experimental posts

increpare is known for his strange, boundary-pushing games, and his entry into TIGsource's A Game By Its Cover competition is no exception. He's a prolific developer and popular developer as well, even though we've only talked about two of his games (Kristallnacht and Mirror Stage). Whale of Noise is nothing new from him, but displays the characteristic strangeness that permeates all of his work.

Whale of Noise follows a whale tenuously made of vibrating pixels. The whale can sing a song to separate itself into two distinct halves to get past obstacles, with each song corresponding to a number key. The game is extremely short, but oddly affecting. As you near the surface, the game begins to get more colorful. The music and sounds are ambient and moody, which fit perfectly with the game itself. It's only about 5 minutes long, but it's definitely an interesting game.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

Way back in May there was a little game that scared my pants off with some truly disturbing imagery and sound. That game was All Of Our Friends Are Dead, and it is still one of the scariest games I have ever played. It doesn't stop with just that game, however, as the developer made a thematic sequel with the confusingly titled Au Sable. Where All Of Our Friends Are Dead was spooky, Au Sable cranks it up even further. There are few games that I have to stop playing for reasons pertaining to creepiness or terror, and none that force me to do it as much as Au Sable did. This is an improvement on All Of Our Friends Are Dead in every way, and that includes the scaring your pants off.

The guys that did Shut Up And Jam Gaiden and Sewer Goblet have got to be insane. There's no way they can simply come up with all this craziness on their own. 78641 is another entry into their catalog of downright weird titles, and it's an excellent entry at that. Their first adventure game, it combined the humor they are known for with classic adventure gameplay to great effect.

Those familiar with indie adventure games like Time Gentlemen, Please! will instantly be comfortable with the gameplay of 78641. You have an inventory, you must perform actions, and you must solve puzzles. You play as a frying pan named Doug who crashes his car and is subsequently sent into the past. It's a baffling plot and bizzare game, but the humor and wit that suffuses everything make it a must play.

[Via TIGSource]

Haunting, minimalistic games are our specialty, with games like Dyson ranking high on the list of must-have games that are played often. Broken Brothers is yet another addition to this list, thanks to simple graphics, simple gameplay, and creepy music. It's artistic in the way that will send shivers down your spine, and any RTS fan will love the careful dissection of their favorite genre. It's one of the best entries to any Experimental Gameplay Project theme to date.

Broken Brothers is all about fighting insects to get back your lost brothers. To do this, you must gather hope, which translates into units. It's a fairly standard resource gathering to unit production model, but the incredibly basic way in which the game approaches all of this makes it a definite play. The two downsides are the huge, sudden leap in difficulty, and the inability to make more "bases".

Technical diagrams are incredibly interesting to those that can read them. They speak a wealth of information about both the designer and the object that was actually designed. Fig. 8 is a game based entirely around this technical diagrams, and it's gentle gameplay and peaceful music will no doubt help you enter a state of zen. After all, it's the relaxing games that calm you after a long day at work, not the pulse-pounding ones.

You ride a bike through technical diagrams of a neighborhood. You get points simply by surviving, but also by "grinding" nearby lines (getting close the them). The scoring system is based on if your wheels are together, as the longer they are on the same path, the higher your multiplier gets. You can turn slowly to stay on the same path, or quickly to get around obstacles.

Neural networks are a common theme in science fiction and robotics research alike. If you can teach a robot or a program to learn through feedback, you won't have to program it after every new case comes up. This is the concept of Be My Bird as well, a browser game that tasks you with creating a neural network to help a bird find flowers. It's hard, but fun and sort of educational.

Be My Bird is controlled entirely through the plus and minus at the bottom of the screen. The plus tells the bird that what it is doing is correct, and the minus tells it that what it is doing is wrong. By continually monitoring its feedback and adjusting your responses accordingly, you can eventually get to the point where you don't have to touch anything to get the bird to reach the flowers and bring them back.

Despite bad translations, gamers can still enjoy games that are genuinely fun. Look at the Castlevania games, after all. Bactoriam is one of these games. It has a terrible translation, but the mix of traditional arena shooter gameplay and interesting physics make it a must play. It is, after all, an entry into the Experimental Gameplay Project's monthly theme of bare minimum.

Bactoriam's gameplay feels like a fusion of Osmos and any arena shooter. When you fire or move, you drain yourself of goo' If you run out of goo and take a hit, you die. You also lose goo every time you take a hit. It's a simple system that turned out extremely well, and is a great play for any fan of shmups.

Not many games incorporate the written word into their actual gameplay. We're talking using words as attacks, environments, and such. Silent Conversation is one of these games, and while the base gameplay experience is pretty vanilla, the incorporation of literature into the mechanics of the game help elevate it beyond a single platformer. And, best of all, you read as you play!

Silent Conversation revolves around paltforming through various stories and poems. The words themselves craft your environment, including the background, walls, and ground. Whenever you touch a word with collision, it lights up, and you must try and light up all of the words of the story before reaching the last word and lighting it up. There is not much else, although there are words that attack you and deduct from your score. A relaxing endeavor.

[Via IndieGames]

Many games contain metaphors for other things, but we're not sure if there are any games out there that are quite as abstracted as Why. A simple, standalone game made on deviantART, Why runs entirely on metaphors, with the main playing field almost resembling gradual corruption. Our interpretation? It's the gradual corruption of someone's childhood as they mature into an adult.

Why's gameplay is incredibly easy to learn, but is quite hard to actually do well at. Scrolling your cursor over a black circle will change it into a white circle. Your goal is to have as many white circles at the end as possible. You can also create a wave of destruction by clicking on a circle, with the center circle destroying the whole thing. The game's endings are dependent on how many white circles you have as well as how many total circles are left at the end. There are ten endings to be had, some of which contain imagery that might be disturbing or NSFW (no nudity or such, but some suggestive poses).

[Via IndieGames]

We all have that crushing feeling that, as an adult, we have no way of knowing which way to travel in life. It's part of the adult experience, and possibly the most jarring part of the transition from child to adult. This journey through adulthood is the theme of Mr. Jones' Dream, a retro-styled game with artsy and impacting themes. An entry into the TIGSource Adult/Education Competition, it approaches the theme of being an adult without ever straying into NSFW territory. And that's good.

Mr. Jones' Dream is about Mr. Jones, who is having a dream. Big surprise. His dream, however, covers all sorts of topics, including greed, love, work, growing up, and the monsters that live inside us all. While the game is relatively straightforward, there are some devilish puzzles every now and then. Not that there is no map of any sort, so it is easy to lose yourself in the dream world.