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The analogy is inexact; Harold, after all, lives on a blank page and everything in it he draws, including the environments he traverses. In Max and the Magic Marker, the levels of the world are pre-existing, and Max draws only to traverse them. Yet it seems clear where the game's inspiration comes from.

The mechanic of drawing for traversal is no longer novel, though it is fairly recent; but it's still a mechanic that hasn't been deeply explored, and Max comes up with quite a variety of puzzles in its demo. What perhaps is more novel is the children's book feel to the game; in addition to the debt owed Harold and the Purple Crayon, there's also a nod to Where the Wild Things Are. Max's quest is to capture a monster he drew, and when you stop time (with the spacebar) to draw over moving items, a crown appears on Max's head, much like the one the Wild Things use to crown that book's Max.

Xong is an odd and idiosyncratic munge of a Rogue-like, a level-based puzzle game, and an Arkanoid clone. It's Rogue-like, in that it's an ASCII graphics game with procedurally-generated levels, but the actual gameplay is puzzle solving with Breakout-like aspects.

Simon Read's New Star Games specializes in sports games where you manage not a team but the career of an individual athlete; the New Star Soccer series demonstrates the virtue of this, providing a style of play quite different from either the high-res "you are there" gameplay of conventional sports games or the spreadsheet-like play of sports management games.

New Star Tennis is his latest outing; as the name implies, you're a tennis player on the international circuit. You plan activities week by week, including training, participating in a tournament, relaxing by playing minigames (darts, kart riding, going to the casino or betting on the horses), or shopping. Equipment can allow strength and stamina training, but also apparently to attract sponsors, you have to live some kind of extravagant lifestyle, so you need to buy crap for the sake of buying crap.

Dani Bunten Berry was, along with Chris Crawford and Will Wright, one of the giants of the early days of computer games in the United States. Her work was, throughout his (later her) career, motivated by the idea that games should be social activities; as she put it, "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'" This despite the fact that she worked in an era when multiplayer games were hard; her Modem Wars was the first commercially released head-to-head computer games to support online play, published at a time when only a small portion of PC owners had modems.

Snood is basically a clone of Bust-a-Move -- an excellent one, and something that has wasted way too much of my time -- but I'm not writing about it because of the gameplay; I'm writing about it because of its history, and its business model.

Walker and Silhouette used to be antagonists. He's a police detective; she's a criminal of sorts, though it seems that most of her crimes were expressions of social subversiveness, rather than anything too hard-core. Now, of course, they solve crimes.

Walker & Silhouette is designed to be friendly to novice players, and in particular to get around some of the challenges of parser-based IF: instead of requiring the player to type full commands, it provides keywords that can be typed in or (on interpreters that support hyperlinks) just clicked on. Selecting a keyword means having the protagonist do whatever he (or she -- you play both characters during the game) thinks is the most reasonable action applying to that object at the moment.

Most objects don't get picked up, either, which means that the player has a fairly static inventory. And movement is limited to using the leave keyword when it becomes available -- which means that there's no map to keep track of and no compass directions to memorize. There are even some achievements to unlock, which is cute, a borrowing of game tropes decidedly alien to standard IF.

As one might expect, the keyword-dependency narrows the puzzle range of Walker & Silhouette: any given thing is only useful in one way at one time. It's not completely without challenge, though. It soon becomes evident that puzzle solutions are about interacting with objects in the right order, or timed to coincide right with external events.

I'm describing this keyword-based IF as though it were a novelty. It isn't: people have been playing with variations on this idea for a long time, because it offers obvious advantages to players who find the regular IF parser too frustrating or challenging to learn. Adventures of Helpfulman used clickable keyword-driven conversation back in 1999; in 2007, Ferrous Ring explored the possibility of giving the player multiple modes of play, ranging from the standard parser through keyword play to a system that would more or less play the game for you, so you could read it like a book. There are others. But unless you've followed the IF community and its competitions very closely, you probably haven't heard of those games, and that's largely because they didn't entirely work. Some of that has to do with writing (Ferrous Ring was deeply surreal, so it was hard to figure out what was going on), but some of it was because the authors hadn't given enough thought to how a keyword-based system might be fundamentally different to interact with from a parsed-command system.

More recently, Blue Lacuna offered a partially keyword-based system: it was possible to play quite a lot of the game typing only one-word commands to examine things or move from place to place, resorting to the fuller commands at the parser only for extraordinary actions. But it tended more or less to fall back on the parser when puzzle content was needed; whereas Walker & Silhouette really commits to the idea that the keywords are going to suffice for all gameplay. And they do.

In spite of that, W&S is not quite the same as a hypertext story, and not just because the world model has more state than the average hypertext story tracks. There is still a command prompt, and if you want to, you can type commands in classic IF style. It's not necessary to do that in order to win, and most of the time it won't be productive of anything important, but there are occasionally moments when I wanted to toy with the characters by suggesting actions that they aren't consciously considering. And this paid off: the game responded as though the protagonist was surprised by an unanticipated nudge from the id, often with rather entertaining text.

All this about interface and I haven't talked about the content. Walker & Silhouette is pleasing for some of the same reasons that Gun Mute is pleasing. Pacian likes to take a setting that you think you understand (the old west, early 20th-century England) and then add layers of worldbuilding that make that setting strange and new again. Each new scene brings twists not only for the mystery in the foreground, the one the protagonists are trying to solve, but for the mystery in the background about what kind of a world this is.

I am not describing the setting at all, because one of the constant pleasures of the game, for me, was in discovering that this world contained Surprising Element X... and that Walker and Silhouette considered Element X commonplace. The keyword system helps out with that effect, too, because it allows the protagonists to act on their world knowledge in situations where the player might not completely understand what's going on. If that sounds like a demerit, trust me: in this game it generally works.

Add to that a light romance and a theme about promoting gender equality, and you have a distinctively Pacian-esque piece. It's fun, adventurous, and not too hard; it feels like enjoyable fluff while you're playing, but after you're done you may find it leaves more of an impression than you expected.

Osmos is a game that you are designed to like. Sure, it's designed for you to like it, but you are also designed to like this game. And by designed, I mean intentionally by a vengeful Christian god, not in a stochastic evolutionary sense. This game, with its celestial motes harmonizing around the vacuum, slurping each other up, mirrors the precise neurological feedback loops of brain cells congealing electrical signal spikes. The very chemistry of fun is embedded into these floating dynamics, and it's a floating world. You might as well become huge.

You play a mote, an amoeba-type entity, that gets bigger when it contacts smaller entities and smaller when it contacts bigger entities. You can propel yourself by shooting off a tiny portion of your mass with a single mouse-click. Like the cthonic god of Paul Czege's tabletop RPG, Acts of Evil who turns out to be a single powerful microbe predating billions of smaller microbes in antediluvian seas, you are trying to get huge. It's a primal deal, survival of the fittest (or is it fattest? Just going by the current geopolitical benchmark. I mean, what is Thanksgiving about anyway?). Like corporations merging and aquiring until they turn into a bloated parasite like Activision Blizzard, like accounts ripping each other off over a stock exchange, like posturing teenagers drinking beer and licking each others faces, this is evolution or some grotesque approximation. But unlike the cluster-fuck we call reality, this game has charm, it's pure, it's serene. Zen meets billiards meets libido. It's like splitting a doobie with the unbearable lightness of being.

Aesthetically the game is a knock-out, Eddy's background is in "technical art" which is a catch-all to describe everything from light filters to shaders to procedural animation, and this game has all that stuff. I'm a 2d purist and for this scale of a team, you would probably not get such a fine sense of awe, contiguity and most importantly, shininess if they tried to make a 3d take on the same concept. The music tracks all have a kind of groovy Brian Eno feel, like Spore was going for, and its generic qualities are offset by the absolute appropriateness of the genre to this gameplay. One commenter on TIGSource, (which I believe stands for "Trolls In Games Source", Rinku actually banned the word "pretentious" from being posted in comments there) had noted that like the holocaust or the dramas of homosexuals being Oscar bait, amorphous floating blobs with a physics engine are IGF Award Bait. I reckon that troll had a point, and after all, what are trolls for besides brewing regeneration potions from samples of their nanotech-like skin? However I have to defend it, this game is as cohesive as the congealed lipid/water complexes that populate it, its aesthetic is beautifully understated, it's the music of the spheres reconciled with the rhythms of evolutionary biology.

The gameplay in the demo, linked here, gives you the basic gist, the gentle hook, but the variations in the full version are sublime in their nuance. I know this review is getting way to laudatory, so lets break it down in practical terms. You've got three threads of gameplay: ambient settings where you have to puzzle your way from speck-hood to being the biggest, contest levels where you have to rush to become bigger before the already larger motes dominate the field, and physics oriented levels where you have to snipe orbits and other tomfoolery. Each has a different bent and subdivides into mechanical variations, and whats best, the structure is non-linear, so if you're looking for fiero you'll find it, it you want to chillax with some paidic puzzle-solving at a slow pace, as I do, you can just park yourself on that. The alt-Z key allows you to reconfigure the level in a randomized fashion, so maybe we are talking more evolutionary stochasticism here rather than divine intervention, but the replay you get from that is worth the price of admission. My main criticism, and this is a minor one, is that you have to push alt-r to restart or alt-z to scramble, for an otherwise mouse-based game the mapping of complex keyboard inputs to these purposes is unwieldy.

Whether you're a high powered business mote or a lowly student mote, you will enjoy this game and find it soothing from your daily struggles with all the other motes in your local petri dish. And maybe, just maybe, you'll become more humble from the exercise, because after all, does it really matter if you're 100 or 1000 times bigger than the average mote? You're still just an amoeba in the sea.

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.

Amanita Design is well known form its delightful Samorost games, which are free; with Machinarium, they've basically taken the aesthetic of those games, produced a much larger one (about six hours of gameplay), and are offering it for sale, along with a playable Flash demo that's an excellent little game in its own right.

This here game's about old-time shootouts, and it's a hoot. Your protagonist (who I assume is the Man with No Name from those Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns) is tasked with shooting his way through a mess of enemies, and it ain't easy. They outnumber you, have spiffy AI, and are deadly shots to boot. Thankfully your cowboy has learned to tap into the Matrix and use bullet time, so that evens the odds a bit. Expect some exhilarating gunfights. Add in delightfully chunky graphics and some twangy MIDI guitar and you've got a game that has the cowboy-punk charm of the Meat Puppets. Yeehaw?