Graphic Adventure

Mental Repairs, Inc. is a pleasant, occasionally funny graphic adventure implemented in the Wintermute engine. The graphics are quite nicely done, in 3D, which is fairly impressive for a lone-man effort. It helps that the only people you talk to are machines, so the immobility of 3D faces in a fairly low-poly environment isn't a concern here.

Amanita Design is well known form its delightful Samorost games, which are free; with Machinarium, they've basically taken the aesthetic of those games, produced a much larger one (about six hours of gameplay), and are offering it for sale, along with a playable Flash demo that's an excellent little game in its own right.

Pizza Morgana is a humorous graphic adventure created by Israeli developer Corbomite games, with art from Uri Fink, creator of Israel's most popular comic, Zbang.

Thorak & Steve: The Hunt Begins is a short (< 10 minutes) adventure, intended to be the start of an episodic series. Thorak is a caveman, and Steve his even more dim-witted companion. Chiefman Chief Man (the only character who talks in articulate English -- everyone else mumbles incomprehensibly, while their statements are rendered in visible text onscreen) won't let Thorak leave the village to hunt until he performs a number of tasks.

Time Gentlemen, Please is what they say in English pubs when one of their statutory and inexplicable closing times is approaching, so everyone can buy a last round. It's also the name of a Lucasarts-like adventure game from Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, a sequel to their superb Ben There, Dan That.

Homeland Guantanamo is a Flash "game for change" dramatizing the iniquities of the American system of immigrant detention. This system is indeed iniquitous -- no proper judicial oversight, no mechanism for appeal outside of the system itself, and based on the a priori assumption of guilt, a notion contrary to Anglo-American common law on which our justice system is supposedly based. Or to put it another way, I am in complete agreement with the premises of the game, so my criticisms of it should be understood not as an attack on its politics, but on its merits as a game qua game, as well as its effectiveness as an instrument of persuasion.

Just another dating sim designed by refugees from 4chan as a result of an anonymous post on /a/. Also, all the girls are disabled in some way -- Katawa is roughly translatable as "retard" or "cripple;" it's not a nice word. Heartwarming, right?

But, shockingly, it's the best portrayal of people with disabilities I've ever seen, far outstripping those you see in the mainstream media, mostly because those are limited to Professor X.

Malstrum's Mansion is a serious retro hoot; from the first Flash screen, which imperfectly recreates the screen of a 512K Mac running the Finder with the floppy disk for a game called "Malstrum's Mansion" in the drive, you know you're not in the same century. Upon starting, you're asked for the kind of "copy protection" scheme we used to use -- you must enter a particular word from the manual (or in this case, readme file).

MS Paint Adventures is not a game. Except that it is a game, absolutely.

The current game in progress is Problem Sleuth, but two previous games have been completed, and are archived. If you check out the first page of Problem Sleuth, you'll see a crudely-drawn private eye standing in his apartment, with the canonical things present you might expect to see if this were a graphic adventure -- a gun, a desk, a phone, a wall safe, a door from the office. Below is a blinking > cursor, which you might reasonably think is an invitation for you to type in text. It isn't.

I Fell In Love With The Majesty of Colors is a poetic exploration of alienation and social interaction by Gregory Weir, sort of like I Wish I Were The Moon but with tentacles. Are you a man dreaming you´re a cthonic leviathan? Or a cthonic leviathan dreaming you´re a man? Or are you a player trying to deduce a finite number of endings? The answer is C).