Exploration

Anna Anthropy continues her degradation into commercial work --which began with the tightly-crafted squealer When Pigs Fly -- and I couldn't be happier. With her latest release she moves away from the masochism she's infamous for and instead weaves a tale of a lone space traveler. It's, dare I say it, actually pretty charming. While the lack of bondage is suprising her knack for marvelous game design (which is apparent in her earlier games and level design lessons) is still intact. Selling out hasn't been this well-crafted or fun.

Anthropy has a fine sense for graphical composition; her pixel art has an elegantly clean style to it. The music by Amon26 (of Au Sable and All Our Friends are Dead fame) is also top notch -- I'm actually listening to it as I type. The game's minimalist story echoes Knytt by establishing that the protagonist has lost roughly two dozen gems and must regain them through exploration. Your sole verbs are walking and a low-gravity leap, which ends in a slight bounce if you fall long enough. The game's main mechanic is the dual polarity of red and green platforms; if you touch a red switch, for example, red blocks disappear and green blocks materialize. Like Terry accomplished with V^6, Anna wrung out every conceivable application of this mechanic and the game's three pitfalls of robot, laser, and electric pit. The level design is absolutely stellar. The difficulty is also fairly low-key, the platforming isn't by any means sadistic and save spots are frequent. Playing through Redder and exploring its landscape shows that you can create a mainstream-oriented experience without dumbing it down or diluting it.

Not much else needs to be said, except this: thank you ma'am, may I have another?

Where has a title that reminds one of some extremely obsequious attempt at being avant-garde, it particularly reminds me of Crispin Glover's What Is It?, a film with a lot of mists where he wears Elizabethan garb and worships ennobled people with Down syndrome. Inel's title is more accessible than that, it's fundamentally a maze game with a quadra-partite level design scheme, each of the four corners of the maze allows you to access the congruent corner of one of three other mazes. The aesthetics utilize powerful lighting and procedural animation to give the game a sense of ambient cloud, bathed in varying depths of light, with a maze made up of trans-physical tiles that can be reshuffled by the vacuum like a deck of Mahjong tiles. It evokes the same kind of feelings one can get for paid cash from titles like Flower, but there's a certain simplicity here that bears note.

This game is fresher than a Snapple, do you remember Snapple? It was in tight competition with Lipton Brisk. This game is brisker than a cute animal wielding a bazooka, who must be brisk lest he take too much risk.

We've already established that retro is a sort of cancerous fetish and/or celebratory exercise in practical limitations, it's one or the other, or both. We've seen retro sweep over the platformer genre like a plague of locusts, devouring every possible variation on physics, level design, goal-orientation, character development, and aesthetic. The term Metroidvania has been viciously defiled, mutilated strung upside down in a mock crucifixion. Now Zelda-style games are being descended upon, we can only expect a skeleton to remain in the wake. But for now, it's time to feast!

Minimalism. This game embodies the idea. From impressionistic graphics to a streamlined verbset of move and jump, this game does away with all unnecessary aspects of design and lets its superb ambiance and atmosphere shine through. I want to say La Monte Young would be proud, but the lush orchestral pieces probably wouldn't be to his liking. I dig them though. I dig this game, and you should play it.

Stephen Lavelle is one of the more occult designers on the scene, a niche among niches, a designer played mostly by other designers and a few thousand others. His most popular title so far, as far as I can tell, have been Rara Racer, a fairly stupid meta-joke that is as funny as it is barely playable. If you check out his site, you´ll find a rich trove of half-baked experiments and bold masterpieces, and Mirror Stage is in this individual´s opinion, the best among that latter category.

Mark Johns considers this his best work. There's a reason for that. Standard Bits is pure. It's the first kiss under the desk in Kindergarten. It's jumping off a fifty-foot cliff into a river while blown. It's an attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. It's the subtle, asexual infatuation you had with The Secret Of Mana's level designs when you were four.