Death

Dreams of Your Life is not so much a game as a sort of conversational meditation on the subject of life, death, and love. Writing this, I realize how dreary it sounds; but actually, it's quite effective.

It's a project tied to a documentary film, Dreams of A Life; in this it is not unique. But unlike most games tied to documentaries, it does not in any fashion try to replicate the experience of the documentary itself. It does, at times, refer to the documentary's subject, never talking about the film itself; the subject is what happened to Joyce Vincent, a woman who died in a flat in London in 2003, in her 30s, with her television on. She was not discovered for three years.

The End is an odd beast: a combination of a platformer, a puzzle boardgame, a philosophical investigation of the nature of death, and a variant Myers Brigg map.

Funded by the UK's Channel 4 and developed by Preloaded, it was conceived as a way to engage teens and get them to think about life, death, belief, and science (I kid you not). Naturally, they created a platformer. That's the cynic speaking there; we've seen way too many "serious games" or "games for change" that take a theme and bolt it onto a game style that's totally inappropriate -- like, oh, Debt Ski. Surprisingly, however, The End works, on three different levels simultaneously.

Just to ride my hobby horse before I get to the meat here: There is not a damn thing Victorian about this game. The music is either heavy metal or an early popular recording; 'popular music' from the era would have been English music hall or American marches. While some of your victims ride penny-farthing bicycles, you're on a conventional geared two-wheeler, and nobody in the era made ox-horns as a symbol of triumph. Menu graphics that look composed of Dover Press Victorian stock imagery do not, in themselves, say "Victorian."

The Graveyard is both beautiful and incredibly irritating -- and it's worth playing, both because it is beautiful, and because the reasons why it's irritating are worth thinking about.

Life Is A Race is an artsy banner-game from Cactus, you click to make a baby move across the screen, prompting it to run, get that briefcase and then become old and die. It's like Passage but with an emphasis, rather than ambivalence, on the speed of aging and mortality.

Torture Game 2 has you torturing a rag doll. I linked to the New Grounds page rather than direct because you gotta read those comments. Then you gotta read Ian's response to an MSNBC article about it. A sick world indeed.