Adventure

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

I used to give away lots of money to homeless people, at one GDC I gave away like a quarter of my travel budget to various hobos, in $20 denominations, because they asked and it was like a cool tourism thing for me. Since living in a filthy, cosmopolitan megalopolis for the past year I´ve become more jaded, at first it was a joy to hand out torn ten peso bills to various street performers on Calle Florida, and to children juggling in the avenidas, but overtime its become another social tension, another point of mental stress in the great control grid of a city. So now we´ve got an "art game" in the sense that its main mechanic involves something social, you play the eponymous beggar who, after getting thrown out of the elite castle, has to go about soliciting aid to survive.

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.

Mel Brooks once said, "It´s good to be The King," but when he said that perhaps he was not taking into account the long history of abuse, excess, and belligerence that accompanies that title. It took a game to highlight the nuance. Queens is a brief platform game that, in the history of all the other dozens and dozens of genre-bending platform games we review here, uses one of the assumptions of the genre along with a clever coat. In this case, it's replay: every platform game has you trod along until some new thing or a timing issue kills you off, so you start the level over with a slightly refined neural map and maybe get a bit further. Then the next thing pops out and kills you and you keep at it until you get to the next checkpoint. In this game there are no checkpoints and every time you die you´re killing another innocent woman.

Gregory Weir, not to be confused with the kid from Freaks and Geeks, has come out with another masterpiece-lite. After giving us the inside view on hacking for liberty and the psychology of Cthulhu, Gregory slings us the childhood dream of being a dragon. You get to be a dragon people! A dragon!

Update: Today I Die is an 2010 IGF finalist in the Nuovo Award category.

Last night I dreamed I was a Stone Age refugee swimming down a river to flee tribal genocide. This game is about the same process, how we reconstruct our daily reality every time we wake. This seemingly abstract idea is made whole with mouse-avoidance puzzles coupled with linguistic puzzles -- which we definitely don´t have enough of. The game is whimsical, a joy, fans of I Wish I Were The Moon will eat it up. However, as good as this is it is a failure.

Puzzle Bloom is a shiny, cel-shaded puzzler that mixes frameworks, giving you the abstraction of puzzle games with the avatar-centricity of Miyamoto-frameworked games. It´s got great technical polish and is yet another example of what can be brought to the web. The game has you controlling a green tree spirit, of if you´re hip to Celtic death lore, a will-o'-the-wisp. You possess these cretinous industrial workers in a dystopian factory world, trying to avoid its high-tech lasers and bloom out green goodness. To that end, it´s kind of like Flower meets Messiah.

Here's the short review, to help you decide if this is worth buying. First, listen to Booty Queen by Lizz King. If you like that song, adventure games, or getting caught in the rain, then buy this thing. If you expect some kind of tight time-cycle between action and response, if you expect strategic depth or even a modicum of decision-making depth, if you expect any level of rapidity, you should pass. Most of the reviews have made the dual mistakes of either praising this game uncritically or dismissing it out of hand because it does not suit the reviewer's personal tastes. "The Path is the art of the goddess, and if you don't like it you're a philistine!" meanders over to the other extreme, reacting "not a game, wtf!" I have a secret weapon that no other reviewer has applied, co-op mode. I played this with a 19-year-old Argentian that I also wolf on periodically, she's a non-gamer but did work at an Xbox call center.

Derek Yu has powers, he has the ability to kill a yak from 200 yards away with mind bullets, and he has the power to move you. He does perpetual service to a collective fetish amoungst the "hardcore" gamer population. It's an almost infatuated sense of comfort and awe at any 2D platforming space involving some kind of RPG or exploration dynamic. These are the millions who had a crush on that girl in third grade and thought, "I bet she feels like Super Metroid." Or Castlevania:Symphony of the Night if you were a bit older. Spelunky! is wet, it's a gamer's game, it exudes interesting decisions in a non-linear series complete with dank pixel art and emergent humor that teaches us something about ourselves. You know what I'm talking about, like that first time you threw the girl in order to pick up the bag of jewels, didn't mean to do that did you? And then she landed on the spikes? Or how about that time you got shot in the face by a totem statue that looked like Dick Cheney? You my friend, got spelunk'd.

The You Testament is Matt Dickie's final game, end of a nearly ten year career of one individual who does all the programming, art, and design of all of his games, and has produced them with rapid proficiency. This title takes all the lessons he's learned about flow and fun, and then distorts them in order to achieve something altogether more meaningful.

The You Testament has you playing a historically unknown disciple of Jesus the Christ.