Through your transdimensional socket connection, you now begin to interact with the desert world. The cute crayon graphics, the beautiful music by Helen Trevillion and the excellent writing build a very atmospheric world you don’t want to leave easily. I had to force myself to quit and write down some lines to communicate this to you, fellow reader! Oh, yes, and TSASSTOTHADB (as insiders call it) is also an adventure game which features one of my all time favourites: A well-filled bookcase. Seriously, you should play the game for the bookcase alone.

Eventually, its developers decided to rely on human genius: They released the software as a puzzle solving game, and now thousands of people can invent new proteins, enzymes or antibodies that could – one day – cure diseases, help decompose toxic waste or dissolve carbon dioxide. And you really want to go on playing Tetris?

To successfully mine the candy, you have to rotate the candy orb, so your candy mining projectiles will hit only the best and tastiest candy – but beware, don’t try to mine it all at once by hitting the core of the candy orb – horrible things will ensue!

Now, to keep you happily mining along, Gregory Weir has crafted a level mode in which you meet a good natured miner, a candy-hating duchess and, finally, a general who instructs you in the war for your nation’s most important natural resources: Candy.

Evolve into all kinds of plants and trees, of course. Unless you know exactly who you are and are told over and over again who you will be, nothing can keep you from evolving into anything you like. And so begins the journey of the little sprout, growing into coconuts, dandelions, fruit trees – overcoming dangerous obstacles and escaping ravenous wildfowl that waits for you in pastel-coloured lands. Nice!

Your actions trigger sampled music by the Boards of Canada. There are three phases, intended to bring you further into the world of Deep Chalk, but what kind of world is this? It is the world of Samorost without the little gnome, and in black and white. It is beautiful to explore until you get stuck. It is the world seen from the non-existant eyes of a little floating diamond that wants to go on but can’t.

Play it for the atmosphere alone.

The new ship is controlled at the same time and with the same means of control as the old ship, only through the leverage of different velocity and acceleration. You can collect items that change these properties, but to master the game you have to internalize the basic physical relations between your ships.

Therefore, _dRive is also an experiment in making educational games – not explaining, but simply integrating kinematics and calculus into its gameplay. Even if the game mechanics and gameplay still feel a bit coarse, it is definitely pushing the boundaries of the popular rhythm game genre.

Okay, this game may not apply as a theory for modern life in general, but as a nice little lettrist space shooter in the vein of (or probably rather in a very close relation to) the classical Asteroids, Typoroids – “the eternal struggle of designers vs. letters”, does pretty well.  Yes, and the subtitle reveals even more – it shows how the medium “game” is still in the middle of a struggle about the privilege of interpretation.

Game designers struggle to incorporate words in their design that manage to convince readers, not only gamers. Writers try to push their craft into the game medium and sometimes think very little of the game designers.

Oh yes, you might want to play that game without sound. It has a cheesy version of the imperial march.

S.T.A.C.K.E.R. by Pishtaco blends the two really successful “Soviet” game exports into one: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Tetris. The game mechanics of both stay intact. Blocks, items and artifacts drop from the sky, developing the story as you are advancing further into the zone and serving as “power ups”. Dogs, barbed wire and bandits attack you on your way.

Then come the mental effects: The radiation starts affecting your sanity if you don’t protect yourself from it. The deeper you get into the zone, the harder it gets to stay calm. Where Tetris builds up pressure by speedings things up, S.T.A.C.K.E.R. evokes real fear by tightening the narrative. A narrative told by dropping blocks.

Then suddenly things start to change. Do the effects of Randy Balma’s attempted self-abortion wear off? No, certainly not. The school bus becomes a landmark, and yet it moves. Psychedelic colours and motions still going steady, although not yet married.

When it finally comes to aborting clients, Randy Balma is already jumping planets with the mark of death on hands and eyes. Mark Essen has told you a story and made you sick in the head. You have learned your lesson.

You couldn’t put the message behing Cursor x10 any clearer. You are a cursor, and you must help your fellow cursors, which all become your alter egos within limited time frames, to reach “a goal”. To reach a goal, whatever it may be, you must cooperate with yourself. You must come to terms with yourself. Maybe meditate a bit.

And then find your way up the stairs, all the while collecting points and solving puzzles and triggering minimalist animations. It is an experiment in memory as well as in terms of game mechanics – can you find a fitting strategy in a 3D game world with the third dimension being time, not x, y or z? And what if I told you it was a 4D game world with time restrictions? Can you handle point-and-click dimensional failure?