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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.

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.

Plith is a simple puzzle game tuned to a casual level of difficulty, but with nicely rendered graphics and unobjectional music.

Each level consists of a peg board, and some initial arrangement of gears -- typically including one red one and one green one. The objective is to place additional gears on the pegs, so that the red gear will ultimately be able to turn the green gear. The difficulty in doing so is two-fold; firstly, putting a gear on some pegs will prevent a solution; and secondly, you have no control over what type of gear you will be served next. Sometimes you want a big one, and are given a small one, and have to try to find an appropriate place to put it.

Seventh Sense is a gamebook reader by David Olsen of the Project Aon, a Lone Wolf gamebook fan volunteer group. Seventh Sense uses Project Aon's digital depository of Lone Wolf gamebooks and adds rich features such as bookkeeping, savepoints, dice rolling, commentaries, and more. As you recall Lone Wolf is an award winning which-way gamebook series by Joe Dever. After winning the 1982 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tournament at the Origins Game Fair in Baltimore, Dever left the music business for gamebook design and writing. He wrote Flight from the Dark in 1983, which would become the first out of 28 Lone Wolf gamebooks, spanning more than 14 years. Flight from the Dark sold 100,000 copies in the first month, while the entire Lone Wolf series sold over 9 million copies in 18 languages until it went out print in 1988. However, the entire Lone Wolf series is available online via Project Aon with Dever's blessings, and books 1-17 are being reprinted by Mongoose Publishing with bonus materials.

Turn-based fantasy is another of those genres that's been abandoned by conventional publishers, and a shame too; I spent way too much time playing Heroes of Might & Magic III (IV and V were disapppointments). Illwinter is a small indie developer in Sweden keeping the genre alive, however; they're best known for Dominions, but that game is so rich, detailed, and complicated that while fans of the genre mostly love it, the barrier to entry for new players is inordinately high.

The Conquest of Elysium games are an attempt to offer a simpler and quicker experience, both as a gateway drug to Dominions, and also for those who want a less time-consuming TBF fix. In this, they are not entirely successful; there's no tutorial, and while play is actually fairly simple, the UI is sufficiently obtuse that reading the manual is pretty nigh essential.

I'm a big fan of turn-based strategy, a genre that, like so many others, the mainstream game industry no longer supports because of its insistence on aiming for millions of unit sales, which TBS games never achieved. But games like Jagged Alliance 2 and X-COM UFO are, in their own way, among the greatest strategy games ever created.

In a way, Frozen Synapse is doing what Laser Squad Nemesis did: take the basic dynamics of turn-based strategy into an online, head-to-head multiplayer environment. LSN is, unfortunately, no longer extant, but Frozen Synapse is a worthy alternative.

Shmups tend to start off easy then steadily build difficulty. Many times I have given up on a game because the difficulty ramps up so high. It is utterly frustrating to play 80% of the game and then quit because the game gets impossibly hard. Charlie fixes this problem in Scoregasm by offering a non-linear, grid-level advancement. If you score high, you will be offered a choice between Normal or Advanced, or if you really score high then you can go to the Insane levels. If you choose Insane and you score poorly, the game will drop you to Normal levels. Thus you are always facing the right difficulty level.

Rijn the Specpyre is an old-school action RPG, currently under development, but with Windows and Linux demos available now (and a Mac version promised). In it, you play Rijn, a vampire, whom the local townsfolk have asked to rid them of a local "specpyre" family -- specpyres are apparently some kind of specter/vampire hybrid, and vampires are cool while specpyres are nasty.

The game is played entirely with keyboard; arrows to move, and left-CTRL/space-bar use left-hand weapon and right-hand weapon. You start with a sword, but can gain a crossbow later, and can wield torches as weapons. There are a limited variety of enemies, but each has its own attack pattern, and the most effective way of dealing with them varies.

This is one of the best games I've played since maybe Minecraft. I was like, way into it. Oh wait, for a minute I thought I was writing for Game Informer.

This game put me in the mindset of Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the JFK and Johnson administrations. We burned to death 100,000 civilians in a night, men, women and children, but at least they aren't 100,000 zombies! There's also kitschy 60s music in the soundtrack, it really goes for a 60s aesthetic, which is a nice compliment to the kitschy 50s aesthetic that the Fallout series pioneered. After all, there is no nuclear war in this scenario, only Llama bombs, Zombies, and panicked civillians.

Your first thought is "Asteroids clone, yawn." But it doesn't take long to realize there's a lot more going on here. Your gun slices up asteroids rather than blowing them up, and as they get smaller, you earn resources (floating numbers indicate so). Enemy ships show up and you have to deal with them too. Every once in a while, a sort of wandering space station shows up that you can dock with to unload your resources for score -- and while there, you can upgrade your ship. There are a lot of upgrades, too.

An increasing variety of enemy types, faster moving asteroids, boss battles -- and sometimes the screen gets close to bullet hell levels of activity, though this is not a bullet hell game. If you took Asteroids, and say, "Let's take it up ten X," you might get something like this.