Loop

You look at Loop and you think: Wow, this is creative; I've never seen gameplay like this before. And also: Who in his right mind thought this was going to be popular?

The look of Loop comes out of Leo Lionni, the children's book creator, and the surrounding media--the girlish laughter when you complete a loop, the cheerful music--reinforces the sense that you've wandered into an alternate universe where people create digital applications for tots without trying to cram branded properties into their brains for future profit selling them licensed crapola--but purely for the joy of creating applications tots will enjoy.

In fact, this might be an excellent game to try to play with, say, a 4-year old, who is probably old enough to be able to maneuver the mouse and comprehend the idea of completing a loop to capture butterflies, and of the right age to appreciate the media aesthetic.

But the interest for us lies beyond the 4-year old mentality: typically of gameLab titles, Loop innovates on a UI basis, in this case, using the mouse as a way to create loops over assemblages of sprites, rather than to click on or assign orders to units.

In other words, this is a level-based puzzle game with an unusual control structure that repays study by the student of game design.

Or for those of you who aren't pretentious game design aesthetes like us: It's interesting because it's not your usual thing. You probably aren't going to devote large portions of your life to it, but it's worth looking at because it's different.