Minimalist

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.

I tagged it "masocore" up there, but Auntie Pixelante would doubtless chide me, because while You Can't Possibly Expect Me To Do That is certainly fucking hard, it doesn't quite play with expectations as much as the best masocore games do.

But still, it's an impressively sadistic little game. Completely minimal in graphics and what can hardly be characterized as a soundscape (a few bleeps and bloops), it exists purely as an exercise in evil level design.

There is what passes for a tutorial; the basics are typical (arrows to move, up to jump, double-jump permitted), and indeed the main innovation is that "dying" sends you through a wall, and if there's a health symbol on the other side, regenerates you there. But often you have to be very careful about your velocity when you die, because your "ghost" continues in the direction sent, and you may not end up in a rescueable area.

And in general, you have to have a light and controlled touch on the keys, since a few pixels in the wrong place will often kill you.

Anyone who thinks that almost all platformers are too easy will probably enjoy YCPEMTDT. The rest of us can find a masochistic amusement in it before succumbing to despair. One nice feature, though, is that all levels are accessible from the main menu, so even if you totally suck, you can check out what the harder levels look like.

My brother sits not two inches away from me, our elbows brushing and occasionally jabbing each other. With my laptop appropriately nestled in my lap we lean forward and stare at an abstraction of two grizzled swordsmen locking blades, hunting for an opening. After a quick exchange of blows, all blocked, we retreat to our respective corners. For a moment we wait. Rushing towards the center, I blast an attack his way. With my sword about to connect my brother raises his weapon in defense, only to realize (too late) that I threw a feint. I seize this opportunity and deal the killing blow, splattering copious red stuff across the screen. And my score count just went up one.

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.

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.

Strip out everything inessential from the platformer, and what you get is Coal. It looks like something you'd see on an arcade machine from 1982 with a black-and-white vector graphics monitor; the music is danceable MIDI techno. Snappily response controls, double- and wall-jumps, and straightforward but nastily fiendish level design; who needs anything more?