Surreal

I think I want to be Paolo Pedercini when I grow up. Of course, he's younger than I am, so I guess that's not going to work.

He knocked off this game in a few days as an Experimental Gameplay Project entry. It is a more emotionally compelling -- chilling, rather -- experience than the much-touted Passage -- at least for me. Passage is an evocation of the tritest idea of romantic love. every day the same dream is an evocation of the alienation of modern suburban life.

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.

FATALE is the newest work by Tale of Tales, developers of The Path, The Graveyard, and The Endless Forest.

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."

On one level -- and, to my mind, about the only level that matters -- Rationalization is a simple, one-puzzle game with a starkly minimalist look and a nice feeling of surreality.

On another level -- and the level that has drawn considerable comment, and perhaps is the key element for the interest in the game, it's apparently a commentary on Objectivism (and if you're interested in exploring that, Kieron Gillen and commenters provide their own, ah, rationalizations).

During the CD-ROM era -- that is, in the early-mid 90s, when it was thought that the CD-ROM itself was a "new medium," and people experimented with all kinds of non-game apps delivered on CDs -- there was a category of CD-ROM's called "click and wiggles." The best known of these was Just Grandma and Me, and it was aimed at kids; there were, as in graphic adventures, places to traverse and a narrative, carried in text; but nothing in the way of puzzles, particularly. Instead, clicking on screen hotspots would cause cute little animations or sound.

Windowsill is a bit like that, except that there is an element of puzzle-solving. To exit each room, you need to find a cube. Unlike a typical graphic adventure, there often is no particular logic to how the cube is found; it's a matter of trial and error. And yet, the animations are engaging enough that it doesn't seem to matter.

The Gostak is a game partly, but not entirely, in English. The usual word order words apply. Most pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are unchanged ("you", "and", "on", etc.), and some modal verbs ("can", "could"), as well as a few other words somewhat arbitrarily ("five"). But most of the adjectives, nouns, and non-modal verbs have been swapped for their own new vocabulary.

Ergon/Logos is a) quick, and b) so cool you must play it at once. If "play" is the right word: It is, when you come down to it, a surreal, poetic hypertext implemented as an action game, if "game" is the word, too.

Hypertext fiction is not intended to be action-driven, of course, which is one reason why this is so weird and original a thing.

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.

Take the color palette of The End of Evangelion mixed with the stench of industrial rock and foribly graft it onto the flesh of run-and-gun platformers replete with the WASD/mouse combo. Spice it with the end of the world, perhaps a few scenes from The Invisibles and a first person plural writing penchant adapted from System Shock 2. The result is All Of Our Friends Are Dead, a hell of a good way to spend an hour and a must add to any tripper´s playlist.