Standard Bits

Mark Johns considers this his best work. There's a reason for that. Standard Bits is pure. It's the first kiss under the desk in Kindergarten. It's jumping off a fifty-foot cliff into a river while blown. It's an attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. It's the subtle, asexual infatuation you had with The Secret Of Mana's level designs when you were four.

You're a pixel, you move around. Various other formations of pixels dance in bizarre constellations, your imagination does the rest. Imagine Dwarf Fortress' visual style, but without the cognitive dissonance. You're just cast adrift in this schizophrenic wasteland, no sound, no text, no nuthin' -- just you and your bit. Standard, really.

You're left to explore and infer and explore some more. You'll move to the edge of the screen and suddenly all the colors will be different and a new entity will be on screen. You'll experiment with it, and learn, and die, cast back to the little squat-box save points. Then you'll go out and do it all again. The only flaw of this game is a lack of direction, and yet that is its greatest strength.