Action/Adventure

Cactus is, it appears, unstoppable. He's a craftsman, and a living testament that it only takes a short time to design a game. In the indie game community, the 22-year-old Swede is looked upon as the gold standard of agility and style, with many being periodically infected with a disease known as "Cactus Envy". Now is an interesting time to review his work in that light, since a wave of content creation engines will allow less multi-talented designers to be cured of their Cactus Envy, and make similarly idiosyncratic games on similar time-scales.

Sure, we all complain about the periodic gluts of movie licensed games that hit the market, but how often have you seen one based on a film by a director like Andrei Tarkovsky? This isn't exactly what you would call a mainstream inspiration or a quick cash-in opportunity. The film was made in 1979, and was in turn based on a short story by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

Aquaria is a special game, and one of the best games released in 2007 on any platform, at any level of funding or production. It's up there with Portal, Everyday Shooter, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Mario Galaxy. It's a game that is both fun and meaningful. It is a world. It is a work of art.

Deleuze once wrote a chapter in one of his books called "Be Like The Pink Panther", and Ben Croshaw has internalized this idea, consciously or not, in his excellent stealth-adventure game, Trilby: The Art Of Theft. When you play this game, you feel like a fucking slink, I mean it's really something. Film noir meets your fingertips; the outlaw within paced down to taps and leers. This general aesthetic is that of Croshaw's adventure games, but Trilby is the embodiment of noir, a perfect flicker of stark white on black. The game is a happy marriage between platforming and adventure gameplay, wedded in a dark chapel where all the gifts got ganked.

Tempo is a third-person adventure game where you play a psychic in a wheelchair. Coming fresh out of España, the work of Cristian Pastor, who collaborated with Pat and Jesus and Alex, Tempo is one of the most technically furbished freeware games you can find on the net. Winner of the game award at the Creanimax Festival 2007, a showcase of Latin American student art. Since it's a university-funded game, the creators had the freedom to come up with anything they wanted, the result is both inspiring and limited.

When you’re first acquainted with Twilight Heroes, it may seem a bit...well, average. In all respects, it looks a bit like a low-fi ripoff of Kingdom of Loathing. After a little while with the game, though, you learn that this isn’t true at all.

The basic structure is the same. You use up adventures/turns in different areas, fighting monsters with neat pictures and funny text. The similarities stop there, though. Twilight Heroes has a much darker and more serious feel to it; there are still jokes, of course, but your avatar and his enemies take themselves much more seriously-which isn’t a bad thing. The art is different, too; instead of relying of simple art to convey things, Ryme, the creator and admin of the game, takes ordinary photos and warps them in Photoshop, creating images that can, at times, be downright creepy.

Knytt Stories is, as you can probably guess, a pseudo-sequel to the original Knytt. While the gameplay and atmosphere of the game are very similar to their predecessor, there are numerous refinements that put this a step above the original. Rather than starting out with all your abilities at once, you’re forced to acquire them as the game progresses. There are several entirely new abilities, too, including an umbrella, which will slow descent, and a double jump.

In Kingdom of Loathing, players take the role of a loosely-defined “adventurer” to save King Ralph XI from the evil Naughty Sorceress. Along the way, you’ll fight such monsters as Sk8 Gnomes, Goth Giants, and Racecar Bob.

It sounds stupid, I know, but KoL is actually a very funny game. Originally designed by Zach “Jick” Johnson, the game uses his simplistic stick figure art. That, in addition to the extremely witty jokes, are some of the major draws to the game.

If ever a game deserved a second chance, it's Eric Chahi’s Another World. Something of an homage to Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia, at least in terms of similar gameplay and rotoscoped graphics, Another World offers both that game's precise platforming as well as an inviting science fiction landscape. Since its release in 1991 it has survived largely on its reputation as an old favorite of countless designers--but few gamers have heard of this classic Amiga title, and fewer still have played it, largely because of its limited distribution.

Take an Elite-style game like Flatspace II. Set it in a cartoony universe where Zombies and Ninjas are waging an interstellar war. Tool around in a "starship" that's more like a Buick with a stardrive and lasers. Wage space battles against, among other things, space-going galleons and pterodactyls, and trade goods like cheese, paper, and kittens--no "industrial goods" or other boring stuff here. All to a loud, frenetic neopunk score--that's Ninjastarmageddon!.