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['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This month: cruel-to-be-kind indie platformer VVVVVV.]

This time last year the very hippest of the games industry's hip were trying to keep their cool while getting their asses handed to them by indie platformer Spelunky. Part masterpiece, part disasterpiece, Spelunky was and is a game about things going wrong. It's intricately designed to allow you to screw up in a thousand and one forehead-slapping ways, at which point it dumps you all the way back to the start. This is a game so mean that players discover by themselves that the damsel in distress is a viable projectile for fending off monsters.

Now? Now it's the year of our Lord 2010, and we have a new indie platformer with a retro aesthetic and rockin' chiptunes to enjoy. It's called VVVVVV. Like Spelunky, it's mean as a feverish mother in law and utterly brilliant, but unlike Spelunky VVVVVV isn't about hiding from death. It's about turning and facing it. You're no longer Spelunky's cautious, cute, chibi Indiana Jones, but the bold Captain Viridian.

Spelunky was a tease. It had you jumping at shadows and ducking danger, and it giggled as you fumbled with its fat mass of button-presses and items, it snorted every time you accidentally fumbled your weapon into a snakepit. VVVVVV's more zen than that. In VVVVVV you know you're going to die, as all heroes must, and you know you're going to do it with your head held high and no more than three keys on your keyboard.

Pay attention! This could be the best $15 you spend all month.

Here's Captain Verdigris' bad situation: his ship has mysteriously marooned itself in a strange new dimension, and the rest of his lovely crew (Verdigris, Victoria, Vermilion, Vitellary and the lovely Violet) have been scattered all around it. Your mission is ONE: To rescue and re-unite your dear crew. TWO: To explore this odd place. THREE: To escape it. All of them pretty tall orders for a little guy who can't even jump.

But wait! What Captain Verdigris can do in this dimension is flip gravity. Assuming his feet are on solid ground, the tap of a button causes him to either instantly fall up to the ceiling or back down to the floor. He can also move left and right, but that's it. In terms of acrobatic platforming capabilities that puts Verdigris somewhere between Miner Willy, Q*bert and a balloon charged with static electricity. Yet one of the reasons VVVVVV is worth playing is how its potent size and variety blooms out of this single, simple mechanic.

In short, it plays a lot like the final exam of a star pupil at Games Development Academy. You imagine developer Terry Cavanagh swaggering up to his desk, tiny black leather jacket slung over his shoulder, flipping his test paper over with a stroke of his hand. Eyes dusted with stories and sex scan the page.

"Design a platformer where the player is restricted to three actions: Moving left, moving right, and a third ability of your choice which is NOT jumping."

Cavanagh swivels his head and spits as he reads. What is this? This is nothing.

He pulls the chair back from the desk and sits in one smooth motion.

The world of VVVVVV is divided into little more than hundreds of perfectly square rooms. Play works like this: You, the player, walk into a room, surveying it with a pro gravity-flipper's trained eye. You probably smirk at the room's irreverant name which can always be found at the bottom of the screen. The solution of how to cross these rooms is sometimes obvious, sometimes unclear, and sometimes obvious yet such an unbelievable dick that you start groaning before you've even made your first attempt.

Yet soon you've beaten the room, you're stood at the other side of it and then you're eagerly sliding into the next one, which will also contain an idea, a challenge, and a funny name. In VVVVVV Terry Cavanagh's created something that plays like a chocolate box of game developer creativity. You're not struggling through levels, you're popping ideas into your mouth one after another.

The other interesting thing about VVVVVV is, as I mentioned before, how it treats death. Kieron Gillen beat me to most of this when he talked about the game on Rock Paper Shotgun, so I'll paraphrase. VVVVVV strips the punishment from death. You only ever get dumped as far back as the beginning of each room, and this reset happens quicker than it takes you to speak even the most unimaginative of swearwords. The result is that VVVVVV's trickier rooms play like a strange gaming sweatlodge where the only things that exist are you, death and this distant opportunity for success.

There are rooms in this game where you can and will die more than a hundred times before you triumph, and that's stressful, almost hateful, but never, ever tedious. You willingly lock yourself into this recursive loop of trying and failing, inching your way closer and closer to success, catharsis, release and (more literally) the other side of the room. Every room a tiny cycle of life.

This peaks in one entirely optional chamber known as Veni, Vidi, Vici. I won't spoil it. If you're interested, Kieron writes a great deal about it in the above link. What I'll say instead is this: VVVVVV's take on death is actually counterpoint to Demon's Souls, and games developers should be taking onboard the philosophies of both games.

Demon's Souls is an action game that won acclaim from gamers and journalists alike for possessing the cast-iron balls required to force the player to risk everything, from experience points to progress to items. The fact that these things were always at stake when you played turned a cruel game into a riveting one. It didn't matter if you were backtracking and had seen the level before, or were stronger than the enemies surrounding you, or didn't find the design of whatever segment of level you were in particularly interesting, because always you had this spectre of death peering over your shoulder. The game played for keeps.

VVVVVV is the exact opposite. It scythes the backtracking, boredom and fear of loss from the action experience, allowing players to exist forever in the scorching heat of insurmountable challenges, death-defying jumps and split-second dodges, and balances the shortened playthrough time by adding secrets, trophies and time-trials.

Both are forms of development which speak the same message: difficulty does not have to be a tiring, audience-limiting affair. To think of it as such is a failure of imagination and creativity, as nonsensical as assuming a game can't be gripping if it's easy.

A demo of VVVVVV can be found right here, alongside an option to buy the game for either PC or Mac.

You know, if you like it.

(You'll like it.)

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway, as quinns108 on Twitter or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-first column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This month: Machiavellian web strategy in Neptune's Pride.]

Look alive! Tuck in that shirt! Polish your soul! It's the Battle Klaxon, and I have a COMPUTER GAME for you!

It's called Neptune's Pride, and it's a free web browser strategy game from some developers who used to work at Irrational Games. Neptune's Pride is a game of two things:

#1: Intergalactic War
#2: Being a jerk

Or diplomacy, as I believe #2 is referred to in polite society. The way play works is nice and neat. Each player controls one spacefaring species in a galaxy full of star systems, and the game ends when one of you wins by holding more than half the systems in the galaxy. It's a 4X game, stripped way down to its bones and taking place in real time. Fleets can take anything from 4 hours to an entire agonising day to complete a hyperspace jump, and games play out over the course of a few weeks.

But I mentioned being a jerk! Oh, what unforgiveable human beings you all become. It's why I like the game, really. The guys behind Neptune's Pride clearly understand that we're such a slimy, conniving, cunning collection of cu-- creatures that there's incredible mileage in a strategy game which simply presents the framework required to let us screw each other over.

Let me talk you through this war crime of a game they've made.

First things first, this is a very blunt game. It's blunt in order to foster harshnes in its fledgling players. It nurtures logic, coaxes out cruel practicality. If I have 30 ships defending against your 45, I will lose the fight. If my empire of 20 star systems is invaded by your empire of 30 star systems, I will slowly but surely lose territory to you (unless you suck)(do you suck?). In short, this isn't Civilization or Galactic Civilizations and arguing with the numbers in this game is liable to get your nose broken.

Through this, each player in a game of Neptune's Pride is backed against the wall. The freedom you're offered as to how to develop your empire doesn't feel restrictive in any way (you can spend cash increasing the economy, industry or research capability of each star system), but intelligent decisions on the home front aren't anywhere near as powerful as those hard numbers you have at your disposal: how many ships you have, how many you produce every day, how fast your ships move and how hard they hit.

As such, skillful play in Neptune's Pride comes from not just manipulating your own hard numbers, but those of the other players. Your war isn't fought in a jungle of research trees, it's fought in the in-game messaging system, the chatbox and even outside the game in email and IM.

This might start with a simple research pact. You pick a player on the other side of the galaxy you don't feel threatened by, and get into the habit of swapping your scanning range tech for his weapon tech. Then maybe you'll move onto a non-aggression pact with one of your smaller neighbours, as the two of you know a war would deplete your ship reserves and render you both easy pickings. After that you might hazard an offer of alliance to that same player against a third, bigger empire who's looming over both of you.

You can give anything to anyone in Neptune's Pride. Handing over tech, cash, fleets or star systems happens at the push of a button. But here's the rub, and the reason the game works: There is no alliance button. There is no non-aggression pact button, or trade window. Everything you do, everything you agree on is a test of faith.

In the example above, let's say you actually are that third, bigger player which the two smaller players have clearly allied against. They shift their fleets to their border with you, and you realise if you don't strike now the two of them are going to become dug in and a nightmare to fight. So you quickly deploy all your available ships to target only one of them, leaving the other completely untouched, and you send a message to the player you haven't attacked yet saying if he doesn't get in your way you'll let him live.

Perhaps if you're smart you'll even sweeten the deal by saying if he helps right now you'll let him have half of his former friend's systems, and try and prove you won't screw him over in the future by laying out your plans for further expansion (that don't involve devouring his pathetic holdings). That's Neptune's Pride.

A better example: The game of Neptune's Pride I'm in now started with an anti-red-player alliance. Myself and two other players happened to encircle the red player, making him a natural, easy target for the three of us. But none of us yet had the scanning tech to see what the other two alliance members were doing in terms of actually sending ships at him.

So, while my alliance-mates wore themselves down taking red's systems, I quickly signed a non-aggression pact with red and busied myself with other territory and easier opponents. Hilarious! Right up until I found out one of my two alliance-mates was giving our alliance-shared technology to those "easier opponents" as a bribe to attack me first.

For several preposterous days our sham anti-red alliance was even cordially kept up, simply because while we all knew we were screwing one another over it still doubled as a profitable research pact.

I like Neptune's Pride because for all the talk of the "Grand Strategy" genre, here at last is some strategy that seems grand. It's slow enough to feel intelligent, simple enough to be elegant, and yet demands these far-seeing plans where you have to plot both the mathematical and emotional impact of your attacks and feints. And you can play it at the office, and it's free.

It's funny watching the RTS genre bending over backwards into horrible, Twister-like contortions in an effort to reinvent itself so frequently. Diplomacy's such a huge part of strategy and it's always studiously ignored.

Nevermind. You can drop into a game of Neptune's Pride right here, and if you have a gmail account you don't even have to register. Give it a shot! You'd probably be good at it. You're a jerk, right?

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway, as quinns108 on Twitter or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This time, he looks at underworld PC strategy game labor of love Solium Infernum.]

Hell - now there's a setting for a video game. Hell lets a game's artists and writers run naked and wild and free, and in just-released indie strategy game Solium Infernum it also happens to tease out some hugely intelligent design ideas. I'm glad for that, because it balances out the damage done to my precious brain every time I see footage from Dante's Inferno. Man, that game. You take not only a nonviolent epic poem but the single most nightmarish and psychedelic setting known to Western civilization and you use it to make... a God of War clone? Are you kidding?

By contrast, Solium Infernum is a turn-based, play-by-email creation, and it's my second favourite game this year. Good year for demons, I guess.

Despite the hex map Solium Infernum isn't quite a wargame. It's all about prestige. The story of any game of Solium goes like this: Satan's missing, and the Infernal Conclave are meeting to appoint a new ruler of Hell in, oh, some 40 turns. It's an unknown number that changes every game. Each player (AI or human) controls an Archfiend of some reknown, and the Archfiend with the most Prestige points when the conclave meets at the end of the game is appointed the new ruler of Hell.

Reputation is everything, making it a game of personality and public relations, back-room deals and threats. So, having to fight a war is useless and to be avoided. But winning a war, or being the Fiend with the balls to start one? Yeah, that might be worth your time.

The principle way of getting Prestige is taking control of the places of power scattered randomly across the map. The Halls of Avarice, the Tree of Woe, the Gates of Hell and so on. March one of your legions over to it, successfully do battle with the demons inside and it's yours. Nice! But about 10 turns into a game all of these places will have been taken, which is, of course, when the lot of you start hungrily eyeing up your neighbours' places of power.

But you can't (publically) attack another player without the Infernal Conclave's OK. That's where diplomacy comes in, which in Sol Infernum comes down to either poking or stroking egos. Your options are: Demand something of another Archfiend, insult them, or send them a gift. If you make a demand and the other player doesn't hand it over, you lose prestige but then get the chance to start a short, Conclave-sponsored war known as a vendetta. Insult someone and you'll take prestige from them, unless they rebuke the insult by declaring a vendetta against you. As for gifts, if a player accepts a gift (usually resources of some kind) then they lose the ability to insult or make demands from the gift-giver for a while. But you can also humiliate any emissaries sent to you bear gifts, which acts like an insult. Tricky, tricky.

But then, of course it's tricky. This is Hell. Nothing is simple, everything is skewed and maddening and all of it requires not just attention but thought. As a strategy game Solium Infernum's demand for actual brains shouldn't feel like a breath of fresh air, but it does. Hellish, choking, scalding hot, ash-filled fresh air.

Another example of Solium's tasty cruelty is how you acquire new Legions (armies), Praetors (champions), artifacts, relics or manuscripts. You can't just buy something, you have to check out a marketplace known as the Infernal Bazaar to see what's available, then place blind bids on what you want. There's only one of everything, but new stuff appears fairly regularly.

Naturally this creates the subgame of trying to figure out what your opponents might bid on and second guessing them. And even the resources you're bidding with have a twist of their own; the four different types (souls, ichor, hellfire and darkness) are acquired randomly when you demand tribute from your minions, meaning you're almost always working with a deficit of at least one type. Demanding resources from another Archfiend is even worse because they'll actively be trying to give you what you don't need. There's no safe way to trade, either. Nothing's stopping you from entering discussions with another human-controlled Archfiend and agreeing to send each other things, but, well. That requires an amount of trust it's unwise to have in Hell.

Worse still, resources are acquired and spent in 'card' form, so you don't just have 4 ichor, you might have a card worth 3 ichor and another card containing both 1 ichor and 1 hellfire. The ramifications of this are quiet and terrible. If you're playing a charismatic Archfiend you'll get valuable resource cards as tribute from your minions, which is great until your neighbour with his war-like Archfiend comes knocking on your door and demands 4 resource cards. Unlike everyone else you don't have the option of handing over some useless crap to placate him. The cards you're holding would fund an army. And just wait until the Archfiends with high prophecy ratings mange to read your charisma stat, because then they'll come calling too, licking their lips with tongues like whips.

Which is the main reason Solium's such a good game for scheming. Whether your demon's vocation is war, amassing resources, stealing, bribing, arena battles, knowledge, artifacts or whatever else you choose to develop, it's all hidden from everybody else. So you watch your opponents, you bite your nails, you wonder about their stats and tricks and secret objectives and doubly secret alliances. You start plotting because you know everyone else must be. Eventually you'll start questioning your own friends, doubting your own cards. It's great. You start to go a little mad, down there in the dark.

The second reason the lot of you start scheming like Disney villains is because your Prestige points are right there next to your name, so any high-risers naturally become the targets of invasions, insults and theft. Winning is something to be done on tip-toes. It's fascinating and deeply psychological, and it makes you remember what strategy actually is.

All the strategy games on the shelves these days, everything from Company of Heroes to Supreme Commander to the Total War games, they're all guilty of demanding play which is either too fast, too large-scale or has too many variables, all of which weaken the role of strategy and hand more power over to the speed of your mouse-clicks or your knowledge of the game.

Solium Infernum, like Cryptic Comet's Armageddon Empires before it, is the opposite. It's enormously restrictive. Not only are you constantly battling a huge dearth of resources, but you only get very few 'orders' every turn. 2 in the early game, perhaps as many as 4 in the late game. Want to move a unit? That's an order. Want to give a gift to another player? That's an order. Want to bid on something at the bazaar? That's an order, and sorry buster, don't you know you ain't got any orders left? It's time to sit back and see if any of the other players chose to screw you over this turn.

Being restricted in how much you can do is not a bad thing, not in a game with as much colour as this. It simply makes every choice agonising, and, hey, that's what strategy is supposed to be in the first place! Sorry, had you forgotten?

More than any game I've played in years Solium Infernum nails the sensation of staring at a screen and losing yourself in the cold glory of a difficult decision. It doesn't matter if you're winning or you're better at the game than everybody else. Because everyone has such a strict order limit, two players ganging up on you will almost always be able to outmanoeuvre you. Conversely, it doesn't matter how bad your position is, either. Thanks again to that order limit everyone tends to harass the lead players instead of wasting time keeping the losers down, and one well-timed event card can tip the playing field utterly. The event cards are also slightly skewed towards helping the underdogs. The Beast Has Arrived means every player with a place of power gets an entire legion randomly gobbled up, for example.

But before I put one hand on your back and steer you slightly aggressively to the page where you can buy Solium Infernum I should probably remind you that the only multiplayer it offers is play-by-email. That's where all the players take their turn and send their 'turn' file to a host, who processes your moves then sends you a master turn file back.

But it's not really a problem. The joy in Solium Infernum is in mulling over decisions that are capable of making appearances in your head while you're cleaning, exercising, cooking dinner, having sex, attending an important job interview or performing open heart surgery. These are beautiful decisions, ones which shouldn't be rushed. Much better to have a game that drifts on for the better part of three weeks than to guiltily complete your turn as quickly as possible. Besides, slow games mean you all get to send covert emails to one another offering alliances, knowledge and services. And you get to scheme that much more.

I guess I should also mention that the interface is awkward and there's no tutorial, so you'll need to read the manual. But since I've already mentioned the hexes and you're still reading, I'm thinking that won't matter to you. I'm also thinking that I like you. I bet we'd be friends if we ever met. I think you'd like me. You know what else I think you'd like? Solium Infernum. I think you should buy it. You can buy it right here. I'd lend you the cash, but I think I left my wallet in my other, uh, article. Probably quicker you just buy it yourself.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Every Game Ever. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week, we examine two different versions of panicked, squeaky-clean PSP title Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!]

There's been an odd glut of tongue-in-cheek Japanese games based on 16bit RPGs recently, games like Half Minute Hero and 3D Dot Heroes. I've already picked my favourite. I like it because it's about PANIC.

I love panic in games. That icy pang of realisation, the blitz of thoughts that follows, the test of keeping your cool. In panic you can find such easy access to that magical realm where the only things in existence are you and the game. And it's such a useful design tool!

Resident Evil 4 was full of boring bits like rooms where nothing happens or having to retrace your steps to stick a stone donkey tail on a carving of a donkey, but nobody noticed because those moments were respite from panic. Inaction became soothing, and a masterful action game became a game of the year.

My favourite of the comedy 16bit reimaginings, then: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is a PSP series which gives you the task of digging out a dungeon with the aim of killing the heroes that habitually raid it. The original game isn't great, but the sequel is, and that's getting released in America in Spring 2010 with the majestic title of Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! Time to Tighten Up Security.

The first game (out now in America as Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?) is so impoverished in terms of content it resembles a prototype, which probably explains why it didn't get a boxed English language release and can currently be found in the shiny blue limbo of the Playstation Store.

And yeah, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! does panic very, very well. Here's how it works:

You play the overlord of a 16bit RPG dungeon, which you view from a side-on perspective like you would an ant farm. The game is in digging out earth to create the tunnels and chambers of your dungeon while keeping it populated with monsters.

Every so often a bunch of nosy jerks known as 'Heroes' will come crashing through your front door, and the game asks where in your existing excavations you want to hide. The game is lost if the heroes find your squealing avatar and manage to drag him, trussed up like a common criminal, back to the surface.

Midnight Soil

What's alarming about this? Well, the way you enlist monsters, for one. Certain tiles of dirt contain nutrients, or, after a hero has cast a spell near them, magic. The more nutrients or magic in a square, the higher level the monster that comes staggering out when you dig out that tile. Fine. Except all but the lowest level slimes and sprites need to eat lower level monsters to survive and reproduce. You're not just filling your dungeon with employees, you're managing a fragile ecosystem, and nature runs its course so fast you're always returning to view parts of your dungeon to find they've changed.

Your lizardmen might have eaten all the dogs in their area and are starving as a result, or your faeries have reproduced like bunnies and set up shop where you were planning to lure a dragon. The exception to this rule is when you want the inevitable to happen for the purposes of something like evolution, whereupon you'll watch predator and pray avoid one another like opposing genders at a school prom. And that's not even the bad news.

Because your only real means of interacting with the world is permanently digging out these tiles, Badman's quirk is that, like a Go board, you only have a limited number of moves to choose from. While most defence games have you building, Badman gets you subtracting.

The irony is that the ultimate protection, 1000 feet of packed dirt, is there from the start, but you need to hide. So you dig down, dig deeper, always chipping away at your options and always panicking because of the acute awareness that you're backing yourself into a corner and sooner or later those heroes are gonna come for you.

Graveyard Humour

Did I mention you need to dig fast? The time frame on each party of heroes arriving is agonisingly tight, so you're often slicing out serpentine tunnels by holding down the dig button and sliding your pickaxe over the screen, praying you don't screw up that delicate ecosystem. You do, of course, and worse besides.

Whether you're extending your dungeon or cutting out delicious nutrient-rich tiles for the monsters within, you'll end up turning blind corners into smooth curves, putting safe spots in killzones and (most embarrassingly of all) knocking down walls and creating shortcuts that let heroes bypass whole areas of your dungeon.

And so you panic. You panic because there's no save, and your dungeon is in ruins, and you don't want to start the level again, and-- oh, mercy! Oh, mother! Here they come!

I'm a big fan of games which invisibly force you into role-playing your character through mechanics alone, so it makes me pretty happy when you end up every bit the bumbling villain in Badman. As a player you'll brood, you'll giggle, you'll hatch plots (the game's too fast-paced for any grand strategy, so hatch you must) and you'll panic when your schemes don't work out, most likely because you ruined them yourself. I love it.

Click here for a trailer and a little more info on Time To Tighten Up Security. And remember, don't bother with the first game! It's not being All It Can Be. Save yourself for this.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Every Game Ever. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week: fascinating Russian PC survival horror game The Void.]

Czech puzzler Machinarium looks to be the PC's solitary darling for October, which is a crime and a sham and a shame and other such nastiness. Let me tell you about The Void, another Eastern European PC game that's out this week in the UK, a game that's stranger, more interesting and more ambitious.

'How strange?'

Well, you play a mute, incorporeal soul trapped between life and death in a land which looks like a nuclear bomb test site redesigned by a feng shui master, and your only means of interacting with the world is the removal and application of colour from a first person perspective.

'Oh... that's... and is it good?'

Yes it's good! I wouldn't be writing about it in this column if it wasn't good! The Void is just as deserving of a fat slice of your time and money as Machinarium, perhaps even more so if you believe a game which tries to realise the potential of our hobby through ideas is more worth supporting than an exquisite construct of familiar, fading genres.

It's easy to use the word 'familiar' as a snub after playing The Void because of just how comfortably The Void sits in the unknown, which is a reference to more than its life-after-death setting. You can almost see the Russian developers [who also created the acclaimed PC title Pathologic] grinning out from the shadows like a whole squadron of Cheshire Cats, delighting in your discovery of all the bleak imagery and weird ideas they've brought to (the after)life.

At its (unbeating) heart though, The Void is a game about high tension resource management. So let's talk about that first.

Progressing through the grim world of The Void with the aim of finding a means to re-unite yourself with the body and memories you supposedly left behind is a straightforward, if peculiar process. You do it with a currency of colour. Each area of the game contains a somnolent female character known as a Sister, and after you've gifted her with enough colour she'll let you through. There are also a number of horrifically warped men known as Brothers wandering around, beings so ugly they look like someone was playing Pipemania with their body parts in the womb. Badly.

As with real life big brothers, your goal with the Brothers is to do what they say while figuring out how to subvert them. That means following orders, expending colour somewhere in a certain way, until enough you're strong enough to tussle with them, which you do by flinging even more colour in their direction. The final use of colour is in travelling and maintaining your soul's sentience- meaning colour is also your vehicle, your food and your health.

This actually resembles Ice-Pick's previous project Pathologic, where you played a healer in a plague-ridden town. In Pathologic completing the story missions where you researched the plague or prevented anarchy from breaking out was relatively easy. The challenge came from keeping your character fed, watered, liked, protected, healthy, and well-rested while you ran about doing your good work, and inevitably three hours into the game you were controlling a sickly man with bloodshot eyes who sold razorblades to children so he could afford more coffee and maybe repair his galoshes with the change.

Likewise, The Void is a game where resources are all you ever need and the challenge is in learning how to claw them out of the world and in trying and failing to keep your grip on what little you have. So, one of your first lessons in The Void is that those skittish egg-shaped creatures can be lured over if you create a pool of colour, allowing you to snatch colour out of them while they feed.

Soon you find out that colour hidden in the ground can be excavated by brute force, and later you learn to lure it out by song. You also learn that different shades of colour have different effects both when you store them in your body and when you expend them, you learn certain colours are poisonous to certain Sisters, and you learn new ways to use colour that have you returning to old chambers in an almost Metroid stylee.

I guess comparisons with such joyful franchises as Metroid aren't wholly unwarranted. While The Void is fundamentally a difficult and daunting game which so often crosses over from being creepy into being downright scary, it does have the capacity to charm you due to it creating such a tangible space for you to explore and exist in. The idea of charm might seem ridiculous when you first start playing the game and are chewing over such friendly pieces of advice as "Until you have learned the Commandments, and followed and seen the Revelation, you are an enemy," but the subtle emotional attachment does begin, even if it's not always a positive one.

It's largely down to this ecosystem of colour you have to study. Through necessity you learn the movements of predators and how to tend whole gardens of colour, and as you master your surroundings you might never feel comfortable, but you do start to feel at home. You could compare it to living in a dodgy area of town. And while the game's inhabitants never become any less monstrous or stony, a small cast of characters means you do get to know everybody's quirks and mad personalities.

The Brother known as Mantid never stops being appalling- I mean, he's a slim man who moves about like an insect on the spears he's skewered by. But you do get to know him. You get to know all of your enemies, and your undead soul dreams of their destruction. Which is an interesting enough idea in itself- the bosses in the game, The Brothers, who are your ultimate enemies, are the same people giving you your quests and warnings. Quite aside from the neat idea of being able to turn on them at any moment, when you do you it's a more interesting fight simply because these are characters you've gotten to know.

Also of note is how The Void's unique setting affects the role-playing you do. Rich McCormick, who was reviewing it for PC Gamer UK, said to me that "as you're a soul in an alien land rather than an analog of yourself on SCI-FI ISLAND or something, you perhaps play closer to your actual thought processes." Meaning the game forces you to make decisions and form opinions with none of the bias other games would impose on your through your character, or the setting, or the tone of the game. There is simply you, and this new world you must feel out piece by piece.

He went on: "it's at such a disconnect with the typical good/neutral/evil decision making dichotomy in a role-playing game, but it's perhaps the purest role-playing game I've played. You're forced to duck when infinitely more powerful forces float overhead, but you can flip them off when they turn around, or act as their little enforcer, or simply bumble around as you (perhaps) would."

Probably the lesson to take away from The Void is how powerful an experience can become by taking a step back and removing elements of game design which almost seem set in stone now. For example, forcing the player to make moral decisions without a character to pass their sins onto. Making them survive in a world without telling them the rules. Telling them there's a time limit, but not how long it is. Letting them stick their nose into areas long before they're "meant" to.

Through all of this The Void becomes a game about fumbling in the dark with both hands in front of you, with you routinely drawing them back to find one covered in an unidentifiable, damp substance. It's a design ethos that makes for a game which is as harsh and awkward as it is fascinating and worth playing.

I was reading a review of Borderlands this morning where it was discussed how neither the reviewer nor his friends bothered reading any of the quest-giver text, instead relying on nothing but objectives and waypoints. They couldn't see any point in reading this stuff, and certainly didn't get any pleasure from it.

Conversely, The Void is a game where all players will find themselves opening their journal and re-reading what's been said to them in instruction, advice or warning, simply because the game cannot be trusted to guide you or catch you if you fall. This need to read over what's been said strengthens immersion because it's no longer a case of you and the game, it's a case of you and what the characters have said, of you and the world.

Of you and the void. Of you, alone.

The Void -- which is available in Russia, Poland and Germany under names including Turgor and Tension -- is currently retailing for £20 from several fine UK-based retailers. If you're not in the UK, then ordering from the British publisher will get a PC physical version, according to recent forum posts. No confirmation on a digital release just yet.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer,, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week: Over-the-shoulder strategy in Sega's PlayStation 3 title Valkyria Chronicles.]

A few weeks back an acquaintance of mine who used to work for Edge dropped out of games journalism. You can read his exit letter here, where he expresses his frustration that what he calls the most interesting game of last year, Valkyria Chronicles, got scant coverage. I've got a load of problems with Valkyria Chronicles, but I can put them to one side. This one's for you, dude!

A small note for any of you who ignored this game because of what's implied by the anime art direction- Valkyria Chronicles' closest relatives are in fact small-scale strategy games like Jagged Alliance and Freedom Force. You know, that mythical genre that lets everyone have fun asking "Why does nobody make games like that these days?"

The only significant different between Valkyria Chronicles and those classics is that instead of trapping you twenty metres above the action in an isometric camera Valkyria Chronicles prefers to drop you into the thick of things. When you're giving orders to a unit the camera sits behind them in a 3rd person perspective, and you steer them around just like you would in a third person shooter with enemies taking shots at you. When you're done the game zooms back out to a hand-drawn paper map, allowing you to select the next unit. After you've moved all your guys it's then time for the AI to move theirs in the same style, meaning it's time for you to take what's coming to you like a man. Or, you know, time for you to go get a cup of tea while humming loud enough that you can't hear the screams of your troops.

If you're thinking that makes Valkyria Chronicles worth playing because it's a really clever hybrid of real-time and turn-based strategy touched by the immersion and excitement that comes from a third person shooter, well, you'd be right. And you'd probably creep me out a bit too since those are the exact words I'd have used. But there's another side to the design of Valkyria Chronicles that I consider far more important than its experimentation with controls, timing and camera angles.

You first encounter it after the tutorial missions, when botanist protagonist Welkin Gunther finally finds himself captaining your rag-tag militia squad. Welkin's called into the office of his superior officer, given a sheaf of personal profiles and told to pick out who's going to be in Squad 7.

Each profile consists of a picture, a portrait, a brief bio and some known facets of their character, and when you look at profiles in more detail you get a short cutscene of that would-be soldier coming in and introducing themselves to you. This was easily my favourite gaming moment of 2008, just because of the immediate impression that Welkin arrived very, very late to the troop roster.

A game hasn't made me laugh so hard in ages. There's Ted Ustinov, who likes making people laugh but is allergic to most metals. There's Wavy, who doesn't have a second name but everyone agrees his is very kind. Nancy Dufour is a renowned clutz. Theold's a racist. This guy's a misogynist. That guy can't stand getting his uniform dirty. This guy has a single trait which just reads "Lonely".

There's one thing all these personalities have in common though. They signed up to defend their home.

Inglorious Nice People

This is where the subtleties of the game start to reveal themselves to you. Whether someone's a chatterbox, flirt or has a temper, all of it affects their performance in combat. To get the most out of your Squad 7 you need to get the most out of each individual, and that means getting to know them.

Aside from this being a really fun system it consciously pushes what's often everyone's favourite aspect of this genre- getting emotionally attached to your soldiers. Not only do the characters in your squad have a ton of colour to start off with, as they cut their teeth in battle they gain more and more traits for you to keep in mind, and as you use specific people over and over their biographies become fleshed out in the game's menu.

You learn where Oscar got his scar, or that Nadine is penning a novel. Even with Valkyria Chronicles's lightweight writing and family-friendly interpretation of war (and, eventually, its borderline callous treatment of concentration camps) you'll find yourself wrapped up in the personalities of your team (three of which, incidentally, are characters from Skies of Arcadia).

The neat twist of this system is that it makes natural at least some of the slow increase in complexity we expect from games. As a squad commander, of course you're going to get to know your men and women better as you lead them from mission to mission. That Valkyria Chronicles demands you take these personalities into account when deciding your next move means the more time you spend with your squad, the more factors you have to take into every decision.

The other achievement here is how overwhelmingly human and engaging this system makes strategy. Say you're controlling famed ladies man Hermes Kissinger (though you've recently found out he's actually bisexual). If Hermes achieves something incredible, some snap shot or mission-winning dodge, you become that much more fascinated by him. Whereas in most RTS games that emotional response would have been applied to luck or yourself and quickly dissipated, in Valkyria Chronicles it's harnessed and applied to the character, sucking you into the game and the action further.

The Big Red One

Now, sometimes when you're playing a small-scale strategy game like this there can be a dark, bloodcurdling core to it. I'm talking about permanent character death, the agonising kiss of which anyone who played X-Com or the original Final Fantasy Tactics will be familiar with. I'm all for this system because it makes combat that much more exciting, but it can potentially hurt your devotion to the game so badly that you might never pick it up again. There's always the option to replay the mission and try and best it without losing anybody, but that smacks of tedium and being a sore loser.

The developers at Sega Wow have come up with a way around this, and it's simple enough that I'm comfortable calling it genius. So, on rare occasions you can lose people in Valkyria Chronicles. It happens if one of your troops gets put down and you fail to get another soldier over to them in time to call for a medic.

The simple fix present here is unique dialogue which has been written and recorded for every single soldier for this eventuality. When you lose somebody you get a small cutscene turning the event from a miserable failure on your part into a full-blown emotional moment that you remember and become touched by, dialogue you'd never have heard otherwise. Through very little effort on the part of the developers an irritation in the game design becomes smoothed into part of the story.

Thinking about it, it's staggering that we've been playing strategy games for so long and so few have tried to simulate the human elements of being a squad commander. Lord knows I'd play a game that in between missions gave you the run of wherever you camped that night, expecting you to gauge and improve the morale of your boys, break up fights, predict and counter mutinies, give speeches and punish desertion, with your invisible performance in these segments affecting how each subsequent mission plays out.

Until that game, though, there's Valkyria Chronicles, and next year there'll be Valkyria Chronicles 2 on PSP. As much as sequels in Japan have a nasty tendency to play it safe, that might end up being interesting too. It's vying for the Persona buck, with protagonists who are all students at a military academy and have to juggle warfare with their studies. Could be interesting! Could be trite. But after the original game I'll be more than happy to suck it and see.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week: The snap, crackle and pop of Red Orchestra.]

I've been hating on Battlefield 1943 a lot recently. Last week when a fan of the series thrust a calloused finger in my direction and demanded games which did large-scale combat better, I obviously mentioned Warhawk, but was surprised when another name fell out of my mouth. Red Orchestra. The UT2004 mod turned full game that paints a grubby, heart-stopping picture of the Eastern front of WW2.

Red Orchestra solves a problem I've had with almost every shooter I've ever played- that of them steering clear of simulating real guns and real bullets. Game guns are relatively quiet, don't have much recoil, can be shot with accuracy while you walk or run and are always reloaded in a few seconds.

Game bullets have the mysterious ability to fill the clips you're carrying in your pockets so those clips are always full when inserted into guns, and when shot game bullets don't so much as cause anyone pain until enough of them are lodged in a single body that they cause some kind of mysterious stroke.

There are tons of games which act as exceptions to one or two of these rules, but Red Orchestra's the only recent game I can think of to ignore them all. In Red Orchestra you point a gun at someone, there is a BANG and they DIE and you don't RELOAD because it takes AGES and besides in a tight spot you'll never empty a full magazine before getting SHOT yourself anyway.

It's obvious why this is traditionally avoided. It means combat's over in a flash and becomes the domain of twitch-gamers and campers.

And yet that's not the case in Red Orchestra. In most multiplayer games, the game's designed first and the weapons are chosen and tweaked to fit. In the name of setting itself apart, Red Orchestra built the guns first, the most worrying and wicked and downright real things the UT engine has ever seen, and created something great by packing the game tightly around them like a snowball.

It Tolls For You

At once the sneakiest adjustment and the one that's sat in everyone's face at all times is RO's map design. Levels take place in cramped, ruined cities, labyrinthine industrial sites and murky sprawls of countryside, all of which make it very tricky to line up enemies under your sights. By which I mean it's a pretty taxing process to actually find the other team. It turns the game from a shooter into more of a hunter and a creeper, elongating that combat which those realistic guns would originally render too short.

The player uniforms do the same job. The Russian side wear murky brown. The Germans wear browny green. All of the levels are murky, and some are murky browny green. This is a pretty awesome joke in a game where life and death is divided and decided by a split-second and friendly fire is always on.

I've had more than one match of Red Orchestra where I was exploring some broken house, rounded a corner, come face to face with Another Guy and both of us leapt back out of sight again because for each of us it was the only option that'd definitely keep us alive and prevent us from team-killing.

The really fun part comes when the two of you decode the mental image you're left with and realise no, oh no, you actually are on opposite teams, you missed your chance for a snap shot and now you're alone in a house with a murderer. Although shooting from the hip can be a bad time too. Unless you've attached your bayonet, missing at close quarters with those old bolt-action rifles is a very noisy way of announcing your pants are temporarily down.

Again, the point of this is to slow down the combat, to plug the flow of death, and have everyone moving slower and more thoughtfully.

Another thing Red Orchestra does to accommodate its deadly weaponry is take the disadvantages of real guns as well as their capacity for murder, like having to aim. Shooting in Red Orchestra means looking down ironsights, which means being close to stationary and ditching your peripheral vision. As I've mentioned, it's possible to fire from the hip but unless you're close enough to an enemy to smell the tang of BO and vodka you might as well be firing blanks. Reloading takes a long time, of course, and there's no counter as to how many bullets are left in your clip. But you remember how to count, right?

The list goes on. Machine guns must be deployed on something to get the most out of them. Bullet drop is modeled for all guns, so if you're shooting from one end of the map to the other you'll need to aim above your target as well as leading them if they're moving. Even taking out tanks with anti-armour rockets means you can't hit your target from an angle or the projectile will bounce off the armour. You need a direct hit.

How many countless late nights and unnutritious meals went into experimenting with all these features I'm not sure, but the results can't be argued with. Red Orchestra is a distinctly playable and fast-paced shooter that boasts honest-to-God real guns.

It's an achievement in itself, sure, but on paper it can seem like a pointless one. When a thousand shooters have had (and continue to have) incredible success dancing around the concept of realism, getting only as close as they can without burning away at the fun of the game, why would you try and force your way closer?

There's an answer hidden in that question. A thousand shooters offer something fun. Battlefield or Warhawk or Counter-Strike offer up fun with both hands and a grin on their painted faces. Red Orchestra? It, and it alone, can provide something else.

Little Rabbit

I remember joining my friend for his very first game of Red Orchestra, how we dropped into the same server just as the match was starting and found ourselves in the muddy woolens of a crowd of Russian infantrymen. We were standing next to a truck in a snowy forest.

As the game began the rest of our team ran off as one to take up positions in the barns and trenches that gave us the best chance of survival, with my friend and I sprinting in their footsteps, rifles against our chests. Soon the first shots were crackling in the distance, their origin and destination unknown to us. We lay there, shoulder to shoulder in a ditch, and we waited and watched for movement.

"OH MY GOD", typed my friend. "I AM ERNEST HEMINGWAY."

Never mind the, uh, multitude of inaccuracies in his claim. The word is immersion. Red Orchestra's guns, seductive as they are, are really only the starting point of something greater.

See, realistic weapons that obey all the rules of the real world lead to one thing only, and that's realistic, believable combat. Because of its weaponry, Red Orchestra organically creates so many of the tactics and tropes that games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honour and Brothers in Arms have to fake through set pieces and abstract mechanics. Flanking, suppressive fire, stealth segments, hesitation before shooting, even morale and panic, all of it exists within Red Orchestra without the developers adding so much as a single line of code or breathing a word about it to the player, simply because of the way the guns work. Adapting to survive means adopting the small-unit tactics that exist in real life, and that'll happen whether you're conscious of it or not.

Another war story. I was playing a machine gunner on a heathery, flat map with a massive maze of trenches making up the centre. Through luck and more luck I'd managed to slink through to the far side of it undetected, and found myself and my enormous gun standing some twenty feet behind several enemy soldiers who were lying on their bellies and shooting down at my friends in the trench.

Feeling empty, I lay down facing them and tapped the key that began the laborious process of propping up my machine gun on the ground in front of me. As I was lining up the first shot I noticed a scrap of colour between me and the man I'd chosen to die first. Pulling back from the ironsights, I saw it was a single flower. Gee. It was a pretty thing. The rest of the landscape was so ugly.

That was when one of the soldiers turned around, saw me, whipped up his gun and shot me dead before I could have breathed a word. Some of us don't have it in us, I guess.

I love that story, because it's too saccharine to appear in a piece of war fiction. A soldier dying because he was totally absorbed in the captivating beauty of a single flower? C'mon.

Think about this:

Because everything in a piece of fiction is preordained by the author, certain events, occurrences or coincidences are off-limits because they appear too unlikely or because they're too obviously meaningful or ugly. They either destroy the story because they aren't believable, or because the give off the stench of bad storytelling, or both.

Ridiculous, overblown imagery then is an area in which games can play where other forms of media cannot, because it's not something placed by an author. It can be something you find, or create yourself.

So, I love the flower story because it's a war story that only a game could tell, and I love Red Orchestra because it's he only game telling it.

Yikes. I remember when I envisioned Battle Klaxon as a light-hearted thing. Not sure what happened there. Tune in next time when I'm sure I'll have written 4,000 words on the parallels between Daggerfall and the Canterbury Tales.

No. No! Something fun, next time. I promise.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him either relaxing in Galway, working in London or at gmail dot com.]