Experimental

POP: Methodology Experiment One is a "methodology experiment," because Rob Lach created the music first -- and then designed a minigame for each song intended to fit the emotional feel and impulse of the tune. Not surprisingly, the music is quite good; the gameplay less so, though still interesting.

It's carried in nostalgic, lo-fi graphics reminiscent of the early arcade, and the gameplay varies greatly from minigame to minigame. If the controls and gameplay is a little rough, that's perhaps not surpising, since this is seven games in one. Each minigame lasts about three minutes -- not surprising; so do the songs. Three minutes is supposedly the "perfect" length for pop music, at least if you want radio play.

The Stanley Parable begins with an in-engine cut scene set of a man in a dingy office. A narrator explains that this is Stanley, who loves his job, even though as described it sounds quite tedious. But, we are told, one day the orders he receives on a screen stop coming, and he realizes that no coworkers have stopped by all day. So he decided to go to the staff lounge.

At this point, we are handed the controls. The office opens onto a corridor. The narration continues when we hit certain points along the corridor; and eventually, we reach a branch, and are told that "Stanley turned left."

Following the narrator's instructions eventually leads to a story in which, supposedly, Stanley liberates himself from a control device that kept him happy despite the tedium of his work; and, in a final narration, are told that "Stanley would never follow orders again." Which is amusingly disconcerting because, of course, to reach this ending, we did nothing but follow orders.

Naturally, if you restart, and diverge from the path, the story changes -- quite often, the narrator becomes prickly and upset with you, because you're not doing what your told. There are, of course, multiple different endings depending on what path you take -- some rather humorous.

Magick has always been a paradox. It's a science of the supernatural, a consistent manipulation of inconsistencies, a simulation of a fantasy. Often game designs dealing with the magickal err on the side of suspension of disbelief in being a mage while neglecting the visceral side of becoming a mage -- how exciting is memorizing spells every night only to exhaust them in the heat of the moment, or to pick spells off a menu in expense of MP? Arrowhead Game Studio is composed of a bunch of folks from Skelleftea in northern Sweden, at a latitude on par with Macbeth's weird sisters or The Once and Future King's Orkney Isles from whence hailed Morgan le Fay. Apparently, the further north you go, the more magickal things get, Dustin can fill in the details. These people said, hey, forget all the nonsense, we're going to pull the magick of creating game dev jobs in a place where none have existed since initial settlement 8000 years ago, and then we're going to make a game with production values on par with a AAA game circa 2003, and we're going to do a completely fresh spell-casting system that will do what no fantasy game has ever done before in terms of blasting the player with a sense of imminent empowerment.

And then they did it.

I'm going to start this review off with a comic that I think sums up the male existential dilemma more succinctly than anything I've ever seen, and then link you to the author's explanation of the game. Then I'm going to say, hey! Don't read that stuff yet! Play the game first! Some fraction of you may have follow the links sequentially and are now feeling cheated. Hey, at least you aren't stuck in a dead-end relationship!

I know that I just posted about a quirky short-form platformer, but this was such a blast I couldn't resist. Picture this, if you will: you're on a batch of heinous chemicals, hunched over, mashing away to a corrupted ROM. Everything's lucid, The platforms swell and cascade in ever-shifting waves. You try and fail to orient yourself. Years of spatial reasoning fall apart, you can't rely on planning your route bec -- holy fuck the stage's collapsing on me! All the while an incessant hum of TV static fills your head, leaving you to focus solely on your visual feedback. She's got a TV eye on me, she got a TV eye.

Not often am I a fan of puzzle games like Machinarium; I can admire the ambiance but the static puzzles never seem to engage me. Vectorpark's puzzlers are also part toy, or as Greg christened them in his Windowsill review, "clicks & wiggles". The beautiful thing about these dream-like titles -- and the main distinction between them and the non-game apps Greg cited -- is how the toy aspects weave into the puzzle solving. Feed the Head is definitely more lucid than its spiritual predecessor but is just as enjoyable. I'd make another White Rabbit reference here for the sake of the review but I'm afraid of having to pay royalties to Jefferson Airplane.

Quicksand Games, creators of We Want You bring us another politically charged masterpiece, inspired by J.G. Ballard's 1968 short story, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan, it serves to transplant the political machinations of hyper-personalized political celebrity to the mechanics of puzzle-by-proxy AI manipulation games -- or, it's Lemmings with Barack.

When I dream I sometimes create the story as I'm playing in it, and new scenes and characters are spun out, blurry as I meet them, crisper as we fight, dance, make love, explode, or simply have a surreal conversation. Sometimes I meet people I'd known before who have left me, or who I have left, or who I never met, knowing or at least hoping that they are, at some level, meeting met as well, in their dreams. And now Jason has turned the collective unconscious into a game.

Stéphane Bura is an eminent game designer, of both digital and tabletop games, as well as something of a game design theorist. His War and Peace is more of a thought experiment than a game; it is, he proclaims a "one-button Civilization". You make only one decision during play: to toggle between "peace" and "war."

As a reviewer, it's my job to push you in the direction of cool things in the hopes you just might check them out. I wouldn't be living up to my duty if I didn't direct you towards more of Stephen Lavelle's work, and you would be doing yourself a disservice as well if you aren't keeping up with his explorations of the medium. His motto is "let's try something out there" and he holds to it. He cranks out quirky little games that can make you feel empathetic or maybe slightly uneasy; he crafts experimental pieces that toy with game mechanics in a novel way. That is, when he isn't making games about female masturbation or a nerdy math joke. These are short experiences, so overlong explanations would ruin the fun. For the uninitiated here's a few tidbits about each.