Clever Puzzle Game of Spatial Reasoning

I'm a sucker for an original and well-designed puzzle game, and Chocolate Castle certainly qualifies. Here's how it works: In each level, you have a number of little characters who eat chocolate, but each eats only one type (white, milk, dark, or rose), and eats only once. About the level are various blocks of chocolate; you have to clear a level. Blocks can be dragged about the level, but if a block of one color contacts another of the same color, they stick together permanently. One character can eat an entire group of chocolate of the same color. So you have to plan how to move your chocolate blocks to free up other eaters in such a way that everything gets eaten, given the geography of the level and the limited number of eaters you possess.

Elegant Sword-Fighting Game with Outrageous Stunts

While many games indeed contain sword-wielding characters, very few make even a cursory attempt actually to simulate the dynamics of sword-fighting, nor yet to impart a sense of how it actually feels to engage in swordplay.

That's what Determinance does. True, what it simulates is less the reality of fencing that the sort of over-the-top dramatic swordplay you'd expect in Highlander or a Hong Kong action flick, but hey, that's fun. What it does, and elegantly, is allow you to control sword motions, body positions, and arm positions with nothing but the mouse and its buttons.

The First True Interactive Drama

For decades, true interactive fiction--an application in which characters' responses to a player's input are determined algorithmically rather than via prescripted sequences, and in which valid stories emerge regardless of player action--has been a holy grail for AI researchers, digital artists, and game developers alike.

Most attempts to solve the problem have been "top down," that is, attempting to handle all sorts of stories, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of potential actions. The results have generally been never more than mildly interesting.

Andy Stern and Michael Mateas, however, chose to try to solve a specific problem, rather than the general one. They chose a story with one setting (an apartment), two NPCs (a husband and wife), one basic conflict (their marriage is on the rocks), and a limited time frame (you are a friend of the family, visiting them over the course of an evening). By narrowing the focus this way, they were actually to solve the problem. Not, to be sure, in a way that solves the general problem--but in a way that makes of Façade the first really interesting work of true interative fiction.

Place your bombs, start the simulation and blast your way through over 100 challenging levels in this unique logic puzzle game!

Impulse has a simple game concept: the ball must hit the goal object. Different bombs, obstacles, special elements and force fields provide varied levels. The interactive timeline at the bottom of the screen lets you control the time and guarantees an original gameplay.

Free

We don't normally link to adver-games... But we're willing to make an exception for Junkbot, because we like it a lot.

Junkbot is a robot who works in a factory. His job is to empty garbage cans. Unfortunately, his programmers aren't too smart, and his pathing algorithms are dumb. He walks left-to-right until he hits an obstacle, then turns around and walks in the other direction. This would be okay, except that in most levels, something prevents him from getting to the garbage can. Your job is to build him a path--using Lego bricks (ah, the advertiser).

2003 Independent Games Festival Finalist

Here's how a typical game works: You spend 20 hours or more pounding through a series of pre-planned linear obstacles, very often hurling your controller across the room or banging on your desk in frustration as you meet a boss that seems well nigh impossible until you go read a walk-through... And when you are done, you are done, because you've finished, and why would you ever want to play it again?

Here's how Strange Adventures in Infinite Space works: You spend twenty minutes or less, you have a satisfying game experience, and there is never a moment of frustration... if you fail it doesn't really matter because you can always start another game. And when it's done, you find yourself saying "damn, it's over already? I want to play again."

It's Delightful, It's De-Lovely, It's... Pretty Damn Strange

The Noks is about the weirdest game I've seen this year. I'm tempted to call it "indescribable," except we need to describe it, eh?

Partly, it's a game of collectibles. There are several hundred "Noks" in the world at present, and the developers plan to add more over time. You can think of Noks as something like, say, Magic: The Gathering cards, except that they aren't cards. They're animated 3D avatars with backstories. Some of them sing songs or perform music. And most have something to tell you about the game itself, or the backstory of the Noks universe. To understand that universe, you'll need to collect--well maybe not "them all," but lots of them.

Control Winds and Currents with the Mouse

Set in the world of Homeric myth, The Odyssey is a level-based casual game in which you have to guide your ships from one end of the level to the other in the face of monsters, storms, and other obstacles. What's interesting (and innovative) about it, however, is the control scheme--you move your ships by holding down the mouse button and drawing in the water to create currents, and by changing the direction and strength of the winds by moving the mouse within a wind-control region of the screen.

Good abstract strategy games are very hard to design, because they depend at their core on a small number of easily learned mechanics that breed a high level of strategic complexity--think Chess and Go. Wu Hing is a nicely polished such game--reminiscent of the work of Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph (the finest American boardgame designers of the mid-20th century).

Wu Hing is played on a hexagonal grid; each player (you and the AI) has a "hand" of tiles, replenished as tiles are played. Each tile represents one of the five classic Chinese elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water). A mandala displayed at the upper left of the screen explains that each element can "create" one other element, and also "destroy" a different element. (Think of this as a variant on rock-paper-scissors, with five rather than three elements, and with two outcomes--"create" or "destroy" rather than a single one--"beats".)

Simple Complexity in a Austere Puzzle Game

The best puzzle games take a handful of elements, and then surprise you with the complexity of puzzles those simple elements can create. Lexaloffle, the creators of this game (as well as Chocolate Castle) is something of a master of the genre, as Zen Puzzle Garden shows.

In Zen Puzzle Garden, you play a Buddhist monk who, in each level, has to rake the sand of a rock garden. The garden itself is a rectangle divided into squares; some are occupied by immovable rocks. You position yourself at one point around the garden, and rake across it--all the way to the other side, unless you are stopped by a rock. If so, you can then rake at a right angle from your previous direction of motion. To solve the puzzle, all open squares must be raked--but you can never re-enter an already-raked square.