Psychology

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.

Mental Repairs, Inc. is a pleasant, occasionally funny graphic adventure implemented in the Wintermute engine. The graphics are quite nicely done, in 3D, which is fairly impressive for a lone-man effort. It helps that the only people you talk to are machines, so the immobility of 3D faces in a fairly low-poly environment isn't a concern here.