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Erika: 7 The story begins with our young hero, Anka, whose goal is to free his mother from a crime she did not commit and find his missing father. In between this story, players are asked to solve brainteasers in order to progress through the game. Simple enough, but what this adventure-puzzle game lacks [...] Continue reading

Belgian indie Tale of Tales has ported The Graveyard, its short PC "game" originally released in 2008 and nominated for IGF 2009's Innovation award, to iPhone. As with the Windows/Mac versions, the mobile port has two editions, a Lite version available for free and the $1.99 full version, in which its possible for the protagonist to die.

In The Graveyard, players controls an elderly woman during as she hobbles around a cemetery toward a bench for her to rest. Once sitting, she sits and listens to a song, then leaves. In the full version of the game, there's a chance she dies while sitting on the bench.

"The Graveyard offers a player the opportunity to imagine themselves in a certain situation," explains creators Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. "It's not a game in the sense that there is a way to win or lose or a puzzle to solve, or even a story to uncover. But the interaction does immerse you in a virtual world filled with narrative, an equally powerful feature of the medium of video games.

The developers note that because the iPhone hardware is less powerful than a PC, they made several changes to the game's graphics, removing post-processing, real-time overlays, animated trees, and birds. Samyn adds, "Still, if you ask us, The Graveyard is one of the best looking and sounding games on the iPhone."

Hi guys, My name’s Radek, and I’m part of Incubator Games, a small development studio from Toronto, Canada. We were all previously leads at Capybara Games working on such projects as the original Critter Crunch and HoMM: Clash of Heroes, but decided to strike out on our own. We are currently in the process of giving [...] Continue reading

Decepticolor is a remarkably polished little game, for a 48-hour game jam effort. It's a puzzle game, supposedly for two players (one using WASD and the other the arrow keys), but in fact it can readily be played by a single player manipulating both, although it's sometimes hard to remember which of the squares under your control is controlled by which set of keys this way.

Each player controls a square that contains a simple pattern of 16-bit colors. Somewhere in the game are are two "target" squares. You must move your squares to the target squares in such a way that when they overlie the target squares, the pattern of colors matches.

The keys "flip" your squares -- left or right moves you one square distance and flips the pattern across the vertical axis, while up or down flips across the horizontal axis. In addition, if on player flips his square, or part of his square, atop the other player's square, the underlying square assumes the overlying pattern. Thus, on many of the higher levels, you need to figure out how to strategically flip squares atop part of each other in order to build the target pattern. (In the screenshot above, the target squares are all blue, so the two manueverable squares need to be manipulated to transform each other to an all-blue state.)

The result is quite an interesting set of spatial and logic challenges. Only twelve levels, but then that's pretty good for 48 hours.

The development team Playdead has announced that their first game Limbo will be coming to the Xbox Live Arcade service, according to an article posted on IGN.com. Playdead CEO Dino Patti also confirmed that the IGF-nominated puzzle platformer will be launched this summer, so mark your calendars for this one.

Limbo is currently competing for the Technical Excellence and Visual Art awards in this year's IGF, and if you're attending GDC next week you'll be able to play the game at the IGF showfloor as well. Continue reading

Towlr is a puzzle. Towlr is an art movement. Towlr is an aesthetic with its own manifesto. Sort of. Towlr is frustrating. In Towlr, the cake is not a lie.

Towlr has a + sign in the screen. It has no meaning.

Towlr provides no rules, no tutorial, not even a minimalist statement of goals. You must deduce the goal.

Towlr tells you when you have failed, in a most annoying fashion.

Towlr displays only simple, geometric shapes such as you might see in an Atari 2600 game.

Towlr rewards success with cake.

In Towlr, the appropriate response when you succeed is "Doh!".

Towlr looks simple; but actually, there is a highly refined sensibility at work here, one that could only and can only derive from games. It's a sort of minimalism that rejects almost everything we know, or believe we know, about games. There is no hand-holding, no increment in skill, only a puzzle, with no hints and no support. The purpose of Towlr is to figure out how to play, and once you have, you are done.

And just as stark as its gameplay are its visuals and soundscape.

The first Towlr was created by PoV for a Ludum Dare competition, but a bunch have been created since. They are all available at the Towlr site. Some are web-playable, others are downloads, and the downloads vary in what platforms they support. But you should check them out, if only to experience a remarkably different aesthetic of the game.

Stew: 5 Vitamini’s website describes it as “Tetris with physics.” That’s giving it a bit too much credit. The core mechanic of the game can be described as bashing floating, spinning blocks into one another. The closest visible resemblance to Tetris is that blocks fall from the top of the screen and land on the bottom. [...] Continue reading