you play as Prime Minister David Cameron.

You can’t make him fall off a cliff or anything, should you be that way inclined. This isn’t that sort of game. You can, however, make him shout “Balls balls balls!” at Ed Balls MP, which makes this game immediately worth playing.

It’s basically Insult Swordfighting from Monkey Island. You’re asked a hard-hitting question and it’s your job to respond to it. You can do so by picking the appropriate reply from a list, or by going for a special attack, attempting to throw your opponent off-course – but you’ve to be wary with these, as they’ve not got an amazing success rate, even though they’re mightily effective when they do work.

This is a silly game, and not especially substantial, but it raises a smile. Try it out.

Line Bender

Increpare. Play it on the website.

The latest title from renowned indie studio Increpare is Line Bender – a small but smart twist on Snake. You know, that game you played on your enormous Nokia brick phone ten or eleven years ago. Yes, it’s still going strong.

The idea here is that the middle section of the play area makes your ‘snake’ skip across to the other half of the screen. It’s a wormhole, if you like – a big, blank space in the centre where nothing can exist.

It’s a minor twist, certainly, but it completely transforms the way you play, as you learn to re-evaluate the game space. The simple presentation could have done to be spruced up a bit, being a straight-forward black-and-white job, but it at least allows you to focus entirely on the game’s smart hook.

MFA Prep Course

John Bruneau, Marek Kapolka. Play it on the LudoGenesis website.

A very strange ‘game’, MFA Prep Course plonks you into the lazy boots of a filthy student. You’re sitting at your desk. You should be doing work. However, because you’re a student, you’re looking for any possible reason to procrastinate.

You can drink coffee. You can spark up a cigarette. You can play with your phone a little. But that’s it. Alongside the blocky, MS Paint-style visuals, it should be a recipe for disaster.

It’s interesting, though, because of the control input. In order to perform these mundane actions, you’ve to control each of your protagonist’s hands separately. One hand’s mouse-controlled, the other keyboard-controlled, and it’s surprisingly taxing to try to manipulate each limb in the manner in which it needs to be manipulated. It’s a game that’s worth playing for its form, then, rather than for the extremely limited content.

Super Meat Boy

Terry Cavanagh. Play it on his website.

This is just a quick one, but it’s well worth playing. Basically, it’s Super Meat Boy remade by VVVVVV developer Terry Cavanagh, vaguely in the visual style of his own brutal platform game.

In a blog post, Cavanagh explains that Team Meat asked him to draw a title screen Easter Egg for last year’s famously challenging indie game – which Tyler Wilde very correctly score 90%. In the end, though, he ended up making his own version – and when he came across it again recently, he decided to throw it online.

There are only a few levels, and they’re relatively easy to navigate. It would be great to see this expanded into a fuller product, though I suspect such a game is unlikely. Nevertheless, the combination of Meat Boy’s platforming style and Cavanagh’s visual touches make for a really interesting few minutes.

Zombotron

Ant Karlov. Play it on Armor Games.

This is a surprisingly adept side-scrolling shooter, which hopefully won’t become lost in the sea of slightly inept side-scrolling shooters that frequently dominate the free PC gaming space. It’s another zombie game, but it stands above the rest for its excellent use of physics and distinctive visual style.

It’s a sort of hand-drawn, cartoon look, but one with some impressive attention to detail and some often beautiful depth to the images. And some neat physics enable you to take out the zombie hordes in new and interesting ways, mainly involving crushing them with boxes, barrels and suchlike.

If there’s a complaint it’ll be about the controls, which are a little wayward and floaty in that way that PS3 hit LittleBigPlanet became famous for. Personally, I don’t think it’s a problem, but you might. Either way, you get to shoot and crush zombies in a very pretty environment. Oh, and you play as a robot, which is awesome.

Where I Go At Night

Pat Kemp. Play it on Pat’s website.

Two players. One human, one wolf, both part of the same body. By day the man searches a town for an elixir. By night the wolf takes over and goes on a rampage.

This is a really interesting take on a two-player game, asking players to work against each other in intervals. The daytime player’s job is to build barricades to stop his nighttime alter-ago from chomping on the lovely townsfolk, while collecting elixirs to hopefully cure his ailment. Then the nighttime player must tear down those barriers and, y’know, aggressively murder people. During the switchover period it’s a frantic fight for those few seconds where both forms are lucid. It’s clever stuff.

While the game looks blocky and basic, it still manages to paint quite a lovely picture. People appear to go about their business in town, and the nighttime scenes take on a lovely glow that transcends the pixelated image. Well worth a look.

Nitrome. Play it on the dev’s website.

Just another Monday morning in the PC Gamer office.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, the thing you’ll absolutely definitely still want to do is go to work and earn some money. After all, as you’ve been told, your continued employment depends on it. So, in Office Trap, that’s exactly what you do on the way to the rescue helicopter that will take you to your safety.

It is, essentially, a high-score-chase game. You begin on the ground floor of your building, working your way up to the top, collecting coins and avoiding the undead as they burst out of biohazard canisters. When you reach the roof, you’re taken away, then start all over again with a new guy.

There’s also a two-player mode, but it isn’t especially interesting, simply dropping another little guy into the mix and not really taking full advantage of him either co-operatively or competitively. Still, it’s the trimmings that I really like about Office Trap. It’s a game with a supremely silly sense of humour, featuring as it does a company called Corp Inc and a character named Godfrey Nectarine.

I am easily amused.

The Haunted Ruins

Gamedesign. Play it on the website.

Bet it doesn't taste as nice as strawberry.

This is the English language version of a Japanese title called Mamono no Iseki, originally released a month or so ago. It’s a low-definition dungeon crawler that neatly combines maze exploration with basic RPG elements to create something surprisingly compulsive.

You’ve been summoned to the eponymous Haunted Ruins to slay some beasties. Doing so, through simple turn-based combat, gives you experience and money. Levelling up is automatic, but you’ll have to find your way back to the town on the surface if you want to purchase new equipment or resources.

In some games that would get boring, but this is a strangely hypnotic game, one that quickly puts you into a trance of click-click-click. The music is also wonderfully mental. Try it.

Soldiers are Dreamers

Peter Willington. Grab it from the Introspect Podcast website.

This is what you'll see for most of the game. But that's cool.

This is probably one for the crowd who loved The Graveyard. Soldiers are Dreamers is over in just a few minutes, and there’s no complex interaction to be found. Standing in a room, you simply click on various items, each of which giving you a new speck of information to add to the story that’s forming in your head.

It was built in Adventure Game Studio as part of a project exploring the topic of war in computer games. Despite its minimalist nature, the little glimpse you get of a family which was most probably torn apart by war is surprisingly touching.

It’s not for everyone, certainly. But if you’re into experimental or short-form games, and don’t mind not being able to shoot the enemy with a bunch of big bad guns, then this is worth checking out.

Don’t Lose Your Head

Drogen. Get it from TIGSource.

This pretty much sums up my performance.

Don’t Lose Your Head is a flabbergastingly unforgiving platformer that requires you to dodge a variety of environmental obstacles with extraordinary reaction times. Fail to do so and you’ll end up dead. Look – the game’s even kind enough to print it in massive letters across the screen each time, just in case you hadn’t realised the gravity of the situation.

Fortunately, the brutal difficulty is mitigated by the fact that you’ve unlimited tries at each level. It means you’re able to take risks in a way that similar platformers don’t allow. This is a game in which repeated death is expected – and that’s all part of the fun.

Whether it’s spikes, falling objects or gloop splattered from a strange, circular monster, there’s always something around the corner to splat you against a hard surface in a satisfyingly stupid way. Good old masochistic entertainment.

World of Warcraft Starter Edition

Blizzard. Sign up on the official website.

Is the sun setting on subscription-based WoW?

Some unknown online game called World of Warcraft is now free-to-play. Well, sort of. What you get for your lack of money is time-unlimited game content up to level 20, although there are fairly tight restrictions set in place to limit the fun you can have.

What you don’t get are the auction house, voice chat, mailbox, player-to-player trading and, quite fundamentally, access to guilds. Gold is capped at 10, and trade skills stop at 100.

But what you do get are the first 20 levels of a truly majestic MMO. There’s a reason it’s so popular: it can be phenomenally deep and intricate, but it’s also accessible, friendly, and ultimately forgiving to new players, even those who’ve never picked up an MMO before. Its version of Azeroth is lighthearted, cartoon-like and welcoming, despite the dark things that go on within it. It’s constantly rewarding, too. If you’re not one of the hundreds of billions of people already playing, the Starter Edition is your chance to see why we think World of Warcraft is still the best MMO ever made.

Proun

Joost van Dongen. Grab it from the official website.

It's not like you really have much choice.

In Proun, named after a series of paintings by Russian artist El Lissitzky, you play as a ball travelling very quickly around the outside of a tubular circuit. But there are obstacles. Obstacles which smash your spherical little face in if you don’t have the reaction times of a star-nosed mole. (It’s the creature with the fastest known reaction times on Earth. I looked it up. Yeah, I’m cool.)

It’s a game in which the slowest speed setting is ‘Fast’. It is fast enough. To unlock the higher settings, you’ll have to win championships on the lower ones, which can be quite a challenge. As there are only three tracks (a fourth unlocked if you choose to pay for the game), it can also be a little tedious – but it’s worth pressing onwards just to experience the extraordinary speeds of the more advanced modes.

It looks great, it features some awesome music, and you can get it for absolutely nothing – although there’s a pay-what-you-like option, and the dev does, of course, encourage you to throw in a donation if find yourself having fun. You will.

Mosquito and Cow

Petum. Play it on Kongregate.

That is not what I thought a cow looked like.

This barmy puzzle game sees you taking on the role of a mosquito. Your mission is to suck the blood out of cows. And that’s it.

Of course, cows are smart. Smart enough not to let a pesky mosquito bother them, anyway. They’ll bat you away with their very strange tails if you get too close, ridding you of any opportunity for attack.

Sometimes it’s as easy as stumbling upon a cow who’s asleep. But most of the time you’ll have to hatch dastardly plans, rigging often quite complex traps for the cows to fall into. A pleasant little earthworm guides you through the game with pictorial hints, while the game’s entire aesthetic sits brilliantly between the twee and the obscure. It’s a surreal, silly game, but that’s why I like it.

Luftrauser

Not Vlambeer. Play it on the Vlambeer website.

Keeping the game this simple was a very smart idea.

Increasingly prolific Dutch indie developer Vlambeer and its side-projects are churning out some really top material at the moment. This time, it’s an air combat game that uses its extreme simplicity to its advantage.

You can fly around, and you can shoot. You’ll be attacked by other planes, which you’ve to destroy, but you can also destroy ships and the like. It’s all played on a screen with just a handful of colours on it, and the same tiny passage of music loops throughout.

It works, however, because every single element of the game is so precise. The controls are flawless, that little musical motif gets your head nodding, and the simplicity of its visual style affords clarity to every inch of the game. It’s small but perfectly formed, basically. I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.

Team Fortress 2

Valve. Get it on Steam.

So they actually did it. After all the rumours and speculation, Valve have announced that Team Fortress 2 will be free forever. If you haven’t bought it and you never buy an in-game item, you still get all the maps, classes and game modes paying customers do. The only limitations are that certain rare items aren’t available to find or craft, and you have less inventory space to store the ones you do find. But spend even £0.29 on the cheapest item, and you’re treated as a paying customer and those few restrictions are removed.

Team Fortress 2 added an in-game item shop late last year, letting players pay real money for the many unlockable weapons and hats for each class. This switch to free-to-play comes with a huge new update adding even more of these items for almost every class. But if you’re new to TF2, you won’t care about that: you’ve got enough to learn without any extra items to think about.

A good way to learn the ropes is to play the King of the Hill mode – choose it when you look for a match, or if you’re using the server browser, look for maps starting with koth_. It’s nice and simple, just one control point to capture, so you can learn how the classes work in a controlled environment. The Medic is a good class to start with, since you’re always appreciated and you can pay attention to what your team mates are doing rather than shooting people. Just keep the healy beam on the big man.

Arma 2: Free

Bohemia Interactive. Get it from the Arma 2 website.

Arma 2 is a hyper-realistic military sim with an extraordinary sense of scale and accuracy, but the single-player campaign that never quite hit the heights provided by multiplayer. Which makes Arma 2: Free an exciting prospect. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Operation Flashpoint, Bohemia have taken the best bits of Arma 2 and lobbed them online for you to grab without paying a penny.

All you miss out on is the campaign, the highest quality graphics settings, and the ability to use mods. What you can do is create your own campaigns in the excellent editor, or play those other people have created. The community is huge and creative, and you can find lots of the campaigns they’ve made over at Armaholic.

It’s a huge and often scary game, simulating real war mercilessly. Group up with some friends, lay some explosives, and lie in a bush together for an hour while you wait for the enemy tank convoy to roll over them.

Skinny

Atmos Games. Play it on Newgrounds.

I haven’t seen a game so quietly beautiful in a long time. This 2D, silhouetted platformer has such an extraordinary sense of style that it’s captivating within seconds – and that’s before the game itself has even had a chance to get going.

When it does, it’s a pleasantly floaty platformer about a robot. You’ll jump, grapple and smash your way around the immaculately designed world as you first embark on a quest to recover your son’s lost marbles, then find yourself involved in something a whole load bigger.

You gain new abilities as you work your way through the game, and the surprisingly strong and heartfelt storytelling keeps Skinny engaging throughout. I haven’t enjoyed a browser game this much in ages. A very strong recommendation.

‘Dillo Hills

fexLab. Play it on Kongregate.

If you’re familiar with the iPhone game Tiny Wings, you’ll be at home with this armadillo-based equivalent. If not: you hold a button to roll down slopes, then release it to let the momentum carry you uphill and into the air. You can also, er, ‘soar’ by clicking the upper half of the screen to delay your descent, smashing through birds mid-air for no ethically sound reason. Gems on certain slopes give you an incentive to come down sooner or soar a little longer.

The game’s (re)created very well, with some pleasant aesthetic touches giving ‘Dillo Hills a much needed dash of its own character. It’s peaceful, and pleasant, and a great way to spend a rainy half hour.

Revolutions

Zink-Interactive. Play it on Kongregate.

Revolutions is the sort of game that proves there doesn’t have to be a huge amount of substance for a game to be exceptional: just careful design and a strong sense of identity will get some titles by.

In Revolutions, you play as a small, glowing orb, and your objective for each level is to get to another, slightly bigger glowing orb. It’s a platformer, but the lack of anthropormorphic characters means you identify with the game in a different manner.

The levels are very neatly put together, but it’s the aesthetic that binds everything – it’s a glorious collection of yellows, whites and oranges, combined with the soft, elegant music, that keep you hooked until the end. Simple, but lovely.

Probe

Koubo. Download it from the dev’s website.

I love my exploration games. They’re not too taxing, but they do provide some glorious moments of surprise if done well. Probe isn’t exceptional – it doesn’t throw those surprises at you quite frequently enough – but it adds something different to the mix that ramps up the tension in quite a nice way.

There’s no tutorial, so you’re left to work things out for yourself, but you get the idea that your spaceship has run out of power and you’ve to find a way to fix it. And so below the ground you drop, searching for resources.

But not all areas of this cavernous world are accessible straight off. Instead, you’ve to collect blocks around the place that you then stack, build stairs with and suchlike to reach new places. All the while, a timer’s ticking down – if it runs out, you die.

It’s engaging, and provides a reason for you to be efficient with your work in an otherwise calming game. Worth a look.

Z-Type

PhotosLab. Play it on the website.

I missed Z-Type a little while ago when it emerged onto the web, but it’s good enough that I’ve been holding it back for a rainy week. It’s been raining quite a lot this week. It’s time, people.

So. Do you remember The Typing of the Dead? It was essentially a typing tutorial program, except that it was also House of the Dead, and correctly typing the words that appeared on the screen caused the zombies to explode in a big shower of goo.

Z-Type does the same sort of thing, except it’s a space shooter. You have your ship; the enemies are attacking from above with big words. It’s your job to type those words in order to fire your guns, and eradicate all threat.

It sounds silly, but a nice ambient soundtrack and some lovely minimalist presentation make this properly engaging beyond its core mechanics. Really worth playing, whether it improves your typing or not.

Dinosaur Zookeeper

Not-Vlambeer. Play it on the [adult swim] website.

It’s great – another new addition to [adult swim]‘s increasing collection of delightful free games, and a new title created by Super Crate Box dev Vlambeer. At least, I assume so: the game has “NOT VLAMBEER” plastered all over it, but the fact that the name’s there at all suggests they might be one and the same.

Anyway, this is a sort of distinctly indie take on Zoo Tycoon-meets-Jurassic Park. You’ve taken over a dinosaur park which the previous zookeeper ran into the ground. Your role is to ensure the customers and the dinosaurs are both happy – and, of course, that no one gets eaten alive.

To begin with that’s as simple a task as dragging some fences around your exhibits, but as you progress you realise that this is going to be a more difficult task than you originally thought. The art style is pleasingly sketchy, and the game’s sense of humour raises more than a few smiles.

Crystal Towers 2

David Newton. Grab it from the game’s website.

The full version of Crystal Towers 2 is $5, but there’s also a free version – and since it’s substantial enough to not just feel like a demo, it goes in this list. Especially since it’s very good. I’m always looking for excuses, me.

Initially it seems to be a fairly straightforward platformer with an introductory sequence far longer than any game of this type needs to have. However, it’s also a very funny game, one that absolutely nails the comic timing of its events and dialogue in a really effective way.

The story is that this world is being rid of music, and your job is to stop this from happening. Along the way you’ll meet all sorts of ludicrous characters, and Grab an impressively wide range of collectibles that shape the way you play. For a free version, it never feels restrictive: it’s always looking for new ways to impress you, in as wide-ranging a manner as it can.

Excellent stuff, basically. Get involved.

Still, the great thing about being a PC gamer is that we don’t need the big guys to provide us with our gaming fun. We have countless hard-working individuals, and ludicrously talented small teams, churning out great games that we can play on our computers for free. Here are some of them.

The I of It

By Gameshot. Play it on Kongregate.

The I of It is an absolutely wonderful idea. In the game, you play as the letter ‘I’, separated from your pal ‘t’ in the word ‘It’. ‘t’ sneaks off while you’re not looking, and it’s your job to track him down.

It plays out as a puzzle platformer. As ‘I’, you can extend or retract your stem, then use your top and bottom arms to grab onto stuff, pulling yourself up and down the levels. You’ll need to do this in order to overcome environmental obstacles that are thrown towards you at regular intervals.

The difficulty curve is a delight to work with, each puzzle ramping up the complexity steadily so that the game’s usually a challenge, but never overwhelming. It’s strikingly confident in its simple presentation, and the idea is one of quiet genius. Absolutely brilliant, in its own special way.

Paxia

By Ono. Get it from the official website.

Retro puzzle games seem to be making a bit of a comeback. In this one, you have a grid, you have a strange object in the middle of it, and you must use said object to direct differently coloured balls towards different areas in order to stack up points.

It’s a test of both observation and reaction time – although unfortunately, to begin with, it’s a bit of a test of patience generally. It’s kind of poorly explained, but fortunately, once you figure out that the concept is quite so simple, it becomes strangely hypnotic.

Ultimately, it’s not quite that indie stalwart of making a simple game but doing it well. It’s a simple game that isn’t quite polished enough, and while I get what the presentation is going for, it misses the mark somewhat in terms of quality. But what’s at the core is still entertaining, making Paxia worth a go.

Warp

By GraniteGear. Play it on Kongregate.

Clearly made on an extremely low budget, Warp Game is nevertheless a satisfying little platformer with an identifiable aesthetic – even if that aesthetic doesn’t amount to much more than a green gradient fill and some black silhouettes. It’s a simple platformer at heart, but with a twist: when you walk off one side of the screen, you turn up on the other; when you fall down the hole in the floor, you’ll come out of the one in the ceiling.

It opens up a number of different puzzle opportunities, and while none of them are particularly taxing, it does add a nice cerebral edge to the game. Warp is short and sweet, and not always immaculately presented, but it does more than enough to keep you playing.

RPG Shooter: Starwish

By Anonymous D Studios. Play it on Kongregate.

Starwish is a curious mash-up of a few different game types. It’s got the vibe – and some of the mechanics – of a Japanese RPG. Its storytelling takes the form of something approaching a visual novel. And the actual action stages are something like a side-on Space Invaders – a properly traditional sh’mup that sees you piloting your big old space rocket from left to right and up and down as you fire laser beams at the bad guys.

Considering this is a Flash game on Kongregate, it’s a huge and complex game. The narrative riffs on Star Wars quite heavily, albeit with a few of its own touches along the way, but it’s still at least competently written and provides some meat to the game’s bones.

The shooting is less enthralling, although when faced with a huge stream of enemies it can become pleasingly chaotic. It also displays a level of polish lacking from most Flash games, so for that reason alone it should be at the top of your ‘freebies to play’ list this week.

1899 Steam & Spirit

By Moloc Lab. Play it on the website.

1899 Steam & Spirit needs your help. And so do I.

It’s an adventure game which, quite spectacularly, is being built entirely in HTML and Javascript. That’s enough of a reason to point you in its direction, because there’s no doubt that this is an impressive achievement, despite its blocky graphics, odd music, and completely bonkers dialogue which I assume is a victim of some online translation program or something.

It already has a nice, surreal vibe to it, but the developers are hoping to keep on churning out future episodes. To do that, they need some help funding their endeavours, so they’ve set up an IndieGoGo donations page to allow them to keep making the game but never need to charge for it.

Here’s where I need your help, though: I’m stuck in the first bloody room. I’ve been stuck in this room for about 20 minutes, I’m pretty sure I’ve clicked on, combined and generally used everything I can, but my door key is still stuck down the sink. Am I just an idiot? Can you get further? Leave a comment if you’d like to laugh at me.

zOMT

By Preloaded/[adult swim]. Play it on the [as] website.

zOMT is a nice sorta-tower-defence game that’s been added to the increasingly populated list of decent games on [adult swim]‘s website. In it, you generate mana by getting little men to worship at your totem pole, and spend said mana on new defensive units, as well as a variety of special abilities and power-ups.

While it is at heart a basic game, plenty of smart additions make zOMT feel more exhaustive than it actually is, your range of defensive options surprisingly creative at their best. At only 15 levels long, zOMT might seem a bit insubstantial, but there’s actually a great deal of challenge to the proceedings – and its pleasant, original art style means it’s always a joy to look at, as well as to play.

Retirement Home Roundup

By Team #IT. Download it from IndieDB.

This is an extremely silly game. You play as a worker at the local retirement home, and it’s your job to make sure its elderly residents all get on the bus for their day trip – and then back on again when they need to return home.

To do so, you’ve to shove them, push their wheelchairs, and just generally be a bit of a bully until they comply with your wishes. If they’re being especially stubborn, you’ve got a gun which fires tapioca pudding – a dessert sure to get the residents running towards the point of impact as if they were as fit as a 14-year-old.

There are obstacles, too, such as puddles the residents can slip on and, worryingly, electrical items that can full-on electrocute them. It sounds crude and stupid, and it often is, but there’s also a knowing sense of humour that runs through the whole game. It’s low-budget, basic and ridiculous, but it knows it. That’s kind of the point.

Fender Bender

By RocketHawk Games. Download it from IndieDB.

Fender Bender is every deathmatch game you’ve ever played – except this time, you’re shooting your opponents with vehicle-mounted weapons as you drive around one of two carefully crafted arenas.

The game’s a little light on content – there are only six cars at present, and only three game modes, as well as the disappointing duo of maps. But while Fender Bender could to to be made more substantial in the future, it’s already a whole load of fun.

The game plays out an an agreeably mad pace, and there are plenty of glorious ‘splodes to be seen. It’s all delightful macho nonsense, with over-the-top voice work and more flying shrapnel than you can shake a stick at. The music powers on through while the engines rev. It’s always a lot of fun.

There’s also Xbox 360 controller support, and up to four players can gather around the same machine, playing in split-screen mode. Fender Bender’s hardly the greatest deathmatch shooter you’ll ever play, but it gets enough right that it’s a healthy dose of fun in small doses.

Alas, I’ve only stumbled upon four truly awesome freebies this week, but they’re all sure to pass the time quite nicely. Read on for PC Gamer’s picks…

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure

Untold Entertainment (and five-year-old Cassie). Play it on the dev’s website.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything more adorable. This is a point-and-click adventure game created by Ryan Creighton of Untold Entertainment, along with his five-year-old daughter Cassie. She came up with the idea, wrote the titles, drew all the artwork, provided the main character’s voice and even designed some of the puzzles. Her father pieced it all together.

What’s lovely is that an initially cute idea quickly blossoms into an actually fairly decent adventure game. Spectacularly, it has a sense of style and a brilliant sense of humour, in the way that five-year-old kids can make you laugh hysterically without even trying.

Play the game, and also have a read of the story of how it came to be: it’s properly heart-warming.

Alone in the Park

Cheap Drunk Games. Play it on the dev’s website.

Another adventure game, but of a slightly different ilk, Alone in the Park combines a few different takes on the genre into something quite interesting. With the written narration of a text adventure meeting the graphical touches of something else entirely, this is an intriguing and slightly unsettling treasure hunt around a national park, seemingly orchestrated by someone who might well be stalking you.

It’s consistently weird, well-written and compelling, and the unusual presentation is a particularly strong draw. It’ll also last you a good couple of hours (and you can save the game at any point). Well worth trying out, if only to experience something a little different.

Plus, what a delightful punning name! It wins points for that immediately.

Ambia

Ian Snyder. Play it on Kongregate.

Ambia is a lovely, floaty, dreamy platformer in which your aim, quite simply, is to destroy each enemy and reach the level’s end-point. Getting rid of your foes and collecting the glowing orbs they emit levels up your weapon, giving it more power and additional abilities.

That might not sound so remarkable, but Ambia has another trick up its sleeve: it’s all about the game’s aesthetic response to your actions.

Basically, the music is procedurally generated, and additional sounds are layered on top as you go about your business. Meanwhile, the background bulges with your presence, creating an eerie, atmospheric vibe. It makes the game more tactile, somehow. It feels like you’re a part of this world.

The challenge ramps up nicely as the levels progress, and it never loses its sense of style. A lovely game.

The Dreamerz

Rob Donkin/RobotJam. Play it on Kongregate.

The Dreamerz doesn’t always explain itself quite clearly enough, meaning that to begin with I hadn’t a clue what was going on. But once you realise that this is a point-and-click adventure in which the aim is to fix a dream machine so that people can sleep softly once more, it begins to make a lot more sense.

There’s a written diary that updates as you go through the game, which gives you hints as to how you might progress. But other than that, everything is conveyed via the world itself – not unlike you’d expect from an Amanita Design adventure.

What follows is a delightful game with a wonderfully strong aesthetic. Tiny planets make up the adventure’s locations, where you’ll need to generally collect and click on various things in order to progress. It’s all very much like a children’s story, but one of the abstract, wandering ones you half-remember from your childhood, knowing that you’ll never be able to find them again. For that reason alone, The Dreamerz comes highly recommended.

But hey, look! A new thing exists! So welcome to the first ever roundup of the best free games of the week. Good gracious! These will, as you can imagine, be published weekly. Read on to find out what I’ve been freely enjoying in the past seven days.

Pon

Bov. Get it from IndieDB.

Pon is an absolutely lovely puzzle-platformer about a boy sent to find a cure for his dying father. So off you trot, on an adventure that takes you to places far further away than the local chemist.

Sweet, imaginative and touching, Pon is also blessed with some lovely visual design and a great sense of exploration and discovery. It’s packed full of surprises; unfortunately, it’s also packed full of bugs, one of which forced me to restart the game after about 20 minutes of trying to work out how to progress. There’s a patch, which adds a much-needed save feature, but some glitches remain.

Nevertheless, I urge you to play it: it’s one of the most striking freebies I’ve come across in a while.

Boss fights might be the traditional way to up the challenge at the end of a level, chapter or game, but since the early days of gaming we’ve come up with a whole host of other ways to keep things interesting and varied. Boss fights can be invigorating, but only in the right context – if your game doesn’t need one, dear developers, don’t put one in.

This is how the most intellectual action game in the world finishes. Sigh.

Worst offender: BioShock
After the intricacy of BioShock’s story, the precision of its design and the creativity of its combat, why on Earth did Irrational feel it necessary to include an utterly incongruous boss fight at the end? Your confrontation with Rapture leader Andrew Ryan, and the subsequent escape, were wonderful moments, their quiet understatement elevating them above other games’ attempts to do something similar. And then it ends with a giant bad guy with glowing eyes and ludicrous powers. A fine example of when to not bother at all.

Do make the boss huge

Of course, there are exceptions. There have been a great many boss fights against enemies who are all wee and tiny. But as a rule… huge bosses are cool, right? They’re a visual spectacle, something intimidating – something to get your adrenaline pumping.

OHAI!

Star pupil: Gunman Chronicles
Half-Life-powered indie game Gunman Chronicles, released back in 2000, was famous for its enormous bosses. From huge dinosaurs to massive alien beings, it was a game that fully embraced the idea that bigger really is better. Few other games have rendered quite such spectacular bosses, even with today’s new-fangled graphics engines.

Don’t make it an awful difficulty spike

Boss fights are supposed to be challenging. That’s the point of having them in your game in the first place. We get that. But what we don’t get is why, developers, you so frequently opt to make them quite so ludicrously difficult. Managing a game’s difficulty is certainly no easy task, but when your boss requires ten, 20, even 30 attempts to beat, the chances are you’ve got the balance wrong.

I never did like gardening.

Worst offender: Batman: Arkham Asylum
Some of Arkham Asylum’s boss battles are admittedly brilliant, but there’s one that stands out for all the wrong reasons. Your fight with Poison Ivy is an absolute nightmare. Organic spikes stab you every which way, while Ivy fires upon you while you’re pre-occupied with avoiding the environmental dangers. Also, there’s nowhere to take cover. Also, you have to “beat” her a bunch of times in a row before she finally pops it. Come on, Rocksteady. Your game is great! You don’t need to cheat like that.

Like PC Gamer’s annual Top 100, this isn’t supposed to be a definitive declaration of the best games ever. It’s a collection of titles that we think you should be playing right now. A snapshot in time, if you will. So at this moment, in May 2011, here’s our favourite free or free-to-play games. Onwards!

20. OpenTTD

Grab it from the website.

Why it makes the list: Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe proved cult favourites when they were released in the 1990s. That might be why some dedicated fans took it upon themselves to remake the latter from scratch, making it open-source and adding a heap of features along the way. To this day OpenTTD continues to captivate its followers. Why not give it a go? You might happily become one of them.

19. Yume Nikki

Rapidshare seems to be the net’s only trace of it.

Why it makes the list: You’ll probably never play a stranger game. In Yumme Nikki, you play as a young girl as she succumbs to her terrifying nightmares. And, of course, tries to locate a bunch of different special powers which have pretty much no bearing on how the game plays out. Strange, warped, and difficult to find an English version of, this is a work of psychedelic madness that’s worth experiencing, even if it’s never anything approaching “fun”.

18. Alien Swarm

Get it on Steam.

Why it makes the list: Valve unleashed Alien Swarm without much fanfare, but that’s no indication of its quality. Originally a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, then rebuilt in the Source Engine, this top-down shooter sees you battling through alien-infested institutions with up to three co-op buddies. And it’s a lot of tense, action-packed fun.

17. Games Journo Story

Grab it from the dev’s blog.

Why it makes the list: Smartly parodying iPhone hit Game Dev Story, this is an exceptionally witty release documenting one university graduate’s attempt to embark on a career in games journalism. If you’re generally familiar with the faces behind the words in the games publications you read, you might spot a few amusing cameos too, including former PC Gamer UK deputy editor Kieron Gillen.

16. Wurm Online

Get it on the website.

Why it makes the list: Before Minecraft came along and blew everyone away, the indie game about building stuff was Wurm Online, a slow and plodding but rather atmospheric and engrossing MMO. The controls are awful, the visuals are frankly shit, and you do, admittedly, have to pay to do the best stuff. But the free version still ultimately blossoms into a fierce, challenging attempt to craft your own way through this tumultuous world.

15. One Chance

Play it on Newgrounds.

Why it makes the list: You have just a few days until the world is supposed to end, and you’re a scientist. Can you and your colleagues come up with something to divert this terrible disaster? And, since you might only have a few days left to spend with your family, do you even want to waste time trying? This is a short, emotive title that gives you just one choice – go to work or stay at home – but makes it resonate to a wonderful degree.

14. Battlefield Heroes

Play it on the website.

Why it makes the list: This free-to-play Battlefield title takes a lot of visual cues from Team Fortress 2, but puts them to use into a fun and silly third-person shooter with a fair few vehicular touches. It’s about as straight-forward as multiplayer action gets these days, but it all runs in a browser, and it’s rarely anything other than a delight, especially when you factor in the (lack of a) price tag.

13. Canabalt

Run along to the dev’s website.

Why it makes the list: You can only jump. But that’s all you need to do. You’re running away from something or someone, which is never explained, but it never needs to be. It’s the simplicity of Canabalt that makes it what it is: a hugely exhilarating one-button platformer to which you’re likely to become dangerously addicted.

12. Photopia

Play it on iFiction.

Why it makes the list: No graphics. No sound. No monsters or action or strategy. Just simple puzzles, and lines of text, beautifully presented and profoundly moving. Photopia is, quite possibly, the smartest and most interesting text adventure around, and you can play it for free online. Its hour-long tale is confusing at first, but it slowly clicks into place – and in the moments when it does, its magic is basically unrivalled.

11. Dwarf Fortress

Grab it from the developer’s website.

Why it makes the list: A deep and engrossing combination of roguelikes and city-building-sims, Dwarf Fortress is a nightmare of ASCII graphics and instant failure. In fact, think Wurm Online without the 3D visuals and anything resembling a decent tutorial, and you’ll be on the right lines. But what makes Dwarf Fortress so fascinating, so unrelentingly brilliant, is its refusal to sit still: this is a game in which you can plan all you like, but very rarely predict an outcome.

Technobabylon – Part III: In Nuntius Veritas

Technocrat. Grab it from GameJolt.

Shouldn't that be "...to which you're willing to go"? Fnar-nyar.

I really need to go back to the start of Technobabylon at some point. Its first episode was an unassuming little room escape title with some interesting narrative touches to keep things fresh. Since then it’s expanded into an enormous adventure series set in an unsettling future where your character is under constant oppression or threat.

Part III is the most stylish so far, and perhaps the most well-written, although all three episodes are marvelous from a storytelling perspective. For my money, the actual game itself isn’t quite as strong, with a couple of stinkers in the puzzle and mini-game department. But now that the several interlocking strands of the story are coming together, there’s never been a better time to give the series a go.

Soul Brother

[adult swim]. Play it on the [as] website.

There a Fat Boy Slim joke in here somewhere...

This is a neat idea. From the always-agreeably-barmy [adult swim] comes a new platformer, which is essentially a game about very carefully timed suicide. Yeah. Exactly.

The idea is this. Soul Brother features a string of different characters, each with its own special abilities. When one character dies, its spirit enters the next one, and you play on from there. The trick is to time your deaths so that the next character is in the most favourable position to plod along with the adventure.

The game itself is a pretty straightforward, unremarkable platformer, but the art style is nice, and the idea behind it is lovely. So is the name, come to think of it.

Ace of Spades

Ben Askoy. Download it from the official website.

No prizes for guessing Ace of Spades' main influence.

Hey, look, it’s Minecraft: World War I edition with a multiplayer twist! Ace of Spades so shamelessly nicks both the core mechanics and visual design of Mojang’s pre-release classic that my initial response was to laugh at it, and ignore it. But it turns out there’s a bit more going on here than you might expect.

Firstly, its rudimentary physics system opens up a whole boatload of new creative avenues. And secondly, the combat is a huge improvement on Minecraft’s, with some absolutely fantastic range and satisfying insta-kill headshots.

The first beta build was as bug-ridden as you can imagine, but an updated version – which I’ve not touched yet – is now available. And, of course, this is entirely free, so a lot of that stuff can be quite reasonably forgiven when set against all the fun you’re having.

Global Agenda: Free Agent

Hi-Rez Studios. Get it from the game’s website.

I hope that's not a massive gun in your pocket, and you're just pleased to see me.

I thought Global Agenda was pretty rubbish, if I’m honest. I played it for a while with PC Gamer contributor Phill Cameron, and the most fun either of us had was getting into an utterly ludicrous argument with one player about who was allowed to dance in which bits of the game’s Dome City hub.

But it’s a different matter when no coins are involved. Global Agenda: Free Agent is the free-to-play version of Hi-Rez’s team-based shooter/MMO hybrid, and while it retains all the original’s flaws, they’re a lot more forgivable when your bank balance remains intact.

Combat still feels flimsy, there’s still very little variety to the game, and the MMO side is still simultaneously undeveloped and unintuitive. But weighed up against other free-to-play shooters, Free Agent actually fairs rather well. Perhaps High-Rez would have done well to realise that from the start.

Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story

Christine Love. Download it from Christine’s website.

It might not *look* like your sort of thing, but give it a go.

Do you remember Digital: A Love Story? If you don’t, it’s presumably because you never played it, because such a fiercely creative little indie game would certainly have stuck with you in the 18 months since its release. The brilliantly named Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story is a spiritual successor of sorts – although this time, writer/developer Christine Love’s efforts are marginally less striking.

It ostensibly takes the form of a visual novel, but the more you play, the more you realise there are more interactive elements than you might think. Set 15 years into the future, Don’t Take It Personally lobs you into the shoes of a divorced high school teacher, and the plot unfolds as you decide the extent to which you feel comfortable becoming involved with (or intruding on?) your pupils’ lives.

This is hardly a traditional game, and the visual style is a little jarring, not least because this futuristic school is apparently still using big boxy televisions and blackboards. But it also made me ask more questions of myself than a game has managed since the original Dragon Age. At around two hours long, it’s best completed in one sitting – and while the ending is disappointingly unsubtle, I came away from it with a positive impression overall.

GIRP

Foddy. Play it on the developer’s website.

Alternatively, try spelling out rude words.

From the developer of the absurdly fiddly QWOP comes GIRP: another game in which you must control the individual body parts of a dude, only this time you’re climbing a wall instead of running a race.

See those letters in the rings in the screenshot above? Those correspond to letters on your keyboard. Holding one of them down makes your character reach for and grab onto the respective ring. Release that key and his arm goes all floppy. You can even click for an added bit of muscle stretch.

It takes absolutely ages to get the hang of GIRP, but once you’re on your way to becoming the next champion rock-climber, you’re already hopelessly hooked.

Red Eclipse

Quinton Reeves, Lee Salzman. Download it from the official website.

The game isn't perfect, but the thinking behind it is.

Here’s an interesting project emerging from the open-source software community. Red Eclipse is a full multiplayer (or singleplayer with bots) shooter, built on a modified version of the Cube Engine. It immediately feels slightly out of place on this list, because it’s not particularly good. The weapons feel flimsy, the AI is useless, and visually it looks ten years old at best. It’s fun, certainly, but it feels like fairly perfunctory fun.

But then you look into what these guys are doing a little bit, and things take a turn for the better. In true open-source spirit, it’s a game that’s being poured back into the community for feedback, suggestions for alterations, and regular updates to ensure the experience is eventually all that it has the potential to be. And all for free – or, if you’re feeling charitable, a small donation on the website. To my mind, that’s got to be worth supporting.

Sky Island

Neutronized. Play it on Armor Games.

There's a surprise about to happen.

It seems to be a typical platformer. A typical cutesy platformer, at that. You play as a small yellow thing, scurrying around a colourful world that makes adorable noises. And then you get to the obstacle in the screenshot above.

You can’t jump that high, because the controls are oddly floaty, in the way that console heretics will understand if I mention LittleBigPlanet. What to do? Ah, of course. Just spin the world around.

This is a very clever 3D game that, for the most part, masquerades as a 2D platformer. You’re running and jumping and bouncing off enemies’ heads, but an extra puzzle dimension is opened up by the world’s hidden depth. What’s initially a little lackluster quickly becomes delightful, and well worth a play.

BeGone

NPlay. Play it on the website.

All this in a browser. It's quite lovely.

Residing in its own little region of the gaming world, hidden away somewhere between Counter-Strike and Battlefield, sits BeGone, a new browser-based shooter from NPlay. And it’s impressive stuff. While it lacks the flair and impact of the games it tries to imitate, this squad-based FPS does a cracking job of evoking the same sensation of careful, strategic warfare, but warfare with a bit of a kick to it.

BeGone looks half-decent, and generally promotes tactical play in a way that even the best shooters struggle with from time to time. Considering it’s all played in a web browser window, it’s nothing short of a remarkable achievement.

Antimatière

Chronodrax. Play it on Kongregate.

I wish it were rubbish, so I could use the "Antimatière falls flat" gag.

This month’s star, however, is Antimatière, a puzzle game from French devs Chronodrax. This smart title drops you into a world where all matter within a given space appears to have become flattened. No one quite knows why, but the result is lots of things painted on the walls and floor, when really there should be actual, tangible objects.

Much of the puzzling involves getting from Place A to Place B, as the doors seem to have been muddled up, as well. And since even people are being stuck to the nearest flat surface, you’ll have to help them out in order to progress. You are, after all, the only 3D thing in this entire world. You’re an asset.

Never too taxing, but always cerebral and frequently amusing, Antimatière is a gem of a game, containing a hundred brilliant ideas. Play it now.

That game, and its remarkable sequel, Dark Flight, are some of the most brilliant adventures never to cause a stir on the mainstream PC gaming scene. Now, with a third game in production, two of their creators sit down with PC Gamer to discuss the development process, their attitude towards art design, and why they believe that imagination and creativity can overcome all odds.

“When we were given the opportunity to create a completely new franchise, we set out to accomplish two things. One: provide the casual user with an accessible experience that was very different from anything they had played before. And two: create a game that nostalgic adventure gamers would enjoy.”

Those are the words of Chris Campbell, a senior producer at Big Fish Games. Big Fish is one of the leading casual game publishers online, but they also have an in-house studio – which, on the evidence of the Drawn titles, is home to some serious talent.

That quote says a lot. Drawn is obviously designed with accessibility in mind, and Big Fish’s primary audience is what we’d usually consider to be the “casual gaming market.” We’re talking, mainly, about older players, in particular females: basically, not the sort of crowd you’d usually associate with deeply satisfying, complex point-and-click adventures.

But when you spend some time with Drawn, especially Dark Flight, you begin to realise that’s exactly what these games are. They’re fiercely imaginative old-school adventures which, via layers of smart comfort-blanketing, manage to stretch their appeal into a whole new area of the gaming populace. They’re also of an absolutely exceptional quality, and are two of the most atmospheric point-and-clickers on the market today.

A picture paints a thousand words

In Drawn: The Painted Tower, you’re hot on the trail of the king’s daughter, who’s been kidnapped due to her phenomenal power. The little girl, Iris, has the magical ability to paint pictures which spring to life, allowing those who gaze upon them to enter into their worlds. Iris is being held hostage at the top of an enormous skyscraper in the town of Stonebriar, and through a variety of lightweight puzzles, your task is to make your way up the tower to her rescue.

The second game follows directly on from the first, and improves the already intriguing title in a few key areas. For one, the previously dodgy hints system has been replaced, removing the occasional frustration of having to wait around for a timer to run out just so you could skip to the hint you required. And secondly – and more significantly – the game world has seen a spectacular overhaul. In Drawn: Dark Flight, you escape the confines of the tower and head out into the town itself. It’s a remarkable place to explore.

“I wanted to make a game that would be visually different and fresh from the majority of the games I have seen,” explains Brian Thompson, art director on Drawn. “I pulled from things I love – a mix of dark and gothic and stylised fantasy – to establish the art direction for Drawn, and it grew from there.”

Thompson’s art was inspired a great deal by a number of sources. Classic illustrated fairy tales, the early animated works of Walt Disney, and contemporary filmmakers such as Tim Burton – all combined in Thompson’s mind to create the whimsical town that sits at the centre of Drawn’s fiction. But it wasn’t just illustrations that influenced Thompson, but also the vivid written word of authors such as C.S. Lewis, Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein. And that, he says, is something that affected the design process in a positive way.

“The idea of ‘words evoking images’ is integral to the development process of Drawn,” he explains. “For example, Chris [Cambpell] will frequently turn to me with a sparkle in his eyes, and I know instantly that he has a great idea that will evoke a fantastic image in my mind before he even says, ‘Brian! I have an awesome idea!’ Our process is fluid and organic, and this helps to reinforce the art style and evolve it. Sometimes game design drives the art, and other times, just as naturally, the art drives design.”

The result, Stonebriar, is extraordinary. It’s a lonely, unnerving place. Dark forces have descended on this town, and it’s now desolate, devoid of life. Throughout the vast majority of both games, the only characters you meet are a butler who’s been turned to stone, and a young boy, made of wood, with a dud battery where his heart should be.

Making a difference

It’s fearlessly creative. But the second game is also a game about fearless creativity. Your task throughout Dark Flight is to light a series of beacons to ward off foes, and as you do so, a haunting orange glow begins to form in the sky, light brought back to a town where, for a time, there was only darkness.

And in order to achieve your aims, you’ve to move in between the painted and real worlds, rebuilding both the town itself and the art that resides within it. It’s a game where you defeat your enemies not with guns, but with words, and music, and vibrant, colourful drawings. It is, in many ways, a story of imagination triumphing over all else.

“We really want the player to interact with the art in the game and make them feel like they are affecting their environment in a profound and positive way,” says Brian Thompson. “With The Painted Tower and Dark Flight, we knew that we wanted to tell a simple story about a talented young girl who created magical paintings, and we liked the idea that the player would help her overcome great odds by interacting with her paintings and even creating a bit of their own.”

Thompson thinks that, generally speaking, just having the player shoot some bad guys is a cheat’s way out of a game design challenge. “It’s an easy way to avoid thinking about the motivation of your player,” he says. “I get it, sure – it’s fun to blow stuff up, but let’s move beyond that now. The world is violent enough and it’s getting worse. We wanted to try something different like focusing on the wonder and the magic of it all – and maybe, in our own small way, immerse players in an experience that would challenge, entertain, and inspire them.”

There’s another Drawn game in development, and this one will move out of Stonebriar and into the wider world. “We as a team really want to explore some different areas of the kingdom, so right now that’s what we’re doing,” says Chris Campbell. “Our fans had a lot of questions for us after finishing Dark Flight, so we’re going to do our best to answer them in our own unique way.”

Perhaps there’ll be a slightly different vibe to the third Drawn game, then, but Big Fish’s own unique way of creating game worlds leaves me filled with great hope. And if the core message of Drawn: Dark Flight is continued over into its successor, we could well be looking forward to an absolutely stunning and imaginative third part to the series.

“We wanted the take-home message to be that imagination and creativity can overcome all odds,” says Brian Thompson. “I think it really can.”

American Dream

Increpare/Terry Cavanagh/Jasper Byrne/Tom Morgan-Jones. Play it online.

This is undoubtedly the most exciting screenshot you'll see on PC Gamer all month.

This collaborative title, created by a host of indie gaming legends, is about as bizarre as it is hilarious. You play, ostensibly, as a dude with a job on the stock market – albeit a very strange interpretation of it – and your task is to make a million dollars within a month.

Instead of the latest and greatest corporations, you’ll be buying stock in a selection of yesteryear’s celebrities. It might also be an idea to kit out your house with all the latest trimmings with the money you earn, as you’re told you’re expected to have a party once you’re filthy rich. It’s a straight-forward game, distilled right down to its central mechanics, but it’s still strangely invigorating, and well worth investing (ha!) some time into.

Spent

McKinney/Urban Ministries of Durham. Play it online.

Yeah. Prove it. Exactly.

Well, this is depressing. Spent is a game about how none of us have any money, are having to work in rubbish jobs, and how the outlook is pretty much bleak in today’s day and age. Tremendous.

The idea is to demonstrate quite how difficult it is to be a low-income worker in the United States, and how easy it can be to slip into an inexorable spiral towards homelessness. It was developed in conjunction with a charity called Urban Ministries of Durham, a charity organisation which works with the homeless. It’s not particularly entertaining in a typical game-like way, but it is eye-opening, and it’s worth seeing just how well you can survive. Try it out.

The Silver Lining – Episode 3: My Only Love Sprung From Hate

Phoenix Online Entertainment. Download it from the official website.

Oh, hey, look. That's your mum.

After a number of years in development and a legal battle with Activision, this extraordinary fan tribute to King’s Quest continues with its regular episodes. The lengthily titled My Only Love Sprung From Hate takes things down a slightly darker route than before, but it’s more of the same traditional adventuring that we’ve now come to expect from the series.

That means, I think, that it isn’t going to convert anyone. It’s of an impressive quality for what is essentially an amateur creation, and anyone with an interest in point-and-click adventures or, especially, the original King’s Quest games would be barmy not to pick these up. However, I suspect that if you haven’t got into The Silver Lining yet, this third installment isn’t likely to change your mind.

Beacon

randommine. Download it from the dev’s website.

One man's journey to the well of orange squash.

Beacon was technically released last month, but it wasn’t quite as good back then. It’s since been updated and polished, so allow me to shoehorn it into February’s picks. This is another in the current trend for exploratory non-games on the PC freebies scene, and follows an astronaut after his spaceship crash lands on an unfamiliar planet. According to everything he’s been told, it’s a planet that’s never been inhabited – but the super-enormo-building he quickly stumbles upon suggests otherwise. Ooooh…

This isn’t quite the best exploration game I’ve played recently, but there’s a real compulsion to continue as you press onwards beneath the planet’s surface, uncovering its secrets. It’s surprisingly touching, as well. It’ll only take you 15 or 20 minutes to play through, so you should probably go and do that.

Games Journo Story

Brendan Caldwell. Get it from his blog.

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Disclaimer: Games Journo Story’s developer, Brendan Caldwell, is an acquaintance of mine. Don’t read too much into that, though, as I’m fairly certain I’d be singing its praises regardless. This is an exceptionally clever, witty and candid tale, created in RPG Maker, which documents an aspiring games journalist’s trip to a large expo where he hopes to make a name for himself among more established writer-folk.

There are a lot of in-jokes. Understanding one of them means having witnessed a particular moment at a particular bar at a particular expo last year. It’s probably a lot funnier if you were at that expo, or if you’ve ever been in a similar position yourself – but I think it’s worth playing even if you weren’t, or you haven’t.

That’s because it feels, more than anything, like a cuttingly honest portrayal of what it’s like to leave university, knowing what you want to do with your life, but feeling like it’s constantly that little bit out of reach, no matter what you do. For all the jokes, the impression it left me with was a slightly melancholy one.

But the writing is exceptional, and Brendan clearly knows a thing or two about what he’s doing, so hopefully he’ll realise his ambitions.

“Grief, loss, guilt, faith, illness… But it’s also about love and hope and redemption” That’s how Dear Esther’s designer describes his game.

Imagine a Source Engine title without any guns or physics puzzles. Dear Esther emerged from a research question proposed by Dr Dan Pinchbeck in Portsmouth University: “What would happen if a game was to focus purely on storytelling, to the exclusion of more traditional interactive elements? The project has gone from humble mod to commercial release on Steam, redesigned by one of the team behind the stark environments of Mirror’s Edge. It’s got potential to change how you think about games forever.

Issue 224 of PC Gamer UK has an in-depth feature on innovative title, but we like you so much that we’re giving away our interviews with the designer, developer and sound designer for free. Click more to get the scoop.

Dr. Dan Pinchbeck – Designer

How has Dear Esther come to be heading for a commercial release?

I was harassing Rob about going for a [Source Engine commercial] license a while back and we kind of agreed to hold off on the discussion until it was a bit more together. Then after the update on 30th June, Rob pitched the idea to the community and we got very positive responses, so we started talking to Valve after that.

So my reasoning behind it was that Rob was creating something so extraordinary with the remake, it deserved a wider audience than we could give it as a mod. I love the mod scene, but it is limited in terms of reach, and I also knew quite a few people who really wanted Esther but for a bunch of reasons either didn’t want Half Life 2, or weren’t exactly technical in terms of mucking about with SourceMod folders and all that. And I also knew if we went to indie, I could leverage some funds to rebuild all the audio, which I was keen to do. It was always really, really strong, but I just thought with Rob’s work, it deserved a facelift too.

Underlying this is my wider research agenda. I think games researchers and academics have this amazing opportunity to explore high-risk areas of game design and development, and we have almost an obligation to run with ideas and push them as far as we can. Commercialising Dear Esther just extends that, so we started off saying ‘will this kind of thing work as a game?’, and the answer was pretty resolutely ‘yes’, so the next question is ‘what happens if you commercialise that?’. And if that works, then it means we are generating income we can use to underwrite the next experiment, and we’re moving towards sustainable, practice-led research in games. Which is massive – it’s a completely new thing for the UK. We’re doing something that has actual, absolute relevance to industry, and we’re proving it has value, not in some obscure journal, but out there, in the marketplace.

Dear Esther is an unusual concept. How did the idea come about originally?

So Esther is basically about ambiguity in game stories. It came from this idea that you could do more with storytelling in games if you stopped worrying about everything making sense and adding up, and that when you read a book or watch a film, you are filling in a lot of those details yourself. Games are like films in that regard – you have these cardboard cutout sets and no-one worries about that, we focus on the front, not the back. So we can apply a similar thing to story, and stop giving as much away.

And I’m really interested in stuff like William Burroughs and the Strugatsky brothers, and was reading a lot of big, dark romantic poetry, and listening to a lot of quite odd but very beautiful music and wanted to make a game story like that. So it’s all about the feel, the flow, the mood and actually it’s full of holes and contradictions and abstract ideas and symbols, and you don’t even understand a load of it, but it somehow all still hangs together and creates a really extraordinary experience. And I wanted to know if you could do that in a game, but a game that had quite a traditional voice-over approach to story. Because I’m a writer, I love text and words, and didn’t want to go fully down the Ueda route, but was trying to fuse that kind of sense with a more traditional approach to how you deliver story in a game. Which also relates to what kinds of stories you can tell, and how, and the range of those stories in terms of emotional, mood, character.

I guess the driving force behind it was, on a structural level, that games offer an unprecedented and totally unique space to explore what stories can be… and then on a more content level, this attempt to tell a completely different type and style of story than had been attempted in a game before.

How did Rob’s remake come about?

He wrote to me out of the blue and asked if I had a problem with him remaking it. So I looked at his portfolio and wasn’t about to argue – the fact he was on the Mirror’s Edge team, which is one of the most beautiful games of recent years helped too! I think he’s an exceptional talent and I feel really lucky and proud to have made something that someone of Rob’s ability was into enough to want to spent a year of his life working on.

What do you think he’s added to the Dear Esther experience? Obviously it’s prettier, but what about more fundamentally?

There’s a lot of subtle stuff going on in there, and what’s really cool is how he’s responded to the original version and put his own spin on stuff, rather than just carbon-copying it. I sent him pages of random notes and a descriptive walkthrough of what I thought I was probably trying to get at for each VO trigger, and then I’ve been looking at the alphas and feeding back, but right up until the deal with Valve happened, it was mainly Rob’s gig.
Since then, I’ve been working with Jess on the new soundtrack, writing and recording some new VOs with Nigel and working with Rob on some new features and things in the landscape.

It’s going to be quite different in a few ways from the original. The visuals are the most obvious thing, as that’s going to have a massive effect on how immersive the island is, and that’s really important. There are some new landmarks and fragments of story attached to those; the caves are really quite radically different. If you thought the original soundtrack was good, the new one will take your breath away. And there are some new voice overs to discover that add new depth to the story. There’s quite a bit more focus on exploration, properly rewarding the player for leaving the obvious path. And the great thing about going indie with the remake is we’ve been able to do all of that, to make it more than just a visual overhaul – which to be fair, never really did justice to Rob’s amazing work anyway.

The story’s obviously a key point. Summarised, and without megaspoilers, what’s Esther about?

Grief, loss, guilt, faith, illness. Cheerful stuff. But it’s also, and this is really important to me, about love and hope and redemption, and how people cling to each other in the face of a brutal, uncaring world.

Central to the concept of Esther is the idea that there’s no central truth, no absolute interpretation of it at all, and it is whatever you take from it. And it’s been great how players have really responded to that, there’s some amazing versions of it out there.

So on a superficial level, Esther is about a man who finds himself standing on the jetty of a remote Hebridean island. Some time before, he lost someone called Esther, which seems to have driven him here, although he’s not sure why. He seems to be following the story and journey of a 18th Century explorer, who was convinced the island had some kind of almost supernatural power, of healing or redemption, some special function in the world. But then it’s also about whether any of what is happening is real, whether it’s a coma dream, or repressed memory, or fantasy, or a final moment before death, a final release. That might even be giving too much away, but there’s also a lot more going on in there. As much as anything else, it’s a fog of images and ideas and symbols that can be stitched together in a whole bunch of different ways, depending on how you take them.

It’s an extremely tragic. I think we’ve spoken a little about this before, but do you think there’s room to explore more negative emotions in games?

Yeah, although I don’t think that’s necessarily necessary or a sign of a greater emotional complexity or sophistication. Emo teenage poetry isn’t inherently better because it’s depressing and self-absorbed. A game that makes you cry is not inherently a more emotionally sophisticated thing than one that captures many subtle shades of joy or rage or fear, all those more traditional game emotions.

But what is important is that we all keep pushing at the potential emotional range of gaming, and how subtle we can make a player’s emotional journey. I mean, what I hope about Esther is that although it is fairly dark, there are subtle tones to that, an ebb and flow that makes it an interesting journey that we can all recognise in part, rather than just us standing there hitting the player with the tragedy hammer until they give in. I think there’s a really uplifting core to how Esther ends, that last sequence is really all about this sense of release, of wonder. Even marooned in the darkest places, there is hope, humanity.
Having said that, I thought Conscientious Objector – our Doom 3 mod – was funny as hell, but everyone else seems to think it’s really depressing and nihilistic, so maybe it’s just me.

What is Esther? Is it a game? An “interactive experience”?

I spent a long time agonising over this when we launched it, I think because I didn’t think it would be accepted as a game. I was wrong about that, and I’m really happy to be wrong. Esther is an experimental game, unless you want to get really technical about rule-systems and interaction feedback loops and all of that. It looks like a game and plays like a game, so it’s a game. Just a very odd one.

But what is acceptable as a game now feels quite different to when we first launched Esther in 2007, which is really weird. So maybe that’s the answer. The question of whether it was a game was different in 2007. Back then, I’m not as sure, now, yeah, I think it is.

And how do you see this game space progressing? What state is it in now, and do you think it has potential to go somewhere?

I think we’ve been in an amazing period of creative expansion in games for a couple of years, and that ranges right from really left-field indie titles to mainstream AAAs. So the space seems to be in a pretty healthy state right now, I’d say. Despite the usual frustrations in terms of content being by-and-large a bit derivative and the usual suspects, there’s a fair bit of often quite subtle change in mainstream titles. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of room for improvement, but credit where credit is due.

And indie gaming is just fantastic right now, there are so many great titles and developers out there, and some really experimental work, which is finding a place in the market. One of the many things I love about gaming culture is that players are not just happy to pay for innovation, they actively want to. Games get a lot of stick for being derivative and all the same, but the reality is that it’s one of the most amazing mediums on the planet in terms of the audience actively demanding experimentation and innovation and being really happy to fund that themselves. So that’s really encouraging for me.

In terms of progress and potential, well, I’m slightly more nervous. Up to now, mostly big players have been working in retail, and it’s meant that a lot of more niche products got to play online without that kind of competition. If the trend for publishers to move to digital distribution, and developers to self-publish continues, then that means indies may have to compete more with big marketing budgets and that’s going to make things tougher potentially. I think it’s really interesting how all of a sudden, these really big, established studios are all starting to proclaim their indie roots, or call themselves indies, which is hilarious really. I’d love a deal with EA or Sony, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think I’d have the balls to then go around calling myself indie if I got one. What it does show is that the term ‘indie’ has value, and that’s really important, because it’s innovation, individual vision, and not being willing to compromise that drives that value. That can only be a good thing.

I’m rambling, as usual. Times have been good, times will get tougher, but games are finding a momentum in terms of innovation, diversity and experimentation, and that’s only going to increase. So I think the future is looking good.

Robert Briscoe aka. LittleLostPoly – Developer

How did you come to be remaking Dear Esther?

Back in early 2009, after an exhausting couple of years working in Sweden, I decided to take some time out to recuperate back in the UK and perhaps work on a small project of my own for a while to keep me occupied. Originally I had planned to build upon a small prototype I had been tinkering with for some time called The Willows – a zombie survival horror mod based on the Source Engine. However, shortly before my plans came to fruition, there was a sudden surge of zombie games which eventually led to my decision to put the project on hiatus until the zombie genre was a little less saturated.

This left me with the dilemma of finding an alternative project to work on. I needed something original enough not to have to compete with the mainstream games market, and something simple enough which would allow me to concentrate on my skills as an artist and not be hindered by other limitations such as coding. Struggling with ideas I began trawling through my games collection, and later, through ModDB searching for some kind of inspiration until eventually stumbling across the veritable gold nugget that was Dear Esther.

What appealed to you about it?

It was the inspiration I’d been looking for: a simple, highly original idea which was singularly focused on telling a story through the environment. I found that although the original design and visuals were, quite frankly, a little rough around the edges, it excelled in every other conceivable area. On my first play-through I was completely drawn in, feeling emotions I’d not felt in any game before or since. It stuck in my mind for days afterwards and although I toyed with the idea of translating Dear Esther’s core mechanics to my own designs, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was so much untapped potential in the original, if only for a proper coat of paint and a more polished design. I eventually decided to take on the remake and haven’t looked back since.

What do you feel you’ve been able to bring to Esther that the original version didn’t capture?

I think one of the areas that the original fell short on was the potential depth of the story that could have been told through the environment. One of the most common complaints about the original was the tediousness of trudging through the simplistic landscape between audio cues and landmarks, which made exploring rather unrewarding, and sought to emphasise the linearity of the game. To be fair, it wasn’t really a failing of the design per se, but an shortcoming of the Source Engine and how it handles large outdoor environments. Luckily I had worked with Source for over five years and had a few tricks up my sleeve, which has allowed me to create a much more rich and detailed world than ever attempted before in the Source Engine, which encourages and rewards exploration with the incentive and uncovering small clues and details about the history of the island, its inhabitants and our protagonist.

What is Esther, to you? Is it a game? Something completely different?

That’s one question I’ve been wrestling with for some time now, which makes it especially difficult when trying to explain to your friends and family what exactly it is you’ve been working on for the past year and a half. I often find myself avoiding the use of the word ‘game’ in context with Dear Esther, at least in the traditional sense of the word, preferring to describe it as more of an experience or a story. I always ask people if they have ever stared at a painting and wondered what the story was behind it, or imagined being able to transport yourself through that small window into the world and explore it. Most people connect with this, but when forced to revert to a more traditional ‘game’ context, I will usually fall back to describing it as a first-person adventure game where the goal is to figure out why you’re playing it.

What are your thoughts on this sort of “not-game” space at the moment?

I think it’s extremely important and highly beneficial to games development as a whole. ‘Not-games’ tend to focus on, and dissect, important areas which are tragically overlooked in the modern game design philosophy. I believe they allow us a greater understanding and insight into how and why we empathise and interact with our games. Dinner Date, The Graveyard and Every Day The Same Dream are great examples of this.

Jessica Curry – Sound Designer

The music in Esther is obviously a really key component in its emotional weight. What was your process for composing the soundtrack?

What was nice about this project, unlike films that I’ve worked on, is that the soundtrack, the island and the script were all being built at the same time, so we were talking a lot about the ideas that Dan had, then I’d go off and write some music and he’d listen to that and respond with some script. Or he might come and say “this bit of the island needs to have this feel”, but often before he’d actually worked out what exactly was going to happen there. So it was a very organic process, but I also had a lot of freedom. It wasn’t that I got handed a basically finished product and then had to score around that, but I actively got to held sculpt what that experience was. Maybe it’s because Dan is a writer and often the writing and the soundtrack for games come after the design, so he wanted to try really integrating all of those things.

And I believe it’s all being re-recorded for the new release, correct? How exactly are you going about that?

It’s really exciting. The original score was done on a shoestring budget, so a lot of digital sounds were used rather than real instruments, and you can always hear the difference in the final piece. So it means I’ve got the opportunity to bring in a string quartet, a concert pianist and a vocalist; and that will make a huge difference to the music. It will add so much depth and warmth to the sound, and that’s really important to me and to the game, as the music really provides a lot of the emotional backbone to what is going on. There’ll still be a lot of the digital soundscapes, which lots of people really loved about the original, but getting to use live musicians is just going to make a big difference.

Also, going back to the soundtrack means we’ll be able to add in some new pieces and variations. In the original there were parts where there was no music because we’d have just had to have repeated it. So what we’ve got the opportunity to do is break up some of the themes and have fragments, ideas, fleeting bits of music in other parts of the island, which will really add to this sense of a haunted landscape. Dan is keen on that too, that it will encourage exploration as you won’t have the situation where you go off and explore but then have to retrace your steps, trudging back across the same bit of ground in silence. Rob [Briscoe] has also been adding new features into the environment, so I get to respond musically to that too, which is great.

What is Dear Esther, to you? Is it a game? Something else entirely?

I see this as a work of art, as much as I do a game. I’m not a gamer or from that world at all, so I’ve always seen it as a piece of digital, interactive art. What is interesting to me is that Dan sees it as a game, but neither of us really think you have to make a distinction between game and art. For me, art is about an experience which touches people deeply, and if a game can do that, it’s art. I really think and hope that Esther achieves that – it certainly seems to have done.

The music that I’ve written for Esther is the first time that I’ve inspired fan mail- every few days I get a lovely email from someone who has had a really strong reaction to the music. As a composer, that means everything to me and it really touches me that people from all over the world take the time to write and express their feelings. I’m very grateful for that and it’s utterly thrilling.

Whatever it is, where do you see this “not-game” space at the moment? And where’s it heading?

I’m just not into traditional games, as I don’t really find them interesting, mainly because of the subject matter. So if games are expanding beyond zombies and chainsaws, that’s always going to be a good thing for me! When we won the award at Indiecade, what was fantastic was meeting all these amazing developers, who were doing brilliant, artistic and beautiful things with games, and that was very inspiring. So I’m glad we are part of that.

Da-Da-Dash DX Edition

By Renard. Download it from the official website.

Taking a screenshot of this was harder than you'd think.

This is a maddeningly fast game. The premise: grab a selection of different jewels from around a grid, while avoiding the bullets and laser beams of an enormous monster which sits atop the screen.

There’s a ‘normal’ mode, which makes things relatively restrained, but frankly that isn’t a lot of fun. It’s in the game’s ‘accelerated’ mode that things really come into their own. You move your miniature spacecraft around the grid by clicking on your destination and seeing the little fella zip right there, which means there’s no real opportunity for edging carefully around the hail of fire heading in your direction. This means ‘accelerated’ mode becomes a frantic dash around the screen, as you desperately hope you’ve managed to dodge the bad guy’s latest spray of hot death. A whole heap of fun.

Fotonica

By SantaRagione. Play it on Kongregate.

Flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

Fotonica is a splendid one-button game that takes a fair few cues from the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Canabalt. Your task is to run like the bloomin’ wind along a track, but the only control you’re blessed with is when to jump. Hold down any button to power up a leap, and release it to go flying through the air – and, hopefully, land where you’re expecting.

It isn’t a new idea, by any means. These simplified free-running games have been all the rage in recent months. This one is particularly noticeable for its visual design, though, Fotonica throwing hyperactive wireframes in your direction which add a whole new dimension of adrenaline in your direction. The sense of speed is enormous, and the entire thing remains just about distinctive enough to hold your attention – even through a couple of odd difficulty spikes.

The Dream Machine – Chapter 1

By Cockroach. Play it on the official website.

"What DID I come in here for?"

The name unfortunately gives away what this astonishingly crafted point-and-click adventure is all about. After moving to a new house, your character and his wife stumble across a big machine that allows you to enter people’s dreams. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen until Chapter 2, which you have to pay for – as you will all subsequent episodes. (And yes, this does make Chapter 1 a bit more akin to a demo, but it’s called a chapter, so I feel no guilt for shoehorning it into this list.)

Chapter 1 is remarkable for its own reasons, though. For starters, it’s all hand-crafted and animated. The sets are real, physical sets, and the characters are made of clay. It’s a really impressive piece of work from its indie developers – even more so when you realise it’s actually quite good, with sensible puzzles, strong dialogue, and a refreshingly understated opening that really draws you into its world.

SuteF

By RottenTater. Get it from the official website.

Happy nightmares.

As sinister as you can imagine, SuteF has been stirring up a few reactions in the last month. It’s a puzzle platformer in the style of – say – VVVVVV, but comes equipped with a bunch of new ideas, as well as a completely different vibe, that turn this unnerving creation into its own beast.

You’ve got to avoid death and get to the TV screens, essentially. But various obstacles stand in your way, and you have a selection of abilities to help you overcome them. The puzzles are smart, cerebral, often devilishly difficult but always sensible. And the thematics are wonderful: delightfully twisted in a way that sticks you to the edge of your seat as you dare to imagine what might come next. Both surreal in spirit and solid in design, SuteF is only marred by an apparent inability to quit the bloody thing in any way other than bringing up the task manager. Seriously?

Goblin War Machine

By Big Block Games. Play it on the website.

Your spear is no match for my ENORMOUS CANNON BIKE.

There was a game released on Xbox Live Arcade in the summer. It was called Limbo, and it was really very good. You should go and play it on your friend’s console toy, or something. But if you can’t bring yourself to do that, you can get a fairly good idea of its aesthetic design by playing Goblin War Machine, a game that seems to have been fairly obviously influenced by Playdead’s quirky puzzle-platformer.

Of course, actually play the thing and there are plenty of differences. Goblin War Machine is about constructing an enormous bike-o-tank and ploughing like hell through a bunch of tiny settlements. It’s a lot of fun, too, especially as the game opens up: score points for kills, and you unlock new features with which to customise your machine of doom. The little guys with spears and the silhouetted greyscale are evocative of others’ work, but it’s through its delight in silliness that Goblin War Machine really shines.

Champions Online

By Cryptic Studios. Get it from the official website.

Another MMO switching to a free-to-play model.

We seem to be being treated to quite a few online games going free. It’s not that many months since Relic’s extraordinary RTS Company of Heroes threw away its need for up-front payments, and the excellent Lord of the Rings Online made the same move shortly after. We’re soon to see an updated edition of APB, too, which is set to function on a microtransaction system. Although, to be fair, APB was rubbish. So maybe don’t think about that one too much.

Still, it’s an interesting new area for the games industry to explore, and the result is that we’re seeing some decent games emerge into the free-to-play realms. Champions Online is a flawed but fun MMO that expands upon Cryptic’s previous City of Heroes/Villains titles – a colourful, action-packed universe of superhero mayhem that does enough to keep you entertained for many hours on end.

The free version locks out a few subscriber-only features, but for all intents and purposes it’s the same game, only without the monthly fee. If money were involved, Champions Online would be a cautious recommendation. But now that it isn’t, go nuts.

What this all means is that I’m sitting here feeling like I should do some exercise. And what better way to exercise than jabbing my fingers at a keyboard while playing some of December’s best free games? Here are the five notable ones I’ve played in the last month.

Endeavour

By Zillix. Play it on Newgrounds.

Fine, maybe I will. Pout.

This is a lovely little exploratory platformer. Or, rather, a lovely big exploratory platformer. While the game initially appears simple and small, it quickly sprawls out across a huge area, interlinking and intertwining with itself, as you follow a request from your deceased father to collect your inheritance from a treasure chest.

It’s quaint, and at first feels quite predictable. But as the game expands, it throws quite a few curveballs your way. You gain new abilities as you go along, allowing you access to areas you previously passed but couldn’t enter. And the dialogue, while straightforward, really helps to set the tone. A marvellous way to spend a portion of the day.

K.O.L.M.

By Armor Games. Play it on their website.

For a Flash game, it looks wondrous.

A story about a robot, K.O.L.M. is one of the most gorgeous, strikingly melancholy and creatively designed Flash games I’ve played in ages. It’s ostensibly a platformer, but like Endeavour it’s primarily about exploration. This time, there’s also a captivating unfolding story to keep you going as well.

The narration is quietly sinister, while the visual design adapts to its themes. Your robot begins without eyes, so the screen is simply a muddy blur, with vague shapes shifting around as you attempt to guide him to the next area. With each new component re-fitted, you gain new abilities which allow for progress elsewhere. It’s Metroid without the action, then, but it’s the aesthetic that really sells it: it looks, sounds and feels absolutely wonderful.

Dark Visions

By Tenth Play. Play it on the official website.

Game settings by numbers - but a pretty impressive adventure.

This is an interesting one. I pondered for quite a while about whether to include it. The problem is this: it’s an impressive game, a fully fledged semi-3D adventure built in Flash and playable in a web browser, all for the handy price of nothing at all. But I’m not entirely sure whether it’s any good or not.

It’s very traditional. You select whether you want to look at, interact with or move towards an area, then let the actions play out. The puzzles are… traditional adventure game puzzles. Half of me wants to hate them, while the other half totally appreciates what the developers were going for. The setting and story are less easy to defend, throwing in hundred adventure game clichés into – gasp! – a spooky mansion.

But like I said: it’s a huge 3D point-and-click adventure that’s playable for free in a browser, and it’s about a million times better than some of the rubbish that gets released commercially.

One Chance

By Awkward Silence Games. Play it on Newgrounds.

What would you do?

You have one chance to save the world.

The clock ticks down. Humanity will be wiped out in a matter of days. You’re a scientist, and if you play your cards right, you might be able to prevent the global apocalypse. But you’re also a family man. And if the world is going to end this week, you’d quite like to spend your remaining hours with your wife and daughter. What to do?

That’s the question One Chance asks you to make. It’s a haunting, gorgeously drawn and genuinely moving experimental game whose mood is occasionally spoiled by some absolutely dreadful writing. Had a script editor looked over this prior to release, it could have been amazing.

Technobabylon – Part II

By Technocrat. Get it from Big Blue Cup.

This is a particularly striking opening.

The first part of Technobabylon was released in October. “Quietly melancholy but always intriguing, it’s a fascinating little game,” I said back then. Much the same is true of this second part, but there have been some changes made along the way.

For starters, while the first part was a fairly traditional room escape game, Part II has a more typical point-and-click adventure feel to it. There’s a more expansive story, too: where the first game was a marvellous piece of scene-setting, Technobabylon – Part II takes that scene and weaves a more satisfying narrative into proceedings. Once again, it’s atmospheric and engrossing, and well worth a play.

Radical Fishing

Vlambeer. Play it on Bored.com.

Where did you get that hat?

Last month, I enthused about a fantastic, ultra-challenging platformer called Super Crate Box. This month, developer Vlambeer has released another game. This time playable in a browser, your aim is to throw your hook deep into the sea, catch as many fish as you can, fire them up into the air, then shoot the living carp out of them. (Yes, the fish puns are very important.)

The deeper underwater you managed to delve, the more exotic and valuable fish you’re able to destroy in a shower of red mist. You can also buy various upgrades with your earnings, such as that delightful red cap I’m wearing in the screenshot above. Completely silly, Radical Fishing is also hilarious.

…But That Was [Yesterday]

OneMrBean. Play it on Jay Is Games.

I challenge you not to be moved by the ending.

Developed as part of the Jay Is Games Casual Gameplay Competition, …But That Was [Yesterday] begins at an excruciatingly slow tempo. It’s only once you’ve persevered for a couple of minutes and learnt how the central mechanic works that everything begins to fall into place – but once it does, this is absolutely lovely.

It is, essentially, the story of a man who’s haunted by memories of the past, and how he deals with that. But it springs into something truly joyous. I’ll say no more, for fear of terrible spoilers, but this is definitely something that’s worth ten minutes of your time.

Activate The Three Artefacts And Then Leave

Increpare. Grab it from the official website.

Guess what you have to do in this game.

A title from the You Have To Burn The Rope school of game naming, Activate The Three Artefacts And Then Leave is a game in which you must activate the three artefacts and then leave. The place in which you’re activating the three artefacts, and as such the place you’ll then leave, is an extraordinary maze of black-outlined blocks which fade into a muddled blur at a distance.

The name really does say it all, which might not sound so impressive. But the increasingly mental design of the environment, combined with its black and white colour palette, makes navigation an uncomfortable and stifling experience. The soundtrack, too, is oppressive and haunting, meaning you’ll want to activate the three artefacts and then leave as quickly as possible.

Sydney Shark

Mausland Entertainment. Play it on Newgrounds.

The most fun I've had in a game all month.

This is the most straight-up fun I’ve had with a game all month – no exaggeration. Sydney Shark is the sequel to Miami Shark, which was a game about a shark on the loose in Miami. You can probably guess what Sydney Shark is about.

You’ll rack up your score by diving underwater then powering up above the surface, snapping at anyone or anything in your way. Landing on boats causes them to explode in a fiery ball of awesome. You can cling onto planes and drag them to their doom, bite the heads off horses, and end the game early by setting off a nuclear bomb. The shark wears an Australian hat. This game is wonderful.

Sp.A.I.

//No Comment. Get it from IndieDB.

In all its neon splendour, Sp.A.I looks gorgeous.

A third-year project by a group of students at the Queensland University of Technology, this is a surprisingly polished puzzle game with elements of third-person shooting and platforming. Set in a high-future, Tron-esque world, all glowing grids and neon floatiness, it’s the story of an artificial intelligence hacking program called Aviva, and her efforts to shut down an enemy mainframe.

It’s essentially a sequence of puzzle minigames linked by more typical action sequences. But it all holds together extremely well, with conundrums embedded into the game world with aplomb. And it looks absolutely gorgeous, using the Unreal tech to splendid effect. One of the most professional free games you’re likely to play any time soon.

Octodad

DePaul Gaming Experience. Download it from the official website.

The tagline is 'Loving father. Caring husband. Secret octopus.' Give it medals.

In Octodad, you play as an octopus pretending to be a human male. I want to be very careful not to understate the brilliance of this. As said octopus, you must go about your day-to-day routine without arousing suspicion that you may, in fact, be an octopus. Even your wife hasn’t caught on yet.

You control Octodad by switching between hands and feet modes. Holding the left or right mouse button causes him to raise his left or right foot, or extend his left or right arm. Moving the mouse forwards or backwards pushes that particular limb in that particular direction. It’s an absolute nightmare to maneuver, but that’s the joyous thing: flailing around from place to place, almost as if you were an octopus pretending to be a person.

It’s rough and glitchy, but the concept is an absolute joy.

Super Crate Box

Vlambeer. Grab it from the official website.

I want to be called Super Crate Box!

For one, it’s called Super Crate Box. Super Crate Box! It wins for the title alone. But there’s more to it than just an absolutely tremendous name. See, Super Crate Box is also one of the most delightfully silly, hilarious, brutally challenging freeware platformers around.

The aim of the game is to collect as many crates as possible: collecting one changes your weapon, and spawns the next crate. But standing in your way are several nasties who bounce around at an alarming rate. Fast-paced death comes frequently – it took me about five attempts to clear the bloody tutorial – but it never stops being a gargantuan lump of ridiculous fun.

In case the tutorial doesn’t make it clear to you: every enemy that reaches the fire at the bottom is reincarnated as a fast enemy at the top. Kill them all before they get to it to make life easier for yourself.

Gretel & Hansel Part 2

Markopudding. Play it on Newgrounds.

Somehow I doubt this guy will win Come Dine With Me.

The first part of this curious indie adventure game was released last year, and now part two is upon us. It’s a rather unusual retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story, painted in delightful watercolour and combining quaint with sinister in a hugely satisfying way.

It’s occasionally a little fiddly, and not always brilliant at communicating what it wants you to do. Nevertheless, it’s an artful and interesting adventure game, small but delightfully formed, and often genuinely surprising.

Technobabylon – Part 1

Technocrat. Get it from Big Blue Cup.

Technobabylon is a glorious piece of scene-setting.

Room escape games sometimes get a bit of a bad rap, or at least buried away in their own little communities. That’s a shame, because some are absolutely lovely, like this one: a short one-room adventure game built in Adventure Game Studio.

Its systems are nothing out of the ordinary, but the writing is strong, and the scene-setting delightful. This is a world in which many inhabitants are addicted to Trancing – delving head first into virtual worlds that strip away the horrors of this future reality. Quietly melancholy but always intriguing, it’s a fascinating little game.

Pirates of New Horizons

Exit Strategy Entertainment. Download it from the official website.

There's lots of potential here. Let's get the whole thing built!

This is a nice idea. Exit Strategy Entertainment would quite like to make a game called Pirates of New Horizons. They’ve drawn up plans for a full-length singleplayer action adventure, but they’re wary of taking risks. So they’ve put together a prototype to demo their core mechanics and art style to their potential player base. If people think it has potential, they’ll find a way of getting the thing made. If not, they’ll move onto something else.

While the prototype is fairly insubstantial, I’m writing about it here because I would love to see a full game built upon these foundations. It’s a swordy-slashy action adventure from the Zelda school of combat design: Zelda with pirates, if you will. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but it’s the luscious art style that really swings it, complete with Mini Ninjas-esque puffs of smoke when enemies are quashed. It seems to be lovely. Write to Exit to tell them how much you’d like to see a full game.

Siamese Enemies

Krimelo. Get it from the developer’s blog.

She did not ask for two babies!

Absolutely mental, Krimelo’s new game Siamese Enemies sees you and a friend working first with each other, then subsequently against each other, to win your mother’s love. After all, she did not ask for two babies.

Against a barmy backdrop of primary colour (the exact hue decided by your decision of which nation your mother is from), you’ll first race across a level with your conjoined bro, collecting organs on the way. Then comes surgery, at which point everything changes, and the whole thing becomes a mad dash to get all your body parts in the right place before legging it home to mummy.

It’s ludicrous, monumentally stupid, and just a little bit perfect.

White

Enjemin. Get it from the official website.

A new meaning to the term 'art-game'.

Built by students at French design school Enjemin, White is a thing of muddled sadism and hysterical cuteness. It’s a first-person shooter in which you blast away at colourful critters, who bumble and bounce around a huge white square. Shoot them in their adorable little faces and they’ll splatter across the blank canvas, creating a pretty piece of modern art.

But different weapons create different splatter effects, giving you added control over your eventual masterpiece. Weaker guns send them running for their little lives while bleeding colour all over the level, while heavier boomstick explode the poor blighters in a glorious rainbow shower. There’s even a big magnet gun with which to pick them up and hurl them to where you want them before commencing with your killer artwork.

Most wonderfully, your finished piece is saved to your hard drive as an image file, which can then be submitted to a gallery on the game’s website. Here are some of the best so far. I guarantee you’ll have hours of fun trying to better them.

1. Get your hardware sorted

If you want to compete on an even playing field, the last thing you want is a dated rig or sloppy internet connection holding you back. In a game whose combat is as finely balanced as that of Counter-Strike, just a slight framerate drop can be catastrophic. “Low fps can affect your recoil, bullet registration and smoothness of your game,” says Elliot. “If you’re stuck with a terrible computer, you don’t really have much chance online against someone with a top-end machine. Also, a good computer and connection will be the same conditions you’ll be playing on when you turn up to a tournament, so you won’t have to adapt to different conditions when you set up on the day.”

"Get your hardware sorted," sez wez.

2. Find a team you get along with

Sometimes in life we’re all thrown into a situation where we have to work with people we aren’t so fond of. Like at PC Gamer, for example. Bloody scoundrels, the lot of them. But there’s no doubting that getting on with your team mates is going to make things a whole lot easier down the line. In fact, it might even be better to pick friendly souls with potential to improve than switching in the cream of the crop without knowing them well. “Playing with people you get along with will make you enjoy the game much more, and undoubtedly be more likely to stick together,” says Elliot. “Changing your lineup every month won’t do you much good, even if you’re replacing a player with someone slightly better.”

3. Practice your tactics in the best environments

If you’re considering competitive Counter-Strike, the chances are you’ll already spend a fair number of hours playing the game. But practicing in the right environments is key to your continual improvement. Deathmatch servers are a good place to start – “You respawn as soon as you die, so you’re constantly shooting and it’s a good way to improve your gunplay,” Elliot explains – and clan war practice is pretty much essential. Use a chat program such as mIRC to search for practice games against other teams, and try out all the tactics you’ve been mulling over in your head. “I’d advise having ten minutes after each match you play to assess what you did wrong, what you did right, and how you could improve,” adds Elliot.

4. Watch demos of other players

Practice might make perfect, but there are numerous intricacies to Counter-Strike play that you may be able to pick up from others. Watching demo videos of other players is a great way to assess their mad skills without fear of being gunned down if you take too long to stop and stare. Professionals will have various different ways of moving, aiming, shooting and reacting to different situations. Just make sure you try out your own moves as well: “All players have different styles,” warns Elliot, “and one player’s style may not be suitable for you or your team.” Demos from Dignitas’ players can be found on their website.

Watching demos of pro players can be helpful, but make sure you practice too.

5. Forget the rest, play against the best

It’s always nice to win, so it might be tempting to select weaker opponents for practice matches. But this can be counter-productive. Unless you’re playing at the highest level you’re capable of, there’s not a great deal of compulsion to improve – and certainly less you can take away from both victories and defeats. “Although playing against people below your own ability will still benefit you in some ways,” Elliot explains, “playing against top teams will give you an insight into the level of professional play, and allow you to learn from high level players.”

6. Communication is key

As with all team-based games, but perhaps even more so with Counter-Strike, it’s important to be in good contact with your team mates throughout a match. A lack of communication can be the difference between a decisive victory and an embarrassing, crushing defeat, so talking to each other is tremendously important. But simply maintaining contact isn’t enough: it’s imperative to be efficient with your communications. “It’s best to keep your calls about what’s happening short and quick, and explain everything you know, such as how many enemies you see, if you see the bomb carrier, and what weapons they have,” says Elliot. And be sure to get hold of a voice chat program such as Ventrilo or Mumble to utilise during practice: they allow you to speak to your team mates whether you’re dead or alive, an advantage not afforded by Counter-Strike’s in-game chat system.

7. Embrace the community spirit

You might be tempted to pour all your spare hours into improving your game, but there’s more to being a professional Counter-Strike player than simply playing Counter-Strike. Your team could consist of the best players in the world, but if no one knows who you are, you’re probably going to end up going nowhere fast. “Playing an active role in your country’s Counter-Strike community means that there is more general interest, which means there will be more tournaments and therefore more oppotunities to practice in competitions and under pressure,” says Elliot. “Also, it allows you to make friends to casually play with when your team may not be online, so you can still practice even if your team mates aren’t around.”

Team Dignitas in action.

8. Master the three pillars of skillful combat

Elliot flags three key things to master in Counter-Strike combat: recoil, flashbangs, and smoke grenades. Counter-Strike’s recoil patterns are very different to many shooters, and it’s imperative to master the technique: “For most professional players, the general technique is to spray at close range, tap fire at medium range, and tap slightly slower at long range, all while moving in between taps to make you a harder target to hit,” suggests Elliot. Meanwhile, good grenade use can make all the difference. “Again, watching a professional player’s demo will give you some useful tips,” says Elliot, “but it’s always best to join an empty server with your team mates and practice them for yourself.”

9. Financial advice

Counter-Strike isn’t all about the combat tactics. It’s also a game in which managing your money is key to high-level success. At a professional level, you’ll need to make sure your finances are in check whether you’re winning or losing, because ensuring your team is finely in-tune and well-timed with quick purchases is essential. Elliot’s top tip? “If you find yourself short on money after – say – losing the pistol round, the best thing to do is save your money by not buying anything for one or two rounds, so you can save up enough cash to purchase a rifle and armour.”

10. For goodness’ sake, stick with it

It might sound obvious, but the only way you’ll reach the dizzy heights of top-level professional gaming is to keep plugging away until you’re good enough. It’s a lot of work, and something you’ll need to treat like a real job as much as play – even during those inevitable times when morale reaches rock bottom. “A lot of dedication is needed to become a professional,” says Elliot, “and there will be times when you and your team are trying to improve and results may not always go in your favour. If this happens, the best thing you can do is stick together, and keep playing through it.”

The Argument

Harvey Smith. Play it online.

Clearly not an actual screenshot, but probably more interesting.

Here’s something I really love. The Argument is a small work of interactive fiction by Deus Ex lead designer, and Deus Ex: Invisible War project lead Harvey Smith. Very short, but exquisitely written and painting the scene with a delightful subtlety, it’s well worth a few minutes of your time.

The level of interaction is intentionally limited, and the focus really is on scene-setting and capturing a moment. But Smith achieves that remarkably well, and it arrives at a sweet conclusion. It does of course suffer for its form, and how carefully you must phrase things. And even then it doesn’t always quite work: at one point, The Argument told me a couch was not something I could sit on. But this is generally lovely.

The Silver Lining: Episode 2

Phoenix Online Studios. Download it from its website.

This little fella is impossibly cute.

Here’s the fan adventure game project that was never to be, after it was squished by the big legal stampiness of Activision after seven years of development. Thankfully sense was seen, and here we are now at Episode 2 of The Silver Lining, an exceptionally professional amateur project based on the King’s Quest fiction.

As with the first episode, for an adventure game this is unusually light on the puzzle-solving, primarily focusing instead on its episodically unfolding narrative. But it’s the presentation values that really impress, the game coming across as far more polished than a great many professional projects. It’s not too late to catch up on the story, either. Grab both episodes beyond the link above.

Snakes of Avalon

Igor Hardy / Alex van der Wijst. Download it from the devs’ website.

Beyond strange.

Another point-and-click adventure, this one rather more surreal, Snakes of Avalon is – in the words of its developers – “about alcoholic incapacitation and people obsessed with murdering their other half.” It’s a strange, warped, and bleakly amusing Adventure Game Studio creation, which… well.

It’s an odd one. It’s completely, unreservedly bonkers. A lot of the time I didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on. Some of the puzzles are ridiculous. But the art style is intriguing, and its bizarre sense of humour strangely arresting. I like it a lot, even though I’m not quite sure why.

Creaky Old Memory

DADIU. Download it from the website.

I can't remember what I was going to write here.

An IndieCade 2010 finalist, this is an intriguing game from DADIU, the Danish National Academy for Digital Interactive Entertainment. A glance at the Academy’s history tells me it’s responsible for such past gems as quirky Half-Life 2 mod Flipside, as well as the rather excellent Puzzle Bloom. And even though the development teams will obviously change, you can kind of see the lineage.

Creaky Old Memory sees you take on the role of an elderly lady, collecting glowing photos which are strewn around a library. Doing so involves solving a bunch of lightweight environmental puzzles, dragging ladders around the place to allow you access to different areas, and allows you to unlock fragments of the lady’s story. It’s got a style all of its own, making it a nice and atmospheric – if not too taxing - distraction.

Feign

Ian Snyder. Play it online.

You're instructed to collect "bodies". Feign is immediately a bit weird.

Feign reminds me why I continue to trawl through reams of browser games: sometimes, you’ll find one that’s absolutely extraordinary. This is a dreamy, atmospheric little game, in which you’re first instructed to locate and collect nine “bodies”. One’s directly in front of you, which is easy enough, but it took me a minute or two to realise I was actually in an enormously complex maze where it’s not always obvious what’s a wall and what’s a door.

That might sound frustrating – and it certainly can be difficult – but the way it toys with your sense of space is quite remarkable. And the music is simply gorgeous. Things ramp up nicely as you progress, as well. It’s an immensely rewarding little experience, haunting and beautiful throughout.

Company of Heroes Online

Relic Entertainment. Download it from the official website.

Tanks: like angry decade-old PC Gamer jokes.

This month, in what must be one of the best deals in PC gaming, Relic’s classic RTS Company of Heroes went completely free to play. You’re getting a superb single player campaign containing classic missions such as the breathtaking fight for Carentan. On top of that there’s an expansive multiplayer metagame that sees your general leveling up from battle to battle, gaining experience and recruiting specialised units to use in future fights. Few strategy games can rival the brutality and intensity of a Company of Heroes multiplayer skirmishes. If you’ve never played it before, now’s your chance to try a genuine PC gaming classic.

Unreal

What happens: You awake on a crashed prison ship. Exploring, you notice something moving up ahead. You follow it through the corridors, readying yourself for a fight against whatever this alien thing might be, before eventually escaping the ship.

The crashed prison ship is an unnerving place to escape from.

Why it’s awesome: The fight never comes, even though it’s always hinted at. You’re expecting your alien foe to strike at any moment as you stalk it around the crashed prison. It keeps showing itself for a brief second before disappearing again. And at one gruesome point, you hear a fellow prisoner being ripped to shreds on the other side of a door. But actually, all it’s doing is leading you on a natural path to the outside world – and back in 1998, the view you were presented with upon escaping was spectacular.

BioShock

What happens: You’re on a plane. It crashes. You survive, but everything is on fire. Conveniently, there’s a lighthouse sticking up from the ocean, with nothing else around. You enter, and find yourself in a bathysphere, descending for fathoms below the water’s surface, listening to the voice of one Andrew Ryan talking about his political and social ideologies, and then bam – the screen lifts, and you catch your first glimpse of the remarkable underwater world of Rapture.

There are few more amazing sights than your first glimpse of Rapture.

Why it’s awesome: It’s all in the timing of the reveal. The build up has been perfect – the plane crash genuinely startling, the slow swim to the water’s surface suffocating. And then, having listened to this strange man talk about sweat and brows for a while, the curtains drop on this spectacular city just as he speaks its name. “Rapture,” he roars, just as the city appears in front of your very eyes.

Fallout 3

What happens: You’re born. And then, over the next half hour or so, you play through a montage of your whole childhood, seamlessly defining your character along the way. Now that‘s roleplaying.

OHAI.

Why it’s awesome: It just makes perfect sense. Every roleplaying game – of the traditional ilk, at least – starts with some form of character generation. So why not weave that into the narrative? Some of it’s a little tenuous – the fact that a baby gets to choose its own name, for example – but much of it is very smart, and allows you to understand some of the fiction’s history without a big hulk of sloppy exposition. Besides, there are few things as wonderful as crawling around as a little tot while inside a post-apocalyptic bunker.

Pathologic

What happens: After a truckload of scrolling text which makes barely any sense, you’re dropped unceremoniously into a theatre. Onstage stand three “actors”: the game’s three playable characters. They argue about who is best suited to the job, then when you’re ready, you walk through a door to the right and select which one of them you want to play as.

Not the most conventional character selection screen.

Why it’s awesome: Talk about setting the tone. Pathologic never did stray away from the meta-commentary, but this staggering display of theatrical detachment as about as big a mission statement as they come. Here’s a game that straight-up acknowledges that its world, its characters and its narrative aren’t real: the point, then, becomes the layered metaphors and interesting ideas that Pathologic plays with throughout its uncomfortable and bleak duration.

Deus Ex

What happens: There’s a nice intro cinematic, then you’re thrown into your first mission. It begins on the docks of Liberty Island. There’s a robot stomping around. You meet your brother, who presents you with an interesting choice.

This robot is incidental to everything, but sets the scene perfectly.

Why it’s awesome: Two reasons: the choice, and the robot. The choice is of which weapon to take from your brother – a sniper rifle, a nonlethal minicrossbow, or a giant bloody rocket launcher. It’s a statement of Deus Ex‘s willingness to allow you to make broad choices at every turn, and whichever weapon you choose can drastically alter your experience of the opening level. And the robot is just wonderful. It’s just there, happily plodding about, not referenced by either character. It’s a glorious piece of incidental imagery that completely cements the feel of this day-after-tomorrow universe, without a single drop of exposition required.

Dragon Age: Origins

What happens: Depending on your chosen character, Dragon Age could begin in one of six different ways. And we’re not talking slightly different opening cutscenes, either: there’s a drastically different hour-or-so to be played through depending on your decision.

The Human Noble intro. Yours could well be very different.

Why it’s awesome: So many games proudly boast multiple endings. In reality, they’re rarely more than a quick cutscene switch-around based on an arbitrary moral choice a few minutes earlier. But in Dragon Age, you get to live through your entire history. It makes your position in this world feel so much more credible having lived through it – but what’s most remarkable is how the different origin sections contain unique sides to the story, causing you to sympathise with different characters based on your own character choice. A very smart touch.

Fahrenheit (aka. Indigo Prophecy)

What happens: You’re sitting on the toilet. A classic intro. But wait! There’s more. A gentleman’s washing his hands. And you’ve got a knife. And all you can do is watch as your character wanders over and stabs the poor fellow ’til he’s dead. Then the game starts, and it’s your job to escape without anyone suspecting a thing.

It kinda looks like the protagonist is taking the mick behind this guy's back.

Why it’s awesome: More games should throw you straight in the deep end. Fahrenheit‘s opening sequence and the ensuing puzzle are brilliant for this. But moreover, it’s a snapshot of exactly the sort of puzzle the game should have stuck with all the way through: a frightening, panicky situation with several possible resolutions. Unfortunately, Fahrenheit decided to forget the intricacy of its opening, and went plain batshit mental by the halfway point.

Braid

What happens: The intro screen launches. And then nothing happens. It’s frozen. Oh, what a great start. You have to just- hang on… you can move! It’s not an intro screen at all – you’re in-game!

This is Tim. Not PC Gamer UK's editor, but another Tim. As far as I know, anyway.

Why it’s awesome: Something of an anomaly on this list, Braid‘s introduction is memorable simply for how unexpectedly stylish it is. It strips away all the unnecessary faff and drops you straight into the first section of the game in a sort of interactive menu. You wander to the right, into a house, and select your level from there – nothing’s extraneous, and it gives you an indicator of how refined Braid is right from the start.

Mass Effect 2

What happens: The Normandy blows up. You, as Commander Shepard, are trying to save the day. But ultimately there’s nothing you can do: as you run through the exploding ship, it tears to shreds, and you’re eventually sucked into the void.

An extraordinary view. A bit dangerous, mind. Don't get too close to the edge.

Why it’s awesome: After the original game’s lacklustre opening hour, Mass Effect 2‘s introduction is like a glorious punch in the face. Action-packed, fast-paced and utterly extraordinary to look at, it’s exactly what the opening to a good space epic should be like. The sequence ends on what would be a nice twist, as well – if the trailers hadn’t spectacularly spoilt it for everyone.

Half-Life

What happens: You go to work. Shit gets real.

Your first glimpse of the ever-sinister G-Man.

Why it’s awesome: It was the first time an action game truly took scene-setting and storytelling seriously. By placing you in a world that was initially working as normal, and sending you on an uneventful train journey to your sector of the Black Mesa facility, Half-Life sucked you into its extraordinarily complex environment. Then, when you managed to blow the place up and cause an alien invasion, the effects of the disaster resonated far more than if you’d have been dropped straight into the shooty bits. 12 years later, it’s still among the finest intros ever crafted.

The Journey Down – Chapter One: Over The Edge

Theodore Waern. Grab it at Big Blue Cup.

You can make some great stuff in AGS if you know what you're doing.

Adventure Game Studio might spawn countless games which look like they’ve been drawn with a mouse in Microsoft Paint, but every now and then someone uses it to create something really special. Theodore Waern has spend the last five years – five! - honing this first chapter of his point-and-click epic, The Journey Down, and that dedication shows.

This is supremely professional for a solo effort, and brings back all the right memories of the ’90s. It’s about as traditional as adventure games get, but if that’s your bag, you won’t find many better free ones than this. It’s just a shame Chapter Two isn’t due until some time next year, especially since the story ends so abruptly.

By The Numbers

AJA. Get it from Big Blue Cup.

The converted mo-capped 3D models give the game a unique look.

Another title created in Adventure Game Studio, By The Numbers is unusual for featuring full voice acting. It’s especially unusual – across gaming generally – for featuring quite good voice acting. However, it’s also intriguing in a couple of other, more fundamental ways.

This is a one-room point-and-click adventure game in which you interrogate an eyewitness of a kidnapping. The game never moves beyond this one room (and another one beyond a two-way mirror), and focuses purely on dialogue. It’s also fully motion-captured, with the resulting 3D animations converted to 2D animations in the engine. Well-written and neatly produced, it’s a genuinely interesting experiment.

Morplee

Ninjadoodle. Play it on Newgrounds.

Panic! Panic! Panic! Panic!

Morplee is a frantic and unusual browser game, part Space Invaders-esque shooter and part collection of mini-games. You’ve to shoot the baddies down as they attack, lest they begin to eat worryingly quickly at your health (as above), while at the same time increasing your score by completing as many mini-games as possible within a one-minute time limit.

It’s that time limit, combined with the ever-present threat of alien invasion, that makes Morplee so brilliant. You wouldn’t expect such a bizarre mashup of a title to work well at all, but in fact it’s a minute-long thrill ride, as you desperately try to multitask through your panic. A simple but inspired idea.

Alchemia

Springtail Studio. Play (some of) it on the website.

It's like Samorost! Except... not quite as good. But still good!

Okay, this one’s slightly out of the ordinary to place on a free games list, because it’s not actually free. It’s $7. But! There is a delightfully sizeable chunk of the game available to play for free online. So I’m going to awkwardly shoehorn it in here, mainly because I absolutely love games like this, and I want you to play it immediately.

As a sort of tactile point-and-click adventure, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s a lot like Amanita Design’s adventure games, especially Samorost. It’s also not quite in the same league. However, it captures that same sense of exploratory magic, and it’s absolutely, staggeringly beautiful to look at. Give it a go. And then pay $7 to finish it off. Go on.

The Curfew

Littleloud / Channel 4. Play it at Channel 4.

He's a shifty one, this dude.

Channel 4 are getting in on the games scene at the moment. Technically developed for educational purposes, the best thing about their output this month has been the fact that they’re enjoyable educational games. That’s an all too rare breed.

The first, The Curfew, was written by Kieron Gillen – a name you might recognise if you’re on the British side of the PC Gamer pond. It’s an FMV-centric adventure game set in a future where second-class citizens aren’t allowed out at night. Think a British City 17 in vibe. It’s your job to decide which of four people to trust with some secret data, which you’re told absolutely cannot get into the wrong hands. Well-written and with mostly decent acting, it’s well worth playing, despite the occasional bug.

Privates

Zombie Cow / Channel 4. Download it from Channel 4.

Sex-ed classes were never like this back in my day.

Bottoms, and vaginas, and lots of sperm. Yes, it’s Channel 4′s other educational game! Just, y’know, one that’s a little less grown-up. But no less wonderful.

Privates is aimed at teenage boys, and attempts to teach them about STIs and condoms and things like that. It’s approximately four hundred billion times funnier and more fabulous than any sex education lesson I ever sat through in school. We used to laugh at those classes for the wrong reasons, but this side-scrolling shooter from Time Gentlemen, Please! developers Zombie Cow gets you laughing in the very best way. If you’re a young ‘un, just promise you’ll remember to learn something.

Alien Swarm
Valve Software. Grab it on Steam.

You’d have been hard pressed this month to have avoided Alien Swarm, Valve’s free co-op shooter. Announced and then released in quick succession, it’s a game that’s managed to make quite some noise in the past couple of weeks – and with good reason.

A standalone, Source Engine-powered update to the classic UT2004 mod of the same name, this top-down shooter is a wonderfully polished effort. Occuping a sort of middle-ground of an Alien Breed/Left 4 Dead/Team Fortress 2 triangle, it contains a whole load of squad-based fun. Just be sure to hone your gun-toting and teamwork skills: it’s not by any means an easy ride.

Big guns, even bigger aliens. What's not to like?

pOnd
The Peanut Gallery. Play online.

pOnd is a little bit special. Interpret the word ‘special’ as you wish. Here’s a web game which rests on an interesting and unexplored mechanic: that of breathing. You’re on a relaxing walk in the countryside, inhaling the crisp air deeply. That’s your somewhat unusual core mechanic in this quirky one-button game.

To be fair, it’s not the most exciting setup. And admittedly, while the opening is interesting, it begins to get somewhat tedious rather quickly. However, it sure knows how to up the ante again towards the end. Make sure you play at least until you arrive at the pond, as there’s a properly magical scene awaiting.

Could this be the world's first breathing simulator?

Stream
Rekcahdam. Download it here.

This is a smart and stylish shoot/puzzle-’em-up that combines Braid with P.B. Winterbottom and adds just a dash of classic side-scrolling action. In this black and white world, glowing objects can be interacted with. But many require more pairs of hands than are attached to your macho body. And there’s baddies to be fought, as well. Scary baddies with scary guns.

Fortunately you’ve also the power to open up a wormhole, which effectively allows you to send a helpful clone of yourself through time loops. It’s not a long game if you know what you’re doing, but some of the puzzles are challenging enough that it’ll take you a few goes – not to mention a whole truckload of brainpower – to get them right.

...and they're right. Buh.