1-Man Team

Okay, I could be totally wrong here, and I invite correction, but if I'm right, we have our first real indie social game hit.

Stick Run is by Otto Manuel, who has done a series of Flash-portal games, some of which are pretty good, like StickCombat.

Stick Run is a somewhat frustrating sidescroller with, really, only two buttons; jump and crouch. You move automatically left-to-right, and must avoid obstacles in your path. Anything you hit is instadeath. In some cases this is tricky, e.g., jump too soon and you hit an upper obstacle, but not soon enough and you hit a lower one. Graphics are stick-figure primitive, gameplay is fast and brutal, and the music (unusually for social games) does not suck.

To all the diehard indie snobs out there spooked by the “casual” label: Don't worry. [Together] is an art game masquerading as a casual game, so go ahead and crank your snob-meters up to 11.

Located somewhere on the emotional spectrum between Braid and Passage, [Together] casts the player as a blue Boy who emerges from a mysterious cave to take his pink Girlfriend on a majestic flight of fancy. The couple chases down a variety of evasive flying hearts while being pursued by the smoke monster from Lost (here known as "the beast"). The creator's descriptive blurb sums up the mood: "Fly to the depths of the ocean or to the ends of the galaxy, together. As long as you have each other, there's no limit to where you can go."

Rubbish Barrage is somewhat crude: hand-drawn images by someone who is clearly not a Photoshop jockey, backgrounds and music ripped from somewhere or other, hacked together by one guy pretty quickly.

It's also kind of charming. It's a sidescrolling shmup, with enemies appearing at any or all screen edges and following pre-set (but not a priori predictable) movement patterns. You have to dodge, or destroy enough of the attackers that they don't intersect you. Three lives and you're out, though this just puts you back at the beginning of the current level (thankfully), not the game.

Iji is a nice, nostalgia-inducing game of a type you don't often see any more -- a 2D platform shooter. There's some story in which the eponymous character, Iji has to make her way through an underground research facility that's been taken over by aliens, but what's more important is eight weapons, an RPG-like system to improve your character (and what you choose to uprgrade can make one character quite different from another), lots of secret areas, and multiple story paths.

Clean Asia! is a hardcore shmup that consists wholly of boss battles, carried in what appears to be vector graphics. There are three levels (called Thailand, New Korea, and China, hence the title), with different boss behaviors for each. What's unique and original about the game, however, is that your objective isn't so much shooting enemies as smashing enemies into debris, and then collecting that debris magnetically.

Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!

This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.

Knytt is a small, freeware platformer created by Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren as a follow-up to his indie hit Within a Deep Forest. Players take control of a small creature that has been kidnapped from its home by an alien who promptly crashes his spaceship on another planet. In order to get back home players must explore the planet in order to find the scattered parts of the crashed ship. Nygren has said that he takes inspiration from the games of Fumito Ueda -- Ico and Shadow of the Colossus -- as well as fellow indie developer Clysm's Seiklus, and those influences are obvious. However, Nygren's game sets itself apart in its unique use of minimalism, which gives the game its distinct feeling. In short, Knytt is very likely one of the most balanced games to have been produced by the indie scene up to this point.

In Brent Anderson's Snowball's Chance, you play through a series of levels as a snowball. You start typically at one corner of the screen, and somewhere there's a goal you have to get to--sometimes by hitting switches and unlocking them first. The problem is that you don't move with the arrow keys; this game is somewhat billiards-like, in that you nudge your snowball with the mouse pointer, and can increase or decrease the force of your nudge. Some obstacles (like open water) cause insta-death, while wandering opponents can reduce your size. And you're slowly melting (more rapidly on some terrain than others), so you can't tarry.

You could almost call Orbital Trader a casual game for geeks. It's a space trading game--you start with a small starship, move from one planet to another buying and selling stuff. You're limited to a single star system (no FTL here), and planets move over time, and you're restricted to transfer orbits, so closer planets are a lot easier to get to. Each planet has only a single commodity, and it's easy to find destinations where you can make a profit (mouseover your planet, and you'll see what its commodity fetches everywhere else in the system). And that's--really about all there is to it.

Doing the Impossible

Today, first-person shooters take millions of dollars, years, and huge teams to develop, right? It's just impossible for a lone-wolf developer to create an FPS that's compelling.

Well, maybe not--if you concentrate on innovative gameplay instead of polygon count and particle effects. That's what Rune Trollebo has done.