Puzzle

If James Lipton interviewed game creators, he'd have Edmund McMillen sit across the table, then state with breathless, definitive poise: "And then you did Clubby The Seal."

This is the work of a deranged, austere soul: a badland vista, a range of horrible, mutant creatures, an alien fetus, a living ball of tar. Compiled together, you have more carcinogens and tasty flavor additives than an industrial cigarette. He's a brimming, creative LED, burning efficiently but also with a sickly, radioactive aura, his distortions splurging as if through a spigot.

The first project listed in the collection is Gish, which many saw upon first release as a benchmark of quality in the then young "indie" segment. Collaborating with a programmer buddy, McMillen carved the distinct character designs and aesthetic of the bizarre, tar-tastic roll-scape. The results marked a major milestone in his career.

Over only a few years, McMillen has been involved with the creation of 11 more games, mostly short-form casual/art/warped jaunts into a rapid imagination. His web comic, The Outlands, paints the setting from which five of these titles are mined. Each one puts you in the role of a different mutant species existing in the fraid desert. A Cactus that kills not for food, but for sport; an in vitro glob of flesh called a "dumpling"; a skull-toothed brain parasite; a wispy, wailing whelp. What's most striking is that these are not merely cosmetic explorations, each game is its own. While Host and Peashy are typical 2d, spatially-oriented, collision-em-ups, the Whelting and Dumpling games are pretty fresh dynamics, like Diner Dash meets Rosemary's Baby meets Mr. Rogers meets Planescape: Torment. Why not?

His most intriguing works, however, are his latest.

When Coil was released, the Jay Is Games mailing list was buzzing with discussion. Many of us wanted to praise it, with some claiming to "get" it, and others enjoying the vague mystique. One woman called it "totally offensive shit". Coil is an "art game" more firmly than his other work, by far, having you play mini-games, without instruction, that mark periods of a pregnancy. Thematically, it's a more somber look at gestation as a game arc, originally played out in Viviparous Dumpling. Its text leaves implications of a rape victim coming to terms with her condition... or does it? The meaning, like the gameplay, is largely open to inference.

His most recent title was Twin Hobo Rocket, a phallic-themed game where you and your hobo friend sit at the base of a rocket, trying to hit up aliens for change. Hilarious bits of speech annotate this hallucinated fund-raiser. It's a nice yo-yo back from the avant-garde ineffability of Coil.

The compilation site is hosting Windows-only, .exe builds of these titles. However, with an easy bit of Googling, you can play the Flash builds in your browser. I asked McMillen if he wouldn't compile and host .swf files, but he declined. I guess he's pretty much giving the finger to all non-Windows people. That's ok, he's a fucking genius.

A polished elaboration of Narbaculur Drop, which was a 2006 IGF Student Showcase winner, as well as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Game Festival in the same year, Portal is a level-based puzzle game with the tropes of a conventional first-person shooter. The game is published by Valve as part of its "Orange Box," which also includes additional Half Life 2 material.

Have you ever taken psychedelics? Have you wanted to, but feared the legal complications?

I have the solution for you. Read up on the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose plant. You can order seeds of this legal plant cheaply, and plant them. They are not intended for human consumption. Recommended dose is 4-6 seeds.

Then play Mondrian.

Gimme Friction Baby is a game written for JayIsGames' Casual Game Design Competition #3, whose theme was Replay.

It's a pure, minimalist piece. There's some austere music; there are a few highly geometric elements, in black and white and pale blue. Even the lettering is a blockish sans-serif.

The gameplay is similarly free of complication. The player fires balls up into the space overhead, where they gradually slow (presumably thanks to stiff air resistance) and then expand to fill as much space as possible until the circumference somewhere touches a wall or another ball. The player doesn't even get to aim the turret, just choose when in the course of its slow arc he wants to fire.

Karoshi means “death by overwork”. The game traps you in a labyrinth of office space with only one means of escape: killing yourself. It’s a satire of the mind-killing effects of constant work. Luckily, the game’s structure makes it perfect for briefly playing it in your cubicle while nobody is watching and sharing it with the colleagues you trust. Watch out, though, the laughter this game will create might attract some unwanted attention from your boss!

The game has twenty-five levels where you must figure out how you can end your life as a suit-wearing work-droid. This isn’t always as easy at it sounds. Most of the puzzles require smart use of boxes and triggers, but many levels require you to think out of the box. Humor is often your reward, as the scenarios are totally unexpected.

You have to think that most game designers have an imaginary consumer clearly in mind, and based on the evidence of most of what gets published, that seems to be a Maxim-reading dude with baggy pants and plenty of heavy metal and hip-hop on his iPod. Yes?

If that's so, then Georgina Okerson's imaginary consumer is very different -- an anime-obsessed teen emo girl, probably.

Click through for video review.

The backstory of Storked has it that the stork inadvertently dropped scads of penguin eggs all over Antarctica, and using your crack crew of penguin specialist, you must rescue them. What it basically means is that this is a puzzle game, and in each level, your penguins must find an egg, and get it to the baby basket somewhere else in the level.

DROD is a game that autistic people might enjoy while on methamphetamine. Its a turn-based, dungeon crawling puzzle-game. The way that works is: you can move in one of eight directions, you can wait, and you can turn your sword clockwise and counter-clockwise, and every time you execute one of those verbs, a turn passes. Every turn, other things in the tile-gridded room you're in will move, and every x amount of turns spawn units will create things that move. Thats pretty much DROD, "invented" (because it is so primally iconic a game design) by Eric Hermansen back in the 90s. Since then, it has expounded on that simplicity with so much manic variation that thousands of people have subscribed to Caravel Net and flooded its message boards with help requests, new content ("Holds" as it were) and all kinds of crystallized culture only possible in a hardcore gaming super-niche like the DROD series.

Phantom Mansion is a 2D puzzle game with enough depth and length of play that, with slightly better graphics and code that wasn't leaky (expect your machine to slow as you play) it could be a game you'd be willing to pay money for, if you're a fan of puzzlers. But you don't have to, since it's free.

Phantom Mansion is being developed as a series of 8 related Flash games, each representing a differently colored "door" in the eponymous Phantom mansion; four are currently available, with, presumably, the next four to come.