There’s been some truly lovely games come out in the past few years, and I’m not talking processor-warping fare like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Modern Warfare 2, but lovely little bites of life like Passage and Small Worlds. Vegan tapas, not filet mignon, and gaming is all the better for it.
These games often rely on Atari 2600-level bits and sprites, but deceptively so. For instance, as your little pixel-person moves through Small Worlds, the camera pans back, revealing an almost fractal-level of complexity: gaming within a molecular universe, what the Atom sees as he jumps over a phone line.
In Continuity, you play a little stick person as they wander through a screen, looking for a key to open a door: a gaming conceit well-worn by 1985. The twist is quite elegant: it’s not just one screen you’re limited to, but a world of them, swappable back and forth in order to find the perfect match between worlds:
And if the screens don’t line up exactly, you can’t travel between them:
As you’d imagine, the game grows progressively complex (I’m stuck on this level right now):
One great feature is that there’s a quiet, almost mournful music delicately playing in the background as you observe the “world” of screens, but once you engage there’s a propulsive Miami Vice beat gearing you up for action.
For lack of a better term—we’re really at the beginning of a gaming age, and so some of the language is not yet concrete—some of these games feel almost punk to me; for if Uncharted 2 and other PS3 & 360 megagames are Fleetwood Mac and the Speedwagon, these guys are breaking gaming back down into its component parts: puzzles, mood, intensity, feeling, loss, timing, worry, and wonder. There’s no death, and less spitting; Johnny Rotten nihilism has no here, only a quiet grace and adventure, an interaction with the “band” like you’d get at a house show, something you could never get at an amphitheater (I sent a fan e-mail to the Continuity team, complimenting them on a wonderful game with lovely music, and one of the creators and the musician wrote me back).
What are you waiting for? There’s three games linked here! Go play!
Tags: games
Gorjus, this game is GREAT. I like the idea of this indie world of games that are stripped down to elemental wonder and accessibility of play. I don’t know if you’ve checked out the A.V. Club’s biweekly roundup of free & cheap games, “Sawbuck Gamer,” but it’s a terrific resource for the gamepunk movement. Also, PopMatters.com used to run a regular column on freeware/shareware games but I can’t remember what it’s called…
Whoa! I had never seen Sawbuck Gamer—and now I’ve got a zillion things I’m downloading!
Glad to help. It’s weird how video gaming gets under the skin so well. Two years ago, I wrote one of my favorite posts about the subject and the nascent stages of what I’m now calling the gamepunk movement here. Geeks on parade!