Horror

Necrotic Drift is one of my favorite games to bring out whenever discussing the relationship between player and protagonist.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I've been flamed just for saying that before, because someone found the opening sequence so unpleasant as to be angry I had caused him to have any contact with the game at all.

So consider yourself warned: this game includes heaping helpings of profanity; copious references to drug use, sexuality, and violence; misogynistic and otherwise seriously unenlightened characters; and at least one grotesque misapplication of every secretion the human body can produce. There's an artistic purpose to it all, but I wouldn't want anyone thinking this was a good game to introduce to their Sunday school class.

Want to know more?

Slouching Towards Bedlam is a great game, without being a perfect one. It has some rough spots in the implementation; there are moments when key characters could be more fully developed. But polish isn't everything. The production values here are good enough to support the game's main concept, and that concept is enough to make it worth playing and replaying.

Slouching begins at a Victorian lunatic asylum. The setting is steampunk-Lovecraftian, and the first few puzzles are fairly research and discovery puzzles. Expect to spend some time manipulating the mechanical filing system at the asylum. At the beginning, things seem to be strange in a familiar way.

The Act of Misdirection is a short horror story. There are some interactions that might be called puzzles, but they don't feel like it -- at least, not in the conventional sense. Instead, the interaction feels like an improv routine, in which the game hints gently (and then more explicitly) at the player's role, and the player performs on cue.

You have to think that most game designers have an imaginary consumer clearly in mind, and based on the evidence of most of what gets published, that seems to be a Maxim-reading dude with baggy pants and plenty of heavy metal and hip-hop on his iPod. Yes?

If that's so, then Georgina Okerson's imaginary consumer is very different -- an anime-obsessed teen emo girl, probably.

5 Days a Stranger is the first in a series of freeware, horror adventure games created by Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw. If that name sounds familiar to you, it probably is; he recently achieved internet-stardom via his wildly popular series of Zero Punctuation video reviews. He had been creating adventure games for years before this, however.

5DaS, while not his first game, was certainly a turning point. Before this, most of his games weren’t bad, per se, they were just...unpolished. That’s not to say that 5DaS itself is polished, however. The graphics aren’t the greatest, the interface is clunky, and the music is ripped straight out of RPG Maker.

So then, how does the game manage to be so fantastic?

Anchorhead is a rare achievement in interactive fiction, a well-designed puzzle-rich game that nonetheless leaves you mostly remembering the story.

Michael Gentry's game is based on the locations and ideas of H. P. Lovecraft, but the result has its own unique vision and integrity.

Penumbra is the only adventure game in which you play an ostrich.

More specifically, you play a terrified but not terribly sane mathematician descending into the depths of an abandoned mineshaft-turned-military-base. And unlike most adventure games, this one is all about the atmosphere rather than the puzzles.

Although the gameplay is flat and the puzzles are simple, the ambiance is spectacular. The graphics, sounds, level design -- it's all very solid and frightening. This is one of those rare games that will put you in a cold sweat even if you play it on a laptop at a picnic.

Will the real H.P. Lovecraft please stand up? One of the following three descriptions is from an H. P. Lovecraft story. The only thing changed in that sentence was the tense so that it would read in the present tense, just like descriptions in a game. The other two are from Lovecraft Country: Arkham By Night, a text-based game--a multi-user experience, if you will--available on the Skotos Network as part of a package of games. The package may be the best monthly expenditure on entertainment this side of Netflix. But that is a decision you'll have to make at a later point. Right now, you have to decide which is vintage Lovecraft and which is web-age Lovecraft. Is it a, b or c?

Inherent Evil was the first graphic adventure developed by Bryan Wiegele and the crew at Big Time Games, and was originally developed in an unusual way: It was supposed to be released episodically, one chapter per week, with a $10,000 cash prize to the first person to 'solve' the game. This structure led to some interesting design decisions; originally, each chapter dropped you to the desk-top on conclusion, and there was no way to save games during a level.