Don't Look Back

Time for a browser game; this one's right down the line between "games as art" and "games as brutal platforming challenges".

Terry Cavenagh's Don't Look Back is a reimagining of the Orpheus myth via the medium of the browser game; as the player, you'll descend into hell (this time with a handgun), and retrieve your beloved. The catch: once you've found her, you have to return to the surface without ever looking back.

This is not an easy game but it's not unfairly hard. Each individual room is very tricky, but you've got unlimited lives and a checkpoint at the start of each room, so you'll never have to replay an easy bit to get another crack at the hard bit. If more platformers were like this I'd be inclined to spend more time with the genre.

Don't Look Back is thoroughly entertaining, and an early contender for many of next year's indie and casual awards, so go check it out now before you're the only kid who hasn't.

Loops of Zen

Very, very busy at work and not feeling much like blogging after a 12-hour work day, but to tide you over in the mean time here's Loops of Zen.

It's a browser game, and it's simple. You get a board of tiles, each with lines and connections to other tiles, and you rotate the tiles until there's no dead ends on the board - every line must curve back on itself. Surprisingly satisfying and easier than it initially seems.

Go play it now.

Cell Warfare

I'm still busy working through Beyond Good & Evil - too busy even to play the new Mirror's Edge DLC, if you can believe it - but in the mean time I've got some browser gaming for you.

Cell Warfare is a shameless attempt to recreate the winning formula of Amorphous +. Simple gameplay? Check. Coloured globular enemies? Check. A constant stream of badges and achievements? Check.

It wants to be a dual-stick shooter in the style of Geometry Wars. The arrow keys fly you around the play field, and you click the left mouse button to shoot in the direction of the cursor. It's initially a clunky control scheme but with some practice you'll develop surprising precision. The basic gameplay is fun, but as always with this kind of thing the real hook is trying to score all 78 achievements.

In the end it's more accessible than Amorphous +, if such a thing is possible, although not quite as tactical. Definitely worth a bunch of your time but I can't see myself racking up the four hours or so that I did with Amorphous.

You can play Cell Warfare at Kongregate, or alternatively at Newgrounds, if that's more your thing.

Bars of Black and White

I'm not typically a fan of room escape games, considering them point-n-click's vapid cousin, but this here's a good 'un.

Bars of Black and White comes from Gregory Weir, the talented fellow behind Majesty of Colours, and it's less of a full fledged challenge than it is a really entertaining proof of concept. You start off, as is typical of these things, trapped in a room with no memory of how you got there, but soon you get your hands on a barcode scanner and you'll start scanning every barcode you can find.

There's really only a couple of puzzles and most of the game consists of some clever jokes about the conventions and limitations of the genre. There's also plenty of shout-outs to other games including the greatest room escape of all time, Silent Hill 4.

As you're probably expecting, it's a browser game, it's undemanding, and it's on Kongregate, among other places. Go have a play, you'll smile.

Scriball

Time for a browser game, and today it's Scriball.

I was indifferent to this one at first, but I'm finding I keep coming back to it. You have a yellow ball, which you have to move to the green dot on each level, and the way in which you achieve this is by drawing a line on the screen with your mouse. Make a slanting line, and the ball rolls down. Make a cup, and you catch the ball. Your line can only be so long so you can also pull it out from under the ball to send it plummeting. If you need to get more height, the mouse button tosses your ball into the air.

Simple concept, and familiar to anyone who's played Canvas Curse or Crayon Physics, but still compelling and challenging. Scriball's also got significantly more content than your average Flash game, with 40+ levels, three difficulty settings and a create-your-own-level mode.

Check it out on Kongregate.

These Balls Are Made For Hiding

These Balls Are Made For Hiding is your browser game for today.

You're presented with a black field, which conceals invisible circles. You can fire a straight line into the field, which will bounce whenever it hits a ball, or when it hits certain walls. You can take as many shots as you like; once you're happy with one, you click to remove all the balls touched by that shot. Every time you remove balls, all the remaining balls in the field move downwards. If any balls touch the bottom of the field you lose.

So very simple, so very addictive. It doesn't seem to be on any of the good game portals but you can play it at the rather ugly page I'm linking to here.

Dreams

Here's your browser game for today: Dreams. This provided me not much more than some quick entertainment, but the art style and simple gameplay seem to really appeal to people with less exacting tastes than myself. It's racked up a lot of attention and won some awards so I'd expect there'd be more than a few readers of The Dust Forms Words who'd enjoy it.

It's basically a spot-the-difference game but the clean interface and attractive storybook art make it stand out of the crowd. If you'd like ten minutes or so of quality picture-sleuthing, head on over to Kongregate and check it out.

Aether

After I talked about Edmund McMillen's intruiging-but-flawed game Coil last month, I promised I'd say a few words about Aether, which I liked a lot more. JayIsGames have just gone and named it their Casual Adventure Game of the Year 2008 so I suppose now is a good time to ride the Media-Train to Consensus City.

Aether is really, really beautiful. Edmund teams up with the equally talented Tyler Glaiel to deliver a game about loneliness, introversion, exploration and adventure, all of which runs in your standard browser window. You control a boy and his squid-balloon on a mission to the depths of space to help out some emotionally-challenged anthropomorphised planets. Edmund's art is in fine form, understated but effective, and Tyler's piano soundtrack gets the emotional tone flowing from the first screen through to the end.

Unusually for one of Edmund's games, Aether features neither gory violence nor extensive body-horror. In Aether no one is getting raped or murdered, but people are discovering important lessons about life and experiencing simple coming-of-age fables. If you liked things like Gish and Meat Boy you might find Aether a little different, but it's all the better for that difference.

The whole game really feels like a single extended piece of mood-art, like I Wish I Were The Moon or Night Raveler. Its success is less about the story it tells and more to do with how you feel as you experience it. It's gamey enough to avoid alienating the very people most likely to play it, but arty enough to leave an impression long after you've forgotten every other Flash game you played that month.

You can play Aether at Armor Games or Kongregate, and as it will only take you about ten minutes to enjoy there's really no excuse to not.

IncrediBots

IncrediBots is something of an odd product.

It is an amazing technical achievement. A community-content game with the depth and features of LittleBigPlanet shoehorned into an in-your-browser Flash application - there can be little question as to why it's a 2009 Independent Games Festival finalist for the Technical Excellence award.

In IncrediBots you use a simple yet deep suite of tools to build robots, which you can then control using the keyboard. With a little creativity, your robots can do pretty much anything, from scooping up debris through to animating home movies.

Everything is based around a robust physics engine, and you'll quickly realise that what the toolset lets you do is, as the name implies, incredible. Like any good community-content game, you can save, load, and share your work at the push of a button.

I was just blown away by IncrediBots' potential, but entirely unmotivated to use any of it. Given the ability to build realistic cars that actually move I was no more excited about making one than I am about assembling automobiles in real life. I can claim to be a huge fan of early contraption-based games like The Incredible Machine, but unfortunately I just couldn't get IncrediBots to enthuse me.

Possibly some of it is in a lack of structure. The sandboxy stuff is just a little too sandboxy - the open canvas can prompt you to ask "where do I start?". It would be great to access pre-fabricated templates for cars, tanks, walkers and suchlike to give you a leg up. Also, there are challenge levels that task you with hauling random junk around, and suchlike. They score you on speed, and while I could pretty easily complete the task, the implicit goal of doing it cleverly and quickly daunted me out of even trying.

Anyway, investigate for yourself. The genius of the game may well dwarf whatever brainpower you invest personally, but you can play IncrediBots over at Kongregate, or hit up the developers, Grubby Games, via their website.

You Have To Burn The Rope

I like to assume everyone has already played You Have To Burn The Rope. Assuming this lets me make those who haven't done so feel like they have failed as human beings. Good times.

In any case, YHTBTR has somehow made it through to being a 2009 Independent Games Festival finalist, so I'm highlighting it here now to give you all a second chance at living meaningful lives.

The game's short, running at about 45 seconds in length not counting the closing credits, or three minutes including the credits. It's packed full of action and thrills and I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I tell you that it involves a requirement to burn a certain rope.

This is three minutes of your life well spent. If you've not already felt the love, go hit the game up at Kongregate and get ready for some excellence. (Alternatively, I suppose you could visit the developer's actual site but then I'd miss out on Kongregate points that I'd otherwise be accruing.)

Coil

Coil is a game about pregnancy, violation, and horrible user interfaces. It's from Edmund McMillen, the controversial creator of Gish, Aether and C*nt, among others.

Coil tells its story in much the same way as Braid. The game is broken down into a handful of short stages, each of which is preceded by a snippet of emotive prose. Every stage has different gameplay and is themed around an aspect of pregnancy, from the fertilisation of an egg through to the growth of a foetus. A dark and horrific tone is applied to the proceedings throughout, and you're warned that some readers may find the game offensive or disturbing.

The chief innovation is that the game is controlled entirely through the movement of the mouse. You don't need to hit keys or click buttons - simple mouse movements are all you need to progress. Although the movements are very graceful once you've worked them out, deciphering them in the first place can be a nun-punchingly frustrating task. The user interface is, to put it bluntly, horrid.

As an example, the bits of text presented between levels look a lot like what we've been conditioned to see as a loading screen. It can take a lot of waiting to realise that the only way to progress is to move the mouse cursor in wide circles. You can do this by accident, allowing you to get past a couple of these transitions without realising it was your own agency that prompted the change.

To be fair, this appears to be a deliberate design decision. Coil bills itself as "a game without instruction or clear direction", which to me was initially interesting but upon reflection is probably as bad an idea as it sounds.

Like most of McMillen's games, Coil looks gorgeous. The subdued colours and elegant animations present a soothing contrast to the unsettling themes. And if the gameplay is, on the whole, a bit rubbish, you can at least be thankful that the experience is short and focused.

Coil is a finalist in the 2009 Independent Games Festival and is worth seeing whether you like it or loathe it. It's available through Armor Games and Kongregate and I urge you to go check it out now.

Independent Games Festival Finalists

What the hell is going on? In previous years, the Independent Games Festival (IGF) would announce their finalists, and I'd be quite happy to realise that I'd neither played nor heard of a single name on the list. That's how you knew they were independent, and it was exactly the way the world is supposed to work.

This year I'm on first-name terms with half the list and I've played a sizeable chunk of it. Am I just getting more widely-read, or is the IGF getting more mainstream?

Seumas McNally Grand Prize
* Blueberry Garden
* CarneyVale Showtime
* Dyson
* Night Game
* Osmos

Excellence in Visual Art
* Cletus Clay
* FEIST
* Machinarium
* PixelJunk Eden
* Zeno Clash

Excellence in Audio
* Blueberry Garden
* BrainPipe
* Musaic Box
* PixelJunk Eden
* Retro/Grade

Excellence in Design
* Musaic Box
* Night Game
* Osmos
* Retro/Grade
* Snapshot

Innovation Award
* Between
* Coil
* The Graveyard
* Mightier
* You Have To Burn The Rope

Technical Excellence
* Cortex Command
* IncrediBots
* The Maw
* Osmos
* PixelJunk Eden

I might highlight some of the games over the next couple of days but in the mean time you can get the full announcement and game descriptions at the IGF site (link). And, in all fairness, my attention was drawn to the announcement by Kotaku (link).

EDIT: I think possibly the difference is that this year most of the games involved are finished games. In previous years the IGF has been happy to acccept prototypes or games still in development; for example, Braid picked up an award in 2006, a good two years before it came out, while Castle Crashers scored one in '07.

I Wish I Were The Moon / The Majesty of Colours

I've got two Flash games for you today, if you haven't already seen them. Actually, they're less like games and more like an arty interactive storybook. Very worth checking out.

I Wish I Were The Moon presents an odd little love triangle involving a girl, a boy and a planetary body. Also a seagull. The player interacts by "photographing" components of the scene and then moving the photographs to rearrange the narrative. The aim is to find as many different resolutions of the scenario as possible. It's by the talented Mr Daniel Benmergui, who blogs over at Ludomancy.com, and it is, in the vernacular, "rather neat".

Once you're done with Moon you'll probably be looking for more, so you'll be glad to hear that this kind of gameplay has been developed and expanded by a certain Gregory Weir in his self-described "pixel horror game" The Majesty Of Colours. Here you're placed in command of a Lovecraftian sea-beast and given the opportunity to terrorise or assist a small sea-going community as you see fit. Artistically.

This an engaging little sub-genre developing here, somewhere between point-and-click adventure and pop-art, and I'm looking forward to seeing where its next steps take it. Go check out the games and let me know what you think.

Thursday Browser Games

See how I put "Thursday" in the title there, as though I've done this in the past or will ever do this again in the future? It's a tradition that starts and ends today; you can consider this post endorsed by the weight of a mythical history of repetition.

Anyway, a few browser games to entertain you which you may or may not have encountered before.

Hedgehog Launch is a neat little thing which challenges you to fling a hedgehog into space, using a combination of elastic bands and jet engines. Your first few attempts will be pitiful, but over consecutive days you accumulate cash with which to upgrade your elastic and/or engines. Surprisingly fun.

Splitter is a physics based game which presents the classic challenge of moving a ball into a hole. The catch is, the only way you can interact with your environment is by cutting things in two, and you only have a limited amount of cuts. Very neat.

Finally, Shore Siege is a defence-style game where you play a crew of shipwrecked pirates struggling to repair their vessel while being attacked by waves of enemies. In addition to deploying snipers and turrets, you take an active part by using a pin to pop balloons, a fire to burn marshmallow-enemies, water to douse fireballs, et cetera. Addictive.

All of the above links point to Kongregate, which is my way of attempting to get sweet, sweet referral points for that site, but I should mention that Shore Siege and Hedgehog Launch are the work of Armor Games and if you particularly like them you might want to visit their site directly.

Currently Playing

Got a bunch of games in my queue right now, none of which I'm particularly near finishing, so I thought I'd do an "in-progress" kind of post.

Left 4 Dead (XBox 360): Awesome. Just... awesome. It makes my jaw drop roughly once a minute and I'm starting to get muscle fatigue around my mouth as a result. Some observations though: as you start to learn the levels the game becomes about speed-running, and I'm not yet sure whether that's an evolutionary step in the gameplay or the point at which ennui sets in. Also it's obviously focused solely on multi-player, and I can't say I've ever gotten more than ten hours out of a multi-player first person shooter before. This may be a first, I guess.

Rock Band (XBox 360): Finally out in Australia. Drumming is excellent and the handling of the vocals is several iterations better than the horrible Singstar franchise. Guitar is a bit lame though, due to an unappealing on-screen interface, a peripheral that pinches my fingers, and punishingly short timing windows. Playing with four friends is great, but the game feels poorly structured as far as progress and incentives are concerned. Luckily it's fun just playing, incentives or no incentives. Also it's clear the developers loved what they were making, which is something it shares with Harmonix's previous efforts Guitar Hero 1 and 2. Neversoft-developed GH3 didn't have that and it's that faceless-corporation direction the Guitar Hero franchise is going in that's really turning me off that brand.

Fable 2 (XBox 360): Not a fan. I can't get attached to the main character, who wanders mutely around the countryside expressing himself solely with corny poses while every NPC has rather excellent voice acting. I can't get attached to the NPCs, who will watch you kill their entire family in horror but then offer you gifts once you dance a saucy jig for a few minutes. The customisation system is shallow, and you end up picking clothes based on their stats rather than what they say about your character. The much-vaunted moral choices are poorly handled, especially compared to something like Mass Effect, and often boil down to "do what you're told, or be a petty jerk". Despite a lot of really well-implemented features, the whole package feels deeply artificial and I have serious doubts I can be bothered playing to the end.

Final Fantasy III (DS): I started this six months ago, I'm about three quarters of the way through and I can't bring myself to pick it up again. The graphical updates are nice, but the "job system" has been poorly grafted onto the original game, giving you little real incentive to play with the different jobs and in fact actively punishing you for changing class. The late game suddenly opens up the map but offers poor direction about where to go next and again can punish you for exploring with the sudden introduction of crushingly difficult encounters. The combat is painfully dull and considering that's most of the gameplay that dullness is a real problem. Despite my gripes it's still a great remake, especially considering the age of its roots, but not a real contender compared to some of the excellent modern RPGs on the market.

Age of Booty (XBox Live Arcade): Yar, me hearties! Age of Booty is real-time strategy dumbed down to its lowest level, where you control one ship and attempt to capture enemy ports with or without allies. It's effectively one-button control, ideal for casual players. It should be awful but it's a heap of fun and pretty much exactly right for the low, low asking price. Local multiplayer for up to four players, or you can take it online to battle the intertubes.

Overlord (XBox 360): Played the first level of this, loved it, borrowed it from a friend, and now it's just waiting until I'm done with Fable 2 or something so I can give it the time it deserves.

Travian (PC / Browser): Actually I've been playing this for a few months. A very hardcore real-time wargame that advertises itself as a casual-friendly city builder. One campaign lasts roughly a year of real-time. An excellent game providing you know what to expect; a very frustrating game for those looking for a casual experience who get eliminated by the cutthroat tactics of the real players. I'm loving it.

SHIFT

Another browser game for today. This one's called SHIFT and it's actually quite unique. Like every second casual game these days it rampantly burglarises a lot of its cool from Portal but it's all justified in the context of an absolute gem of a central game mechanic and some extremely solid level design.

Unfortunately explaining the core concept ruins one of the early moments in the game, so I'm going to let you discover it for yourself. However, I can say that it's a platformer (my arch-nemesis) and yet I loved it to pieces.

You should go investigate for yourself. It's really very clever.

Hanna In A Choppa

Helicopter physics games have been around for millennia. Primitive cave paintings show neanderthal man struggling with the vagaries of WASD control configurations and floaty flying avatars.

Actually I might just be getting confused with 1992 shareware title Ugh!, possibly the best game about flying caveman taxidrivers ever made. That thing was where it was at. In fact, while we're taking a leisurely stroll down Nostalgia Avenue, why don't you go download Ugh! for free and get your cro-magnon on old-school style.

But that's not what I'm posting about today. For those of you for whom 16-bits is just not enough bits, there's a fancy-pancy modern browser-based helicopter game which I just now this minute discovered. It is called Hanna In A Choppa and it is, in the vernacular, "rather good". The frustration of this type of game has always come from when you inevitably ram into things, avoiding which tends to be the point of the game. Hanna has a nice balance, failing you for only the most spectacular crashes, but rewarding you with shiny achievements if you go the extra yard for a perfect flight. It's also got a wide variety of missions, starting with predictable "navigate this tight corridor" levels but working up to rescue-at-sea scenarios and the provision of monster-sized hairdressing.

Hanna In A Choppa is available through Kongregate, and probably some other casual gaming portals. Y'all should go play it some. I'm not kidding. It's delicious.

Amorphous +

Can I direct your attention to a little something I've been enjoying lately? And I'll warn you in advance that being free, flash-driven and browser-based it strays dangerously close to the dark provinces of the casual game.

It's Amorphous +; I'm playing the thing through Kongregate but you can probably find it on any number of game portals.

Basically, you're a little dude with a sword so ridiculously large it puts the cast of Final Fantasy to shame. Your job is to swing the sword, and splat jelly-like blobs before they splat you. It sounds simple enough, but the real skill is in earning combos by splatting multiple blobs in a single swing. That gets complex as the different blobs have interesting interactions - Glooples can merge to become a significantly more dangerous larger species, Inkies leave blinding ink that Toasties can set on fire, and Melties leave a pool of acid on death which kills anything that crosses it.

All these shenannigans should be run of the mill but somehow they're fantastically entertaining. Plus there's a whole mess of awards to get for doing any number of crazy things, which makes the whole thing start to get deeply addictive.

There's a good couple of hours of gameplay in this thing. And it's free. I highly recommend it. Go play it now.

Tower Defence

I was chatting to someone yesterday who, it turned out, had never heard of tower defence games. Admittedly it's a strange little subgenre. What's most strange about it is that despite being one of the more OCD elements of the real-time-strategy milieu it seems to have become largely the province of "casual gamers".

The premise is that a bunch of enemies will troop across a screen from point A to point B, and it's your job to install a bunch of automatically firing turrets along the way to wipe out the nasties before they reach their destination. Typically the enemies will come in waves; you'll have limited resources to build your towers, but every enemy killed or wave cleared will grant bonus cash.

As far as I can tell the first instance of tower defence gameplay appears in Atari's classic Warlords (1980), although it's more properly inspired by Westwood's Dune II (1992), where correct alignment of your turrets and tanks was key to success.

Anyway, to educate the uninformed I thought I'd trot out three of my favourite browser-based tower defence games, and let the gameplay therein say more than the written word ever could.

Desktop Tower Defence 1.5: The undisputed king of browser-based tower defence. Clean, engaging graphics, a good mixture of depth and intuitiveness, and a wide range of modes to try.

Vector TD 2: Deeper than Desktop, with more turret options, and with more freedom to set your own pace. Simple vector graphics emphasise the tactical element of the game.

Bloons TD 2: Monkey versus balloons in a kid-friendly grudge match. Turrets here don't snap to a grid, which can throw off those who like an orderly turret layout, but a lot of charm and a wealth of turret options compensate.

Try them out, but be warned - these are very addictive games!