Adventure Gamers Rejoice

With adventure games abandoned by the majors, and high-profile indie projects few and far between, fans of the genre find the pickings meager. But here's reason for celebration: a big, well-executed game that feels like a cross between Monkey Island and Leisure Suit Larry, with the sort of humor adventure gamers learned to love from Infocom and Lucasarts but is now almost entirely lacking on the gaming landscape.

Original, Abstract, Naval Combat

So... Battleship Chess. The destroyers move like rooks, right?

Well, no; don't take the name so literally. Like Chess, this is a turn-based abstract strategy game with surprising depth. Like Battleship, its theme is naval combat. But the gameplay is quite unlike those two games.

Each turn, you may move one (and only one) ship in your fleet, which may then fire; if it ends its move adjacent to a friendly ship, both (or all) ships may fire, so planning your moves to maximize your firepower is useful. Different ship types (battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, and subs) have different movement ranges, armor ratings--and armaments. As you might expect, battleships have huge long-range guns, while destroyers have shorter-range but potentially devastating torpedoes. Actually, the ship stats are quite detailed, almost as if this were a naval sim, which it patently is not.

There's fog of war, meaning you don't see enemy ships until they get within sight range--you are not, as in Battleship required to fire blindly until you hit something. You can certainly do that, as many ships can fire farther than their sight range, but ships also have limited ammunition, so there's a tradeoff involved.

Balance Real Needs, or Cynically Work to Reelection?
Game Tunnel's 2005 Sim Game of the Year

Books can be important; movies can be important. Games, however, are the degraded purview of violent male adolescents. Democracy cannot exist.

Except that it does, of course. It is not without flaw; but it's a game that every citizen of a democracy should play, to get a better gut understanding of the pressures faced by they leaders--and every citizen of a tyranny should play, to get a better gut understanding of why democracy, whatever its flaws, is better than the alternatives.

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 Best Puzzle Game of All Time

Or so says the Mathematics Association of America, and who are we to disagree?

To call it a puzzle game is inadequate, however; the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) games are sui generis, and about the only quick way to describe them is as "Gauntlet meets Sokoban."

Lemmings Meets The Incredible Machine

In Eets, as in Lemmings or Junkbot, your job isn't to control your character or critters directly, but instead to place items on the screen that affect their behavior, and guide them to the exit point of the level. In the case of Eets, the "exit" is a puzzle piece placed somewhere on the screen, and you have a single "eets" -- a cute little animated guy -- whose abilities are determined by his "emotional state," which you can alter. A scared eets will stop and turn around when he comes to a ledge; a happy eets can jump short distances; and an angry eets can jump big distances. Typically, levels consist of several platforms--and you have to figure out how to guide your eets from one to the next in order to get to the puzzle piece, by placing little powerups that he eats, changing his state to make sure the right jumps happen at the right places.

Real-Time.. Risk? Meets 4X??

Imagine playing Risk in real time, with new armies showing up continually and attacks occurring as fast as you and your opponents can order them. Or imagine a 4X space conquest game stripped down to the barebones essentials. With graphics that look like they come from a minimalist shmup. With games typically taking 5 minutes, and playable online against up to 11 other players...

Sounds wild? It is, and you've just imagined Galcon.

Physics Sidescroller with Beautiful Czech Animation
2006 Game of the Year, Game Tunnel

In recent years, something interesting has been happening to the sidescroller--that old, even musty standard of the early game industry--in the independent game scene. Retaining the 2D sidescrolling motion and controls of the genre, clever developers have been freshening and renewing the gameplay, with the use of physics and graphic techniques like particle effects to create different and interesting puzzles and situations. Gish was perhaps the first to do so--but in Gumboy we have a beautiful and worthy successor.

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.

The Slacker Sim

You're 20, you have no particular skills, you're working as a waitron to pay the bills. Sure, Horatio Alger would urge you to work hard to get ahead, but a person's gotta have some fun. If you're too depressed and lonely to get out of bed, how are you going to do that?

This is a game that sucks you in. Perhaps like Cute Knight, but in a different way; both games put you in the role of a young person trying to make your way in an uncertain world, but Cute Knight is very much a fantasy, anime-influenced game, while in Kudos you get a real sense of being a 21st century slacker. But in both cases, you're likely to come to the end of the trial and think, damn... I want to keep on playing. Is it worth the 20 smackers?