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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.

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.

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.

Find Me a Good One is a student project from a duo at the Parsons School of Design; as with many student projects, it's quite short. It's a sort of puzzle platformer, though the platforming difficulty is minimal, with hand-drawn, surreal graphics depicting a sort of dreamworld.

The backstory is that your brother is asleep and beset by nightmares; you must enter the dream world to find friendly creatures and bring them back to repel the nightmares. If you don't do so, the nightmares apparently abscond with your brother. But you are not required to do this; you can simply explore the world, and there's no "game over" when your brother goes away.

It's pleasant, but more the germ of an idea than a full game.

Find Me a Good One is a 2012 Indiecade nominee.

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.

Tales of the Arabian Nights (TOTAN) is a hybrid electronic and mechanical pinball game. Bookkeeping, combo chain states, and scoring is managed by the electronic components while gameplay -- keeping the steel ball in play -- is managed by sloped angles, gravity and mechanical parts. TOTAN is ranked number seven of all pinball machines in The Internet Pinball Database. TOTAN gets interesting if you understand the goal and the various "side quests," and the subtle meaningful choices that designer John Popadiuk put in TOTAN. There are many ways to achieve your goal of rescuing the princess from the evil genie Saleem Bagazi. However because there is no tutorial for TOTAN (or most pinball machines), players cannot fully appreciate the intricate and clever game design. Even after reading the official manual (PDF), it is difficult to understand all the different scoring and combo options. Many players, unaware of specific goals, will play TOTAN by hitting random bumpers and other targets, and watch the pretty lights, unaware of the deeper gameplay.

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.