Graphic Adventure

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.

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.

In Nanu Planet, you play a pig-like alien explorer who, in the process of crash-landing on a strange planet, gets separated from your sweetie, whom you spend the game trying to find.

The planet, like Korea, is divided into two hostile countries, with a demilitarized zone between them; you land in the DMZ. Theoretically, the game is teaching you something about the history and current state of Korea's division (the game was funded by a Korean government agency and Samsung); however, the connection to the real world is fairly notional, and it's best considered as a charming, if somewhat awkward, graphic adventure.

In Gamer Mom, you play a World of Warcraft-playing mother, trying to persuade her disaffected teen daughter and distant husband to join her in the game, on the theory that this will bring them closer together as a family.

To call it an adventure game is perhaps a tad expansive; in fact, it's just a single decision-tree dialog. Conversational gambits appear as buttons (it's a Javascript game); it's a fairly bushy tree, however, with a variety of endings.

The Old Tree is a short, moody, point-and-click graphic adventure with something of the feel of Samorost. It is, like that game, wholly linear, and its puzzles are not particularly difficult to solve, but it is graphically appealing and, at less than 15 minutes in length, is sufficient to hold your interest for its duration. It's also a little unsettling; your goal is to guide a little tentacled blobby creature through the game, and the thing is kind of repulsive, actually. But that's part of the mood the game sets.

Girl With a Heart Of is a sort of visual novel, a "graphic adventure lite" with little in the way of puzzle-solving. Play consists mainly of dialog with other characters and occasional FedEx quests; but the narrative you explore, and the world background, are quite interesting.

You are a young girl of "the Dark," living in an underground city that is currently under attack by "the Light." Your father has been killed, and your mother is severely injured. As is typical in quest fantasy, it turns out that the survival of your city somehow hinges on you, and you must learn magic and embark on a sort of vision quest to save it.

The Blackwell Deceptions is the next episode of Dave Gilbert's Blackwell series of graphic adventures, starring Rosangela Blackwell, a somewhat geeky young woman living alone in New York, and her spirit guide, Joey, a wisecracking, fedora-wearing ghost from the 1940s. As in the previous episodes -- The Blackwell Legacy and Blackwell Unbound -- their job is to investigate the mysteries around the ghosts they encounter, confront them with their own deaths, and send them on to the afterlife.

Barrier is a short graphic adventure in which you play Wu, a kung fu master whose girlfriend, Mei, is on the other side of the Great Wall of China. You must get to the top of the wall, pull her up, win her heart, and deal with the patrolling soldiers who apparently think peasants don't belong on the Great Wall.

The difficulty is that your verbs are not what you'd expect from an adventure game; all you can do is punch, kick, converse, and leap over. Thus, being the goofball that you are, when you attempt to use the ladder that is right there, you smash it to flinders with your mighty kung fu.

It's a short game -- ten minutes at most -- but entertaining, and the graphics, which appear to be scanned from a pastel rendering, are quite attractive.

Less than Three (aka <3) is a short Adventure Game Studio title from Ben Chandler; at the inception, a D&D-like party of adventures have just opened the treasure house of Emperor Kemal, and shortly find themselves trapped in it.

There's one long-ish and not particularly difficult puzzle (walkthrough linked above should you become stuck), but what's interesting isn't the gameplay per se, but the writing. The "examine" and "use" texts (LMB and RMB) provide a sense of a living world, and the by-play among the characters provides a story that's actually interesting, a rarity in games of any sort. A nice, short adventure gaming fix for those who like such.

Keys of a GameSpace is a short Adventure Game Studio title that rather pretentiously labels itself an "expressive game;" a sort of artist's statement on the site explains that the game is an attempt to explore games' expressive potential and that "games are not a trivial medium of expression." Doubtless some would find this an impressive claim, though I expect most readers of PTT! would respond "well, duh."

But, as most readers of PTT! would also doubtless agree, what's important is the game, not any claims made for it. Keys of a GameSpace has merit.