IGF

Hotline Miami is a brutally difficult, brutally violent, top-down brawler and shooter. With retro, 90s-style graphics, it has something of a feel of a Sega Genesis game -- not a SNES one; Nintendo would never have let anything this violent on their platform, but Sega was edgier.

You're assigned your missions via mobile phone by strange people who wear animal masks and claim to know all about you, though you're apparently amnesiac. The story, such as it is, is a somewhat surreal one, but it's a transparently thin veneer to provide some strange context for what's simply a game of killing everyone on each stage.

You can pick up a variety of both melee weapons and firearms; it's possible to play it stealthily, sneaking up on enemies and dispatching them hand-to-hand, or simply to blast away. Enemies are alerted by the sound of gunfire, though. Additional weapons are unlocked over time, as are additional animal masks; each mask provides a special power, and you can choose among them to suit your strategy.

Kentucky Route Zero is a beautiful visual novel with something of the timeless, surreal feel of Southern Gothic fiction, though without the elaborate language of Faulkner.

The graphics are simple yet striking, in a twilight palette that reinforces the moody nature of the game. It's slow moving, meditative and emotionally impactful.

You play as Conway, a truck driver, who needs to make a delivery to Dogwood Drive. The people you meet tell you that you need to use Route Zero -- which does not appear to exist on any map. Magic realism at work, in other words.

It's played in a point-and-click, graphic adventure kind of way, but there are no real puzzles to solve; more, environments to explore, and characters -- well realized ones -- with whom to chat. As in hypertext fiction, the appeal is in the story, not the gameplay; and the interesting moments are those of epiphany, when you understand something more about the underlying story, putting pieces together mentally.

FTL has elements of an Elite-style game, in that you control a single starship in a world that is algorithmically and randomly generated; however, the focus is less on the universe about you, and more on the ship you command.

Much of the screen is filled with the interior of your ship, showing the locations of your crew members and major ship systems and their status -- along with such things as enemy boarding parties, fires, and the like. The HUD, too, mainly reports on the status of your ship, showing damage, which systems are powered, whether a particular weapon system has been recharged and can fire again, and so on.

You are supposedly fleeing a rebel fleet; when done at a star system, and after your warp drives have recharged, you can bring up a star map and warp to one of several nearby stars. Each newly visited star provides an encounter; you may have to fight pirates or rebel craft, assist a vessel in distress, and so on. Successful actions provide "scrap", which can be used to upgrade your ship; sometimes, too, you can acquire a new crewmember, or new systems for your ship. Eventually, the "rebel front" will appear on your starmap, at which point it is time to head for the sector exit star, which takes you to the the next sector. There are nine in total, of increasing toughness, with a final boss battle series in the ninth.

Cart Life bills itself as a "retail simulation," and a priori, you may expect it to be a conventional sim/tycoon style game in which you buy merchandise, set prices, and consider your profit your score -- a conventional, if somewhat dull kind of game. It is nothing like that at all.

Actually, it is an interactive narrative with a crafting minigame, brutal time pressure despite its essentially slow pace, and curiously emotionally compelling. In addition, it has richer and more artistic subtext that any bombastic, big-budget commercial release.

You play either as Melanie, a recently divorced woman starting a coffee cart business, whose chances of gaining custody of her daughter depend on her business success; or as Andrus, a somewhat lonely Ukrainian immigrant running a newsstand, who must make enough each week to make the rent on his SRO hotel room, or be rendered homeless. This ups the emotional ante, of course. A third character, Vinny, a bagel vendor, can be unlocked for a $5 payment to the developer.

Sugar Cube is a kawaii-cute platformer -- responsive and well-tuned, with one unique mechanic that makes it interesting.

At various points on the level are hidden items -- often platforms -- that are revealed, and switch "on," only when you pass through or near them. As you move about, the four squares immediately around you are tinted, and show the hidden items. Frequently, there are small "lights" on the screen that show the hidden items, in ghosted form, until turned on; but often, items are revealed only when you activate them. Finally, by holding "shift" while jumping, you can prevent items from "flipping" from active to inactive state.

Pixi has something of the feel of Space Invaders, but with very different and original UI. It is a simple action game in which you control a swarm of pink "pixis," directing them by clicking and dragging on the screen; as you do, arrows appear in the view, representing a vector field, which the pixis follow.

"Boxi" move from the screen top toward the bottom, following somewhat random paths, and attempt to steal your "stars;" if they succeed, you fail the level. As you might expect, additional enemies appear at higher levels, with different capabilities.

It is not a deep game, but charming in its way. Pixi was an IGF Student game nominee for 2012.

The Snowfield is a beautiful and horrifying game. You begin on what was clearly a battlefield not long ago, strewn with corpses, barbed wire, and broken fences, covered in snow. You are huddled and obviously freezing. There are some other soldiers in the area, mostly standing in a daze, shell-shocked; they speak to you (a handful of catch-phrases repeated), in German; evidently, this is the Eastern Front in World War II, though none of the corpses are wearing Russian uniforms. The setting is stark, and emotionally impactful.

Movement is via WASD; some items can be picked up, though only one at a time, and handed to others. In a ruined house nearby is a fire; if you spend too much time away from it, you freeze to death, the view becoming blurry about the edges and what seem like ice cracks appearing in your vision as warning. It's easy to lose your bearings in the snow and freeze to death; the controls are also a bit awkward and you cannot climb even a fairly shallow slope, so you sometimes find it hard to extricate yourself from your current position.

Spoilers below the fold.

One and One Story is a puzzle platformer with a clever approach. There are no enemies, and only one trap (the traditional spike pit), but the characters also die if they fall too far. And there are crates to push, which of course can be used in some circumstances to diminish the fall distance.

So far, so traditional; what's different about One and One Story is that there are two characters, one blue and one pink, and your objective on each level is to get the two of them together. Every few levels, the behavior of the two characters change. In some, you can switch from one to the other; in others, they move in concert; in others they move in opposite directions. The difficulty is that you must ensure that neither character dies, and of course when you're focussing on one, it's sometimes easy to fail to notice the danger in which you're putting the other.

Dust is a beautiful and odd little game, and is, unsurprisingly, a student showcase finalist for the 2012 IGF awards.

It's a sort of sidescroller, in that motion is left-to-right, along a linear path, but the gameplay is not what you'd expect from a typical sidescroller. You are a moth, hovering in the air, and move with WASD; you are trapped in an attic, and can see the moon glowing outside. As you move away from the window, the game teaches you that you can revive dead moths if you get close enough to them; they then follow you about, and can push objects. Sometimes, you need them to do so to move obstacles out of the way; other times, you need them to push an object into a cobweb to clear a path. Movable items are marked with numbers, indicating the number of revived moths you need to move them.

To the Moon is an affecting visual novel with adventure elements, built (I believe) in RPG Maker, but eschewing the conventions of the RPG.

It is an exploration of a man's life, approached in an unusual way: beginning with old age and delving back gradually to childhood, unpeeling his life, love, and the events that shaped him little by little. It's an effective story-telling technique, allowing the player to piece together the puzzles of his existence, with moments of raw sadness, occasional bits of humor, and an an ending with genuine emotional power.