PC

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.

The Trouble with Robots is a sort of single-player, sidescrolling trading-card game, with something of the feel of tower defense.

The backstory is that a flying saucer has landed in a fantasy world, disgorging innumerable robots. In a series of 20-something levels, you control armies composed of peasants, elves, centaurs, and the like against robots of diverse types.

Before a level begins, you select 5 cards from those available to you -- only a few choices are available at game start, but other cards are unlocked during play. There are multiple waves of attackers within a level; each wave, you are dealt new cards. Energy to play them recharges over time; you can use surplus energy to trigger lightning bolt attacks on individual robots, which means that, unlike so many tower defense games, you do still have things to do while attacks are ongoing.

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.

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.

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.

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.