3D

Cantrip is a game from a student team at DADIU, the Danish National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment. Implemented in Unity, its models are textured with hand-drawn, cross-hatched illustration, which gives it something of the feeling of Tim Burton animation -- appropriate, given its rather macabre story.

You are a small boy; along with your sister, you enter a scrapyard, looking for cans to collect and return for the deposit. Inside it, you find a trolley filled with cans, but before you can take them, a witch appears, calls you thieves, absconds with your sister, and curses you with magnetism. You have to explore and navigate through the scrapyard to rescue your sister.

Because you are magnetic, cans, and other metal objects in the scrapyard, fly toward and adhere to you. As the weight of metal adhering to you increases, your movement speed slows; and in some places, there are sharp metal objects that, if they fly do you, do damage. Weight and health are reported on the HUD.

The Depths to Which I Sink is a soft of software toy that requires old-school 3D glasses, the kind with tinted plastic panes. The basic dynamic is the same on each level; you control a dot, which moves in the X and Y dimensions with the arrow keys, but moves at a constant speed in the Z dimension downward to the "edge" of the play space, and then back upward.

Different levels (there are three in the demo) offer different challenges; in one, you try to move your dot through floating rings, in another to "break" floating window panes, and in another, you try to move through tubes. There is not, however, any scoring, so it's more along the lines of a play activity than a classic game.

Prelude of the Chambered was put together by Markus Persson (aka Notch), the creator of Minecraft, for a 48-hour Ludum Dare competition.

It's a 3D game, but with pixellated graphics reminiscent of Doom. Movement is with the arrow keys (A and S to strafe), and space-bar is "use." The game start is a little confusing; you appear to be confined to an area with no exits, though you can see monsters moving beyond barred doorways. Facing the walls and pressing the space-bar, you eventually discover that some wall sections -- not visibly any different from others--are breakable.

The developer says "Attr-X is a pointless game," and, well, he has a point; indeed, under most definitions of 'game' it does not qualify as one, since there are no objectives, either inherent or self-imposed. Think of it as a software toy, therefore.

You move about a rather large virtual world (arrow keys to move and strafe, RMB to change direction and mouselook). It is an eerie and nicely conceived virtual world; nothing like photorealistic, but also not the Tron-like setting we've become used to in many indie 3D titles. It has an abstraction, but beauty, to it, a sort of surrealist virtual world. And the world is surprisingly large, for one created by a lone-wolf developer; indeed, there are subway stations at certain locations so you can move easily from one area to another. There's also a day/night cycle, so lighting changes dramatically over time.

Puzzle Moppet is a 3D puzzle game inspired by Sokoban-style puzzles -- puzzles where you push blocks in a maze to traverse it, but cannot pull them, so solving the puzzle requires careful planning and spatial reasoning.

Adding the third dimension makes a big difference, however, since it considerably increases the complexity of possible puzzles. Additionally, new elements are added over the course of the game; ice blocks that slide infinitely until stopped by an obstacle, levitators that lift boxes up to a predefined level, elevators to allow your character (the eponymous moppet) to move between levels, and so on.

“Be broken to be whole. / Twist to be straight. / Be empty to be full. / Wear out to be renewed. / Have little and gain much. / Have much and get confused.”
– Tao Te Ching, “Growing Downward” (Ursula K. LeGuin's version)

The Void is a game that I have been meaning to review for a long time, but have found it hard to know where to start. It isn't an easy game to categorize. It appears to be a survival horror game, and maybe it is, but the principle horror to survive is a kind of slow starvation (which is a lot more compelling than it sounds). It also appears to be a FPS, and it does involve combat, but it's not a “twitch” game at all. It appears at times to be a sex game, but the role of sexuality in the story is complex and ambivalent, not at all “sex for sex's sake.”
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Rumis or Blokus 3D in the US, is a 3D building block, board game. Your goal is to have the most of your color pieces seen from a bird's eye view. Simply, cover your opponents pieces upwards while positioning your blocks in a manner that is difficult from other players to cover.

Although a casual game, strategy is hard to grasp for many gamers because it uses a part of the brain that many games ignore: spatial reasoning. Spatial reasoning is a right brain skill, while logic and puzzle solving involve the analytical, left brain.

Alien Swarm is a third person, squad-based, 3D shooter. There are four classes; you control one marine, while the AI or other players in online play control the other three. The game bears a striking resemblance to the Space Hulk board game or its digital port, Alien Assault. Like Alien Assault, it is mission-based, with different goals for victory in each mission.

This is going to be the shortest review I've ever done.

Cactus is beyond a genius. You can't fully appreciate it unless you either play this on 'shrooms during a blizzard or decompile it and realize that it's just 2D sprites with shaders and layering tricks that are systematically deranging your senses. There is a way to win but there are many more ways to lose yourself against the pall of infinity, and I recommend you do so. It's easier than going to Peru and drinking Ayahuasca with the shamans, and much more Scandanavian.

N.B.: This review was of Minecraft in its earliest outing; see here for a more recent (and favorable) take on the game

Back in the day, I entered Habitat and played around with it. And I remember Chip Morningstar telling me that it "wasn't just a game," and thinking "Too bad! It could be a pretty good game!" That is, if you bolted on some, you know, actual gameplay. Something to do. An objective.