Explore a malevolent sculpture-thing in the beautiful, experimental Césure

Of all the giant obsidian monoliths I've fallen onto in my time - and I've fallen onto a lot - the pulsating black sculpture at the heart of Orihaus' mesmerising Césure is certainly one of the more unsettling. It's perhaps a bit cowardly to admit to being unnerved by a rock, but when it's a rock resembling something out of an HP Lovecraft story - an alien spacecraft, or a petrified elder god - I think that's an acceptable response.

Césure is an interactive first-person game/not-game/anti-game/experience (delete as applicable) focusing on a huge, monstrous structure suspended in water. After setting the resolution - you're going to want to pay attention to this bit, as Césure looks astonishing at higher settings - you're merely deposited onto the monolith, left to explore it from every angle as it thrums with an arcane energy, as a thing that could be a head suddenly turns in your direction, and as the malevolant whalesong-like soundtrack leaves you in no doubt that this object, whatever it is, is pure evil.

That's pretty much all there is to it, and it's enough. Césure contains a wonderful little pocket world to explore - a world totally worth a visit, if you're at all curious what the inside of the 2001 monolith looks like.

(Cheers, Free Indie Games )

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.