Art

Towlr is a puzzle. Towlr is an art movement. Towlr is an aesthetic with its own manifesto. Sort of. Towlr is frustrating. In Towlr, the cake is not a lie.

Towlr has a + sign in the screen. It has no meaning.

Towlr provides no rules, no tutorial, not even a minimalist statement of goals. You must deduce the goal.

Towlr tells you when you have failed, in a most annoying fashion.

Towlr displays only simple, geometric shapes such as you might see in an Atari 2600 game.

Towlr rewards success with cake.

In Towlr, the appropriate response when you succeed is "Doh!".

Towlr looks simple; but actually, there is a highly refined sensibility at work here, one that could only and can only derive from games. It's a sort of minimalism that rejects almost everything we know, or believe we know, about games. There is no hand-holding, no increment in skill, only a puzzle, with no hints and no support. The purpose of Towlr is to figure out how to play, and once you have, you are done.

And just as stark as its gameplay are its visuals and soundscape.

The first Towlr was created by PoV for a Ludum Dare competition, but a bunch have been created since. They are all available at the Towlr site. Some are web-playable, others are downloads, and the downloads vary in what platforms they support. But you should check them out, if only to experience a remarkably different aesthetic of the game.

As a reviewer, it's my job to push you in the direction of cool things in the hopes you just might check them out. I wouldn't be living up to my duty if I didn't direct you towards more of Stephen Lavelle's work, and you would be doing yourself a disservice as well if you aren't keeping up with his explorations of the medium. His motto is "let's try something out there" and he holds to it. He cranks out quirky little games that can make you feel empathetic or maybe slightly uneasy; he crafts experimental pieces that toy with game mechanics in a novel way. That is, when he isn't making games about female masturbation or a nerdy math joke. These are short experiences, so overlong explanations would ruin the fun. For the uninitiated here's a few tidbits about each.

Rohrer's Passage has always polarized gamers; either you appreciated its attempt to elevate the medium past primal urges or you thought it was pretentious fluff. Developer Lurk falls into the latter camp, and did the most indie thing you could do in response: make a parody game poking fun at it. While Rohrer's piece is heartfelt and earnest, Lurk's anti-Passage is absurd and nihilistic -- and elicits a chuckle or two as well. While he claims that games can never be art he inexplicably made a game that would qualify as such, albeit in a satirical Dadaist sort of way. If you've ever participated in one of those "iz gaimz aart" arguments in a forum (or here!) it'll whack your funny bone.

At the start of the year I lost my grandmother. I loved her as much as my parents and lived with her for a period of two years. During this time I helped take care of her, and while playing Home I couldn't help but think of her. I felt a twang of emotion at the end of Passage, but this is the first time my eyes misted up from playing a game. The protagonist is an old man in a hospice; as player, you act the role of surrogate caregiver. You balance the old man's needs like you would in The Sims, and like Billy Suicide, something meaningful emerges as the game unfolds. That's all I will say for now, spoilers and observations after the break.

Aubergine Sky is a simple, five-level sidescrolling puzzle, in which each level asks you to use different UI to solve the level. The text provides a clue as to what you need to do, though the developer also provides spoilers (in a Help link below the Flash window) if you get stuck.

Sid Sackson's palsied hand shakes red pepper flakes onto an Entenmann's crumb cake. He stares at me, mouth working, trying furiously to say something, but no sound emits, to his frustration. I understand that I am dreaming, but it is a portentous dream, filled with inexplicable significance. Behind him stand Bing Gordon and Richard Hilleman; Hilleman is making a v-sign behind Gordon's head and mugging like a fool, holding up a copy of Madden. "These guys just want to go onto the next thing," Gordon is saying, "when the money is in the sequels." Sackson looks sad and finally forces out faintly-heard words: "There's really no need for any more games."

Game designer Brenda Brathwaite is perhaps best known for her work on the classic Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series of PC games, although she has certainly kept busy since. Her latest project is in fact a series of six non-digital games, and it is one of those games that I write about today.

Jesse Venbrux is no stranger to either intriguing freeware or Play This Thing!. The creator of the Karoshi series, Execution, and Frozzd, Jesse has consistently crafted gems any indie game aficionado worth his salt knows about. Pazzon, an existentialist platformer, is one of his undeservedly lesser known works. Unlike his other 'arsty' game Execution, the implications this games raises aren't readily apparent once you boot up the .exe a second time. Mr. Venbrux claims that the game is a "short artistic(?) game with a mysterious story about religion." I find that the game tackles the broader topics of dogmatism and agency; and more importantly, how dogma applies to the structure, narrative, and players of games, who ultimately have no agency.

It starts as a vine. You sit back and watch it, chasing the black, diamond-studded sun, and a fluttery golden angel taunts its path. Then you realize that this is the game, and you follow that path with your cursor. The vine curls. As it curls up toward the angel, a leaf sprouts in its wake, catching it, or maybe the angel eats it, then it grows dark. A second vine is emerging. This is going to get more interesting.

Life Is A Race is an artsy banner-game from Cactus, you click to make a baby move across the screen, prompting it to run, get that briefcase and then become old and die. It's like Passage but with an emphasis, rather than ambivalence, on the speed of aging and mortality.

Torture Game 2 has you torturing a rag doll. I linked to the New Grounds page rather than direct because you gotta read those comments. Then you gotta read Ian's response to an MSNBC article about it. A sick world indeed.