Indiecade

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.

Armada d6 is a space war boardgame by Eric Zimmerman and John Sharp. Emulation is not only for software. Since Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 was released under the Open Game License as the d20 system, numerous clones are being published. New designers are taking the d20 system and making retro clones of Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition as well as ultralight systems. For instance you can play the official Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 modules (adventures) with the Microlite d20 system which has two-page core rules that emulate a full Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 system.

Zimmerman and Sharp is doing something similar. Several years ago Zimmerman and Sharp serendipitously ran across photocopies of partial rules and notes of an unpublished board game, Armada d6 at a book store. Twenty years later, they are emulating rules from partial information to reconstruct Armada d6.

The goal of Armada d6 is to build five monuments on the board. The board is made up of modular square tiles that you can arrange to create a large variation of maps. Each tile is divided in eight movement squares surrounding an impassable circular build site for a monument. Within the circles are costs and slots for monument construction.

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.

Qasit al-Wasat is a 2D overhead stealth action game set in a palace out of the Arabian Nights. You play as an invisible demon, summoned by a sorcerer to slay three people in the palace, with the magical and poisoned weapons they carry as your reward.

Since you are invisible, you are represented as a sort of distortion at screen center; so long as you remain in stealth mode and avoid getting too close to the humans of the palace, you are safe... and can kill them instantly by sneaking up and attacking. However, blood often spatters on you, making you visible to the guards; and at times, there are traps that spray powder on you, with similar results. And you are quite vulnerable; a single sword-slash from a guard kills you. However, you can find water and cleanse yourself, if you are quick about it.

Gorogoa is a beautiful game, but one difficult to describe. Carried in hand-drawn illustration with the feel of Czech animation, and set mainly in an Italianate city, the game follows a boy who is apparently attempting to accumulate five differently colored fruits in a bowl to summon a strange and beautiful monster, which is seen at times moving through the city in the distance.

The game's screen is divided into four squares. At start, only one contains an image. Often, clicking on a hotspot in the image will cause a change -- a pan, a focus on a part of an image, even things such as moving through a painting of a meadow into the meadow itself. And at times, moving an image from one square to another reveals a second image behind it.

Sometimes images match up and cause some change in the world; sometimes, moving a doorway over the boy causes him to step from one image to another. In other words, it's a puzzle game that relies not on inventory combination, but on navigation by recognizing visual cues in the images, exploring their combinations, and advancing the story by allowing the boy to move from scene to scene and acquire the fruit he needs.

Botanicula is another point-and-click graphic adventure from Amanita Design, the creators of Samorost and Machinarium. Like those games, it's in the tradition of Czech animation, with beautiful imagery, but devoid of either text or VO.

It feels a bit more playful and cute than the previous games which (like much of Czech animation) had a more brooding feel. You control three little creatures who live in a tree that is apparently infested with a parasite; your ultimate goal is to take one of the tree's seeds and find a place to plant it to grow a new home.

The first level is available in a free web demo; the remainder require a $10 purchase. It's quite charming.

Botanicula is a 2012 Indiecade nominee.

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.

Created by the designer of Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story is a sequel in the sense that it uses essentially the same dynamic, but thematically quite different. It is also, in some ways, a tragedy, a form of story rare in games.

The backdrop to the story is that you have been sent to a lost generation ship -- a slower-than-light spacecraft, large enough to support a community of people over the generations it will take to travel to a star system with a habitable planet. It was lost long ago, and your own civilization evidently has FTL. No one is alive on the ship, and your task is to discover the reasons for this.

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.

Prom Week is the creation of a group at UC Santa Cruz that includes Michael Matteas, one of the people involved with the creation of Facade. Like Facade, Prom Week is an attempt to create interactive drama, a sort of theatrical story with multiple characters and some agency by the player to shape the path and outcome of the story.

True interactive storytelling is, of course, an enormously difficult technical problem that many have attempted to solve without great success, despite the efforts of some of our most creative designers. Facade succeeded, in a limited way, its success and also its limitation dependent on the fact that it did not try to solve the general problem, and instead create a single, hard-coded, and specific work.

Prom Week is an ambitious attempt to solve the problem more generally. In a fashion reminiscent of Crawford's Trust & Betrayal, it tracks the social graph among a handful of characters, particularly how much they like or dislike each other. The underlying engine also tracks specific traits of the characters, and how they respond to traits of others, and provides a dialog system, not unlike the story-telling system of Tales of the Arabian Nights, that interpolates specific terms into generalized but prescripted dialog in response to certain conditions.