Polished Real-Time Fantasy Tactics
Now Updated to Version 1.54

Chronic Logic, developers of Bridge Construction Set and Gish return with a very different game: a tense, nicely polished game of tactical fantasy combat.

Before a 'round' starts, you purchase units--initially, you can choose from swordsmen and archers, but many other units get unlocked in later rounds. You place them on the map, and enemy units emerge (in a number of "waves" of attack). Combat is real-time, but pausable--and you will, in fact, be pausing frequently to order your units to move, or to use special powers (such as "taunt" for swordsmen, useful in preventing enemies from moving past to attack your more vulnerable archers, or "heal" for clerics).

At the end of each round, you're given the ability to unlock new units or powers for already unlocked units, so there's an RPG-like sense of progression. Naturally, you're faced with tougher enemies as the game goes on.

East Side Story is a point-and-click mystery in the Tex Murphy mold (at least until that series got moldy), developed by Mikael and Eleen Nyqvist, a Swedish husband-and-wife team -- their fourth game, in fact, featuring the English sleuth Carol Reed. It's first person, meaning that, like Myst, you never see your protagonist onscreen; and like Myst, screens are static images, with hotpoints you can mouse over, and the ability to turn to either side and move forward or back.

The images, however, are not rendered 3D, but photography -- nicely captured photographs of the town of Norrköping, in Sweden. This has its good side and its bad; the photographs are technically excellent, and many of them very attractive, providing visual quality that would be hard (and expensive) to create with digital assets. On the bad side, well, the real world is full of irrelevant detail, and sometimes it's hard to see what elements of a scene are important and worth remembering, a problem compounded by the fact that the game is designed so that some on-screen elements are not hotspots when you first encounter them, but do become hotspots later, when a puzzle requires you to use some element.

Nefarious Plans, 1920’s Glam, and Teenage Flimflam

Dangerous High School Girls is a highly unusual game; set in a rather forbidding girl's high school in the 1920s, you lead a team of girls investigating a series of accidents, and surviving the often-nasty hazing you get from other girls. It is, thus, a story-driven game, but the actual gameplay is almost boardgame like; indeed, the graphics are purposefully designed to look like a vintage game board, and overcoming opponents doesn't rely on combat, but instead on a series of minigames that represent, in some sense, fibbing, taunting, exposing secrets, and making power plays.