Coil's been out for some time, but we've never reviewed it, which makes it among the few IGF nominees (in the Innovation category) that you can play at present that we haven't reviewed. So it's about time.
Coil is by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, creators of (among others) Cunt and Triachnid.
It's a highly surreal game; like Braid, each level is introduced by evocative but fairly incomprehensible story text that nonetheless provides a vague hint as to how to approach the subsequent level. Graphics are beautiful in a pastel, arty way, and the accompanying music, like the text and gameplay itself, evokes serenity and is just on the verge of understandability.
Each level poses a different puzzle, has different UI, and behaves quite differently from each of the others -- and yet there is a thematic connection between them; while UI varies, on all levels you move the mouse (generally, but not invariably, in "coils," that is, circular motions) to influence the behavior of onscreen entities. No real explanation of what you are attempting to accomplish is provided, so gameplay involves exploring the nature of the system.
The cynical way to put this is that, like Fraid, the way to play Coil is to do things at random for no good reason until something works. But the game is genuinely pleasurable enough, and the emotions it produces during play interesting enough, that this level of cynicism dissolves as you experience the game, until you're left with the feeling that despite its surreality, there's a clear intentionality on the part of the creators, and the aesthetic experience, while hard to express, is undeniably worth experiencing.
