Now, what makes the game special isn’t so very special at all anymore, but still special enough to mention: You have to interact with your past self. You are so alone that nobody but yourself can help you. The Company Of Myself. Braid showed us how possible that is, yes. It is nicely implemented, though, the dialog keeps you playing, and soon you will be stacking your current selves on top of your past selves that have faded away for the good cause.

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!

Well, d_of_i has done the physics thing, too. In Egg Way, you have to guide an egg safely into your frying pan with a powerful physics pencil that can morph air and time into half-solid temporal gelatine. Or this is how I like to describe it. But be careful not to freeze air for too long, because if it becomes too solid it will relentlessly scramble your egg in the resulting time vortex!

It would probably be a good idea to compile a “food” series. Yes, I shall do that some day.

The other games on Yoshio Ishii’s development blog are also very special. He just keeps on inventing, and in almost every single one of his games there is more creative potential than in your average industry title. And more than in your average highly praised Indie game as well.

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.

All the choices are laid out in front of you, as a jigsaw puzzle of symbols you have to decode. Decode them like it were in a dream. Stay tied to that lethal dream and let the decision that has already been taken evolve. You have to look at things from all possible angles because you have already killed time.

You want to take back your decision? Then you have to fight for it. Caprice is not very highly regarded here. Become the metaphor and survive.

Ferry Halim’s High Delivery combines explorational aspects with a medieval memento mori message. Its graphics style is really reminiscent of impressionist paintings. You play as a fan. There is a bottle, tied to a balloon, and with your fan you change the direction of the balloon, so the bottle can collect flowers. Your balloon goes higher and higher, your bottle fills with roses by the dozen, and finally you have arrived.

You delivered 66 roses. Try again.

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?

You keep on walking through hell, be it of cardboard, of watercolour or purely digital. Through strange sounds. You have to mutate, from a handsome young man to a suitcase-wielding zombie salesman.

3j, the Lithuanian team who created Pragaras, have already sent players on explorations of strange worlds before, but of strange and nice worlds. This time, you almost can not believe that somebody who is able to create something as beautiful as this creates it for the sole purpose of showing hell. A bit like the late medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch – they use fantastic and creative imagery to illustrate their own moral concepts. Which are: Everything pretty bad, but you can’t change it. But please at least be aware of it.

Ergon/Logos captures all the conventions, clichés and, quite surprisingly, even some of the game mechanics of one of the oldest genres in video game history in plain text. As the player, you control the direction of the leading character’s stream of thought.  Feeling quite the daredevil today? Great, then jump over pitfalls, grab the lovely maid and do not look left or right, for all your possible failures are already lined up in font size 72 at the side of the path to glory.

But if you feel like exploring the poetry within jumping, running and failing, then please fail. You will not regret it.