Love

i saw her too, with lasers is the sequel to i saw her standing there, though the gameplay is somewhat different.

Unlike the first game, you do not play one of the lovers, but a mad scientist who uses lasers and holograms to guide the lovers together. They are both zombies now (the male became one at the end of the first game), so do not kill each other when they touch. And the "platforming" aspect is gone, as you do not directly control any character on screen, nor are jumps possible.

Instead, it has much more of the feeling of a switch-controlled puzzler than an action game, though there is still a bit of a performative aspect: often, you need to switch quickly from one control to another to prevent the loss of one of the zombies. The basic scheme is similar, however: on each level, guide the lovers to one another.

As with the first game, it's a nicely tuned Flash puzzler with clean, intelligent level design, and worth your while if you like puzzle games.

i saw her standing there is a nice little puzzle platformer with a fairly novel core mechanic and a somewhat disquieting backstory.

You control the player character with WASD or the arrow keys; "up" is a jump. A second (pink, inevitably) character moves toward you when you are sufficiently close; your goal is to guide her to a cage ("I loved her but she was a zombie, so I kept her safe in a cage"). Since she is a zombie, if she touches you, you die and must restart the level; but apparently she doesn't mind being caged, because a heart appears above her when you guide her there.

Not that it's really relevant to gameplay, but why is it that when games go here, the active character is always gendered male? And while I don't have any moral qualms about mutually consensual restraint (in face I, ah... better not go there), this is a pretty disquieting subtext from a gender political point of view.

The zombie-girl cannot jump, and in some levels, if you are not careful, you may guide her into a gap in a platform, causing her to die (and of course you can mistime a jump and do likewise).

As is typical with puzzle games, new puzzle elements are added over time, including risers, enemy zombies that can kill either of you, switchable laser barriers, and "holograms" of you that you can trigger to guide the zombie-girl even if you yourself are not present. There's a tasty combination of solver's uncertainty (the difficulty of solving puzzles) and performative uncertainty (the uncertainty inherent in any skill-and-action game). And the story is carried in tight, evocative texts, two lines on each level, the first displayed on level load and the second when solved. Art style is minimalist, but evocative and appropriate to the game's aesthetic.

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.

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.

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!

Here's a good game for those who have experienced abusive relationships or sit alone in the dark listening to the ending mantra of Antichrist Superstar with its "know when you are suffering... that I... have betrayed you" while contemplating a Shriek scenario. Loved does what indie games do best, take the platformer genre and then use it to weave an existential mind-fuck. The level design follows the similar series of incremental steps in difficulty, except this time the real difficulty derives from a series of choices you have to make regarding a voice's commands. Do you obey or disobey? When it tells you to do something sensible, will you obey that, or are you disobeying on principle? The actual platforming becomes a bit challenging at times but is nothing a veteran of the genre can't handle, the real challenge is in making sense of the thing.

Digital: A Love Story is an extraordinarily charming game -- a sort of text adventure in which you use your new pre-VGA computer to dial up all sorts of interesting BBSes, just like we did in the Old Days. There, you make virtual friends, uncover a mystery, and have the opportunity to fall in love.

I am now officially tired of the "why can't we have games that do ______?" conversation. Like, you know "games can't do conversations, games can't do tragedy, games can't do X, Y, and Z", so we're stuck with nothing but Gears of War until the end of time.

"The Uruguayans have let their relationships go stale, thus the sky is silent." Or so the instructions for Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans says.

A submission to TIG's procedurally generated content contest, Night Raveler is not a deep game, but packs an emotional punch. The screen shows residential high-rises, with people moving back and forth behind lit windows, gossamer strands across space indicating where 'relationships' exist between them. You play "the night raveler," essentially a mouse pointer in the shape of a little fellow with scissors. And what you do is sever the bonds between people.