Brought to us by the brilliant students over at Digipen, Deity is "a stealth action game" controlled entirely by use of the mouse.  Far from being a simplified or dumbed-down affair, though, it will tax both your brain and your reflexes with its deliberately limited control scheme.  There isn't much in the way of plot, but the basics are these:  you're a creature of darkness, harmed by light but capable of shifting effortlessly and unseen through shadow.  Your homeland's been invaded by legions of enemies, and you need to sneak through an occupied castle to take down their leader.  If you have to take down a bunch of grunts along the way, well, there's no harm in that, is there.

Those guards will never know what hit them.

Basic movement is standard Diablo-style click-to-run, but that's a great way to get killed fast, as anyone who sees you on the ground will start attacking you immediately.  Luckily, your specialty happens to be hiding incorporeal in the flames of torches, and (like the gargoyles in the aforementioned Arkham Asylum) they're all over the place.  Right-click a torch, and you'll jump to it, changing its color and hiding your presence.  If there's another nearby, you can jump from torch to torch, covering large distances almost instantly.

This also forms the first half of the combat mechanic;  attack a guard from behind from a hidden position, and you'll instantly kill them as well as regain some health.  (Claiming a torch for the first time also gives you a health boost.)  Attack a guard from the front, though, and you'll take damage.  Careful timing is paramount to success.

The second, more interesting half of combat comes from your ability to "chain" together a number of jumps before needing to get back to a safe place to hide.  Hold the right mouse button and left-click, and you'll set a chain waypoint, of which you have a limited supply.  (Three at first, more as you progress through the game.)  Any guard you hit in the chain will be killed instantly, without damage to you, even if you attack from the front.  Gargoyles scattered around the level can be incorporated in your chain jumps as well for tactical advantage and extra distance, though you may not rest on them.

Torch > Guard > Torch.  One less enemy, and no-one the wiser.

Chains replenish over time, and using a chain triggers a slow-motion effect to help you plan your moves precisely.  Any guard left alive after a chain will start attacking you, so isolating and eliminating groups is key.  As the game progresses, each level becomes a freeform combat puzzle, working out how to take down the guards without being spotted and killed.  Jump to torch.  Chain to gargoyle, guard #1, guard #2, and back to torch.  Wait for next patrol, then chain to guard #3, guard #4, gargoyle, back to torch.  Move on.  It feels great when you get the hang of it, and complications like well lit (therefore deadly) areas and invincible winged guards patrolling the halls keep things from getting too repetitive.

Also protecting against repetition is the length, which is very short - really the only negative thing I have to say about the game.  It's the work of less than an hour or so on Normal;  I haven't tried Hard yet, so it may provide more of a challenge, but the boss fight at the end was twitchy enough on Normal to make me less than eager to find out.

If you'd like to see how it looks in action, well, here you are:

Regardless of its brevity, I can't recommend downloading Deity enough.  Creative, slick and satisfying, it brings to mind some of my favorite games while still being a little different from anything else I've played this year.  Digipen frequently delivers stuff worth checking out (remember Igneous?  If you never played Igneous, go check that out too), and this is a great example of what they can do at their best.

Deity is...

• a great implementation of stealth gameplay in an isometric perspective.
• fast-moving and challenging with extremely simple controls.
• further proof that Digipen is a force for good in the world of gaming.
• over too quickly, but it speaks well of it that I want more.

A little less than 200MB for the installer, Windows only;  pick it up here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Right now, though, I want to call your attention to "25 Year Legend", the album they've just released in honor of the 25th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda.

I've loved the Zelda series for about 20 of those 25 years, and the overworld music from Link to the Past has a permanent spot in my heart as the most iconic videogame song ever written.  It's just a magnificent piece of music.

"25 Year Legend" includes new takes on songs from Link to the Past, Link's Adventure, Ocarina of Time, Link's Awakening, Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, and the newest game Skyward Sword, written by a very diverse group of composers.  Not every song on it is an out-of-the-park hit, but it's a delightful variety, an obvious labor of love, and free.  If you have any affection for videogame music, please, go check it out.

This is as straightforward as they come, folks.  You're intrepid hero Jackie Gun.  (Yes.)  It's Halloween, and you're trapped in a graveyard with a bunch of ghouls, ghosts, spirits, specters, and so on.  Help five trapped friendly Caspers escape from their imprisonment, and you'll be free to leave.  Go.

If you don't feel like reading, the trailer is going to tell you 90% of what you need to know.  Take a look.

Yes, that is Vampire Killer from the Castlevania series playing in the background.  It also plays in the game, constantly.  Ordinarily, I might rankle a bit at having music ripped from a commercial series plopped into a freeware title, but being as this is a clearly themed homage and Vampire Killer is some of the best videogame music of all time, I'm gonna let it slide.  If it bothers you, you won't miss much by turning the volume down.

The gameplay is extremely barebones (heh.  bare bones.  on Hallow-- sorry again), giving you no more options than you'd expect if you were playing this on the Gameboy it's built to resemble.  You can run, jump, and shoot.  That's it.  No items to collect, just coins for score and the extremely rare health pickup.  No areas to unlock.  Just one big map, a whole lot of enemies, and you.

There are some secret areas, though, which is a nice touch.

For all its simplicity, it's pretty brutal.  You can take five hits before you're done for, that's all.  No continues, no checkpoints.  You clear this puppy in one try or you start from scratch.  And you'll only find one of those precious health pickups when you free one of the five hidden spirits, so don't count on them to save you.  Luckily, the game controls well and enemies telegraph their attacks and move in patterns, so it really is just a matter of learning what to expect and then executing well.

Still, you'll see the Game Over screen a lot.  It isn't a terribly long game - it's all one interconnected map, no branching paths or doors - so that's a frustration I can deal with, but I certainly would have appreciated a checkpoint after saving each spirit, or at least an Easy Mode with that option.  What can I say, I'm getting soft in my old age.

This is not a game trying to hide its influences.

There are a couple of minor gameplay problems that need mentioning.  Hit boxes are a little bigger than you think they are at first, leading to some initial frustration as you learn how much room you need to give enemies.  You need to press X every time you want to fire, which led to me getting out Pinnacle Game Profiler and setting up a rapid fire profile pretty quickly.

For all the minor kvetching I'm doing, though, I had a good time with 8-Bit Halloween.  Lionsoft has put together a tight, fun little side scroller with pleasing Gameboy-inspired visuals, classic music, and well-worn but reliable mechanics.  Just the thing to burn through on a late night as the last trick-or-treaters ring your doorbell.  Happy Halloween, everybody!

8-Bit Halloween is...

• a game that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve.  And steals its music outright.
• still creative enough in other ways, with challenging level design and an amusingly silly, intentionally throwaway conceit.
• maybe a little too happy to kill you, but that's kind of in the spirit of the holiday, isn't it?
• probably largely forgettable, but worth a spin if you want a little retro Halloween gaming.

Windows only, under 5MB, download it right here.

BONUS FOR READING THIS FAR!  This is not free, but man is it close and it's totally worth every penny.  The Humble Indie Bundle is doing something new:  you can get in on the alpha (and all subsequent versions) of the incredible-looking top-down shooter Voxeltron by paying any amount you want!  You should do this.  Because it's great.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

I should be up front before I start talking about it: I have a thing for rhythm games.  I'm not particularly good at rhythm games, especially Dance Dance Revolution-style ones (which will be ironic in a minute), but I find them fascinating and deeply satisfying to play, even on the low and medium difficulty settings that I usually end up stuck at.

Sequence is a rhythm-based jRPG.  You can view the trailer at the linked Steam page, but I'll embed it here as well for your convenience.

You'll notice watching the trailer that the developer trades on their sense of humor a bit, and that definitely comes through in the game's writing (a blessing in my book, because if there's anything I don't want to do it's play a taking-itself-too-seriously jRPG).  But it's the game's mechanics that set it apart from anything I've played recently, so that's primarily what I want to talk about.

As you can gather from the video, this is "Rhythm RPG" the way Puzzle Quest is "Puzzle RPG", in that they've taken an existing tried-and-true gameplay genre (DDR-formula pattern matching) and tossed an RPG layer on top of it.  Honestly, for $5 I probably would have been pretty happy with that, especially given that the music is catchy and the story at least marginally compelling.  But the battle system they've devised hooked me enough to pull several hours from my schedule in the last 24 that I really didn't have to give it, and it deserves explanation.

You don't play this DDR clone on one note track, you play it on three.  One is your defensive shield; miss a note here, and you'll take damage.  Another is your mana generator; there's no penalty for missing notes on this panel, but every note you hit generates a bit of mana, used to fire off spells.  The third is for successfully casting those spells; every time you want to attack (or heal, or use any of the other abilities you gain throughout the game) you'll need to succeed at a note sequence.  Mess it up, and the spell fails, wasting the mana for it and making it inaccessible until it recharges.

This fairly simple division of the combat into three unique tasks means you're always splitting your time as a strategic resource, trying to figure out which panel is going to give you the greatest reward.  You don't want to ignore the defensive panel or you'll start taking heavy damage, but if those notes come while you're trying to pull off a spell in the casting panel, that's a tradeoff you might make.  You'll spend your downtime in the mana generator building up your reserves, but ending a battle faster increases your XP multiplier at the end so you don't want to burn too much time there.  It's constantly engaging without (so far, a few hours in) ever becoming too frantic to handle, and it's based on solid rhythm game mechanics that I already enjoyed anyway - combined, it's a huge win.

The story's alright.  I can't say I'm exactly engrossed in it, but the writing has moments of genuine wit, the voice acting is pretty decent, and the character art has some personality, in a "this is an anime-styled jRPG" sort of way.  The whole thing is aesthetically pleasing, really, through visuals and music both.  The RPG mechanics outside of combat are what you'd expect: level up through battling to increase stats; craft items, weapons and armor using drops from your enemies; grind your way through a level to get the necessary ingredients to proceed; repeat.  So much so boring if the combat itself wasn't fun to do, but I had enough fun grinding through battles last night to completely lose track of time, so I'm not knocking it for that.

And it's $5.  Five dollars.  Less than that if you get it while it's on special on Steam.  It's crazy - literally insane - to think that Duke Nukem Forever released at ten times the cost of this game (though of course you'll be able to find that one in cereal boxes soon enough).  Go check it out.  Sadly there's no demo at this point, but again.  Guys.  Five bucks.  I love you, indie developers.

Life got a little crazy over the last couple of months - well, crazier than usual, it's been a crazy year - and I just haven't felt much like writing about games.  I've still played a few, and managed to knock out a couple of podcast episodes over at Immortal Machines, including an interview with the writer of Bastion that I'm really proud of.  (Bastion is utterly fantastic, by the way, and if you haven't played it, you should.  It will undoubtedly end up in my list of the year's favorite games.)  More of that's on the way, I hope - I'm working my way through the last part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and want to record an episode all about that; also, there's been a weird surge of indie tower defense variants that I want to do an IndieCast about.

But there hasn't been much writing, and I do feel bad about that.  Like exercise, it's a habit that can be hard to restart once you've let it lapse, and it seems to get harder the longer you let it go.

There's a lot of big AAA titles right around the corner, of course - Battlefield 3, Skyrim, the PC version of Arkham City, the PC version of LA Noire - and I may wind up having something to say about those.  Torchlight II continues to torture us with its lack of a release date, but they seem pretty adamant that it'll be out this year, so by definition it must be coming soon.  It's been a very good year to love games, both small- and large-scale.

You know what I've actually been playing this week, though?  Mage Gauntlet on my iPhone.

I don't talk much about iPhone games on here, maybe because I feel like they get covered pretty well by the internet at large already; between TouchArcade, SlideToPlay and following the right folks on Twitter it's hard to miss a good release (and there are so many that I could never keep up).  In fact, even with Mage Gauntlet, rather than try to review it I'll just point you to the review over on STP, because it says pretty much everything I would.  It's a game that'll hit a really sweet spot for anyone with fond memories of 16-bit action RPG's, but I think it's worth checking out for anyone with an iDevice.  I will leave this trailer here for you to check out, because everybody loves trailers.

So if you've got an iPhone, iPad or other iThing, I can't recommend that enough.  Check it out; it's on sale through Sunday.  The other games by Rocketcat - Hook Champ, Super QuickHook and Hook Worlds - are also great fun, though in a totally different vein.

I could write a huge post about all the iPhone games I think are genuinely great, and how as a platform I think the iPhone really is leaving Nintendo and Sony both in the dust, much as I love my 3DS and its predecessors.  At some point perhaps I'll do that.  For tonight I just wanted to get the site out of mothballs and post something.  Hopefully I'll have more offbeat freeware and indie stuff to talk about soon.  Have a good weekend, everyone.

Another Ludum Dare competition (the 48 hour game dev marathon from which we’ve pulled several of our previous featured games) is in the voting stage, this time with the theme of “Escape.”  It was initially my intention to do a round-up of some favorites for you to check out this week, but then I realized that there are almost six hundred entries to this round of Ludum Dare(!), and I spent all morning Sunday playing Flee Buster.  As soon as I’m done writing this, I’ll probably be going back to play it some more.  [Edit: Actually I just kept playing it while I was writing.]  So I guess I’d better just tell you about that one, and call it a success.

ChevyRay’s take on “Escape” is a pulse-pounding tale of three very different characters in terrible peril.  In the first, a man flees from the tractor beam of a giant spaceship, running and jumping through traditional platforming levels as fast as he can.  The second switches to a top-down maze of tight corridors where a tiny ship must navigate around deadly spikes and evade an ever-increasing number of pursuers.  The last mimics the final level of a Metroid game (or, if you prefer your game references a bit more casual, Doodle Jump, I suppose), as a nimble frog leaps higher and higher out of the grasp of a rising flame.

These guys really need your help.

On their own, any one of these three would be a suitable diversion, but probably nothing terribly special.  They’re solidly designed levels with the same sort of muscle memory appeal that games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV have - you can feel yourself getting better at them each time you fail and try again - but it wouldn’t be nearly so compelling without the hook.  Flee Buster’s hook is that you only control each of these characters for a few seconds at a time.

In addition to the time pressure of being chased and needing to constantly press forward while avoiding each level’s hazards, a tiny bar at the bottom of the screen measures the time you’ll have to control each scenario.  When it runs out, you’re thrust immediately into the next one, no matter what’s going on at the time.  (It will, mercifully, let you land if you’re mid-jump when it runs out.)  This means that at any given time you’re not just thinking about the character you’re controlling;  you’re thinking about the one you’re about to control.  And you’re thinking about leaving the one you’re controlling in a safe position so that once you’re done controlling the third character and you come back to this one, you’ll be ready to proceed.  It’s a maddening, slightly insane loop, and it’s great.  The need to think contextually about three characters while reacting to the immediate circumstances of one adds just enough complexity that the game feels a bit cerebral as well as reflex-driven, making success that much more satisfying.

I hope you like this screen.  You'll see it a lot.

Of course, success will be hard to come by, should you come by it at all.  Flee Buster is tough, and will sometimes punish you in ways that feel unfair.  A single mistake with any one character means game over for all three, and while the game is short by design it does mean that you’re pretty much going for a perfect run, and only that, right from the start.  There are tokens strewn along the path in all three levels, which serve as a scoring mechanism, but I can’t imagine any but the most dedicated will want to replay the game to get them all after completing it with less than 100%.  There’s also a noticeable disparity in the amount of player agency in the three scenarios:  the top-down ship level has enemies you can “trick” a bit, and power-ups to pick up that buy you extra time, while the side scrolling and vertical jumping levels rely solely on perfect platforming.  That's not really a complaint - they’re designed to be different - but it would have been nice to see more depth in the precision platforming sections.

Still, for a free game designed over the course of 48 hours, those are absolutely negligible issues.  Flee Buster is a tight, addictive experience that requires nothing but your web browser and some free time (though I did end up using a gamepad, as my skills with the arrow keys aren’t what they used to be), and you should definitely check it out.  The aesthetics are effective but very simple;  this one’s all about the gameplay.  Congratulations to ChevyRay for knocking out a very solid little game with a clever concept in almost no time at all;  I wish him luck in the competition!

Flee Buster is...

• a tightly controlled, clever mix of several classic gameplay styles.
• extremely unforgiving, but fast and short enough that it usually doesn’t feel punishing.
• stressful;  it develops a surprising amount of tension in a very short period of time.
• a game I will probably never 100%, but I will beat it.  So help me, I will.

Maybe you will too.  Flee Buster works everywhere Flash does, so head on over to ChevyRay’s website and find out!

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a game I've been looking forward to for months, after interviewing the developers on the Immortal Machines podcast back in February.  David and Nicholas from Gaslamp Games were hilarious to talk to, and it was clear that they wanted their quirky sense of humor to be front and center in their game.  I'm pleased to say that from my first few hours with the game they certainly succeeded;  Dredmor plays like a combination of Nethack, Quest for Glory and Monty Python, and that's a pretty brilliant blend.  It's remarkably user-friendly for a roguelike, but it'll still kill you at the drop of a hat.  Oh, and it's less than five dollars.  So there's that.

Here's the trailer.  Give it a look, and if you like it, your money will be well spent.

The other two started life as releases on XBox Live Indie Games, but just showed up on Steam for even less money than Dredmor: Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World.  Very much also in the "comedy RPG" genre, they play like classic Final Fantasy styled 16 bit RPG's, only funnier.  I haven't spent much time yet with Cthulhu Saves the World, but here's the story pitch:  the mighty Cthulhu awakens after eons of slumber, ready to rain madness and terror upon the Earth.  Then a wizard curses him and steals all his powers, and the only way he can get them back is to become a hero.  If he wants to destroy the world, he needs to save it first.

That kind of sells itself, doesn't it?

Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World can be had together in a bundle pack for under three dollars!  If you're even remotely interested there's pretty much no reason not to do this.

The best news is, to listen to the blogs and Twitter feeds of the developers, they're having huge success on Steam with these absurdly low prices.  They've consistently been near the top of the best sellers list since release, and it seems like the whole thing has exceeded their expectations.  I wish them the best; this is precisely why I love the indie scene so much.

I'll leave you with the very amusing trailer for Cthulhu Saves the World - if you want to see the Breath of Death VII trailer too, it's here.

...Not a terribly evocative name, I'll grant you, so some preliminary explanations are in order.  Proun is, first and foremost, a racing game.  It is also a pattern recognition game, but the primary objective is getting to the finish line as fast as possible, preferably before your opponents.

You may notice it looks a little different from most racing games.

The method by which you accomplish that, though, is likely a bit of a departure from most racing games you've played.  Gone are collisions with other racers.  Gone are drifting and tight cornering.  You are locked solidly to a predetermined course, and the only task before you is to avoid the obstacles in your way as you speed down the track.

It will still be some of the most difficult racing you've ever done.

Before I talk more about the mechanics, though, I want to gush for a moment over how absolutely stunning Proun is.  Frequent readers of the column know that I'm a sucker for simple, clean, stylized art, and I think Joost's work here is nothing short of marvelous.  The world of Proun is built from entirely abstract structures that never stop being fun and playful while they ruin your perfect run and draw strings of obscenities from you as you hit restart yet another goddamned time.  Everything looks elegant, clean and graceful, as though Joost had taken the aesthetic of Mirror's Edge, stripped it down to its even more bare elements, and crafted a racing game from the pieces.  The little touches and bits of polish aren't skimped on, either, with the way it can handle a near-infinite number of transparent ghost racers for you to compete against on future runs, or the way your racing ball "de-rezzes" a bit when it gets too close to an obstacle.

And the music!  Oh man, the music.  Tell you what, let me just show you some video, because you need to see this thing in motion before I talk about how it plays.

Right, so, the mechanics.  As I'm sure you gleaned from the video, you're locked to a cylindrical track that never branches off - it simply runs straight from the start to the end, with you and your opponents along for the ride.  The landscape / obstacles (one and the same, really) sit attached to the track, forcing you to constantly swing around it to avoid them as you hurtle onwards.  The less you swerve, the faster you go, so keeping to a straight racing line benefits your time... but the faster you go, the harder it is to see what's coming and avoid it.

As I said in the introduction, it does become a bit of a pattern recognition game, especially as you reach the higher speed levels of the game (there are four, starting at "Fast" and going up to "Speed of Light"), but the patterns are consistent, recognizable and fun.  Sometimes, making tight 360 degree rotations around the cylinder will get you past a set of obstacles;  sometimes a tight slalom is required.  Since you can't collide with your opponents, your only real enemy is the track, and beating the track yields immense satisfaction.

Oh yeah, also, split screen local multiplayer.

If I have to knock the game for anything, it's only the things I wish it had that it doesn't.  I'm not sure how online multiplayer would work out in a game requiring such twitchy reflexes, but I do wish it had it.  And Mr. van Dongen's website and highscore servers have been a bit crushed by the game's popularity, requiring him to issue a patch for it temporarily taking out the highscore functionality (and the website linked for the game is a temporary one, Proun-Game.com being down).

Still, what's here is fantastic, and I haven't even gotten around to trying the user-made levels.  According to the between-level info screen, this project represents six years of Joost's spare time, and he's selling it for whatever people think it's worth.  Including nothing, but really, it's worth a fair chunk more than that.  But don't take my word for it.  Go find out for yourself.

Alec Meer over on RockPaperShotgun has this to say, and I don't think I could put it much better, so rather than the standard bullet list here I'll let him sum up:

Proun is Windows-only and carries a hefty (compared to most things we write about here) 330MB footprint, but it's worth every byte and every penny you choose to give it.  Go race.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Originally submitted as an entry in Ludum Dare 19 (theme: discovery), The Wager is a randomly generated exercise in risk and reward, placing you on a Sid Meier's Pirates!-esque ocean map and challenging you to rip as much profit from it as possible in a limited timeframe.  As per the title, your arch-nemesis Sir Lester Marwood has entered into a gentleman's wager with you:  each of you has a year to explore as far as you can, hopefully bringing back holds full of loot and valuable information to sell.  Whichever of you manages to bring back more than the other will get the spoils of both.  The game is on.  Set sail!

This island could hold plunder, or peril.... is it worth the time to explore it?

A bit similar to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and other randomized, short-form map exploration games, The Wager populates its map with islands full of treasure and trouble for you to discover, and lets you choose where you'll invest your limited time.  The actual core gameplay mechanic couldn't be simpler:  when you come across a new island, you are given a prompt telling you how long it would take you to explore it.  If you choose Yes, that number of days are counted off and you gain the benefits (and potential consequences) of your exploration.  If you choose No, you keep sailing.  Repeat until out of time.

Of course, that alone would quickly comprise a recipe for tedium even in a very short game, so a few other subtle choices and constraints are presented to keep you on your toes.  A diminishing "supplies" meter and an increasing "disease" meter limit how long you can remain at sea without visiting a port.  You can pay to upgrade your ship and mitigate these concerns, of course, but then that's money you won't have in the final scoring.  Returning to your main port will also let you sell information about the islands you've visited, which will cause them to be colonized and turn into ports themselves which you can use on subsequent sailings.  Whether you choose to spend your precious time and early earnings on investments in hopes of maximizing your future profits (or stockpile right from the start and hope for the best) will impact your bottom line... and at the end of the year, that's all that will matter.

Coal! Nice. Don't know about that offer, though....

There's no question that in large part The Wager gets by on quirky charm rather than deep gameplay, but it has a lot of that charm to spread around.  Random events like the one depicted in the screenshot above throw some tricky wrenches into the works mid-game, and are fun to read even if they really boil down to a 50/50 chance of helping or hurting you.  (Just wait until you meet Mr. Crackers, the Wonder Parrot.)  The dastardly Sir Lester Marwood regularly sends you correspondence evaluating your progress, and his snide tone greatly increases the satisfaction of soundly thrashing him.  Oh, and the music is great, perfectly fitting the "adventure on the high seas" theme and routinely calling the Monkey Island games to mind.

Considering that the game was originally developed in 72 hours (the limitation on all Ludum Dare entries - from their site you can download the LD version or an expanded one, which is the one I played), I'm really impressed with what Peter Silk and Kieran Walsh of Surprised Man put together here.  It's straightforward, it's funny, it has 3 difficulty settings to pit yourself against, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.  Bravo, gents.  More like this, please.

The Wager is...

• charming and clever without being complicated.
• clearly inspired by games like Sid Meier's Pirates! and Monkey Island, which is worth a lot of points with me all by itself.
• not much more than a diversion, but a very pleasant one.
• the most piratey fun you can have this weekend for free.

Windows only, about 15MB.  Pour yourself a glass of rum and take it for a spin.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Quite different from the side-scrolling action or Metroidvania-styled adventures referenced above, Tottenham is a bare bones arcade game - a little bit Qix, a little bit Asteroids...  maybe even a little bit Yars' Revenge, for anyone who gets that reference.  Taking a simple concept and combining clever, varied level design with the need for careful planning and twitchy reflexes in equal measure, Theta Games has produced a unique pleasure:  a genuinely new game that feels like it should be old.

Pretty, isn't it?  Now blow it up.

The simple concept is this:  you need to connect point A to point B.  Every level has a green square where you begin, and a red square where you must end.  In between...  well, in between there could be a lot of things.  Most of the levels contain a maze of black and colored lines and squares that you'll need to clear a path through ("I was inspired by the mosaics of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (installed at the Tottenham Court Road London Underground station) to make this game," says the designer).  Some of the levels will also have enemies, that may move at random or may chase you.  The final level...  well, I'm not going to spoil that for you.  It's something different.

The catch is this:  you can only make your way through the level by causing explosions, and you're terribly fragile.  Every projectile you fire, if it hits something solid, will fling debris in all directions, including back at you.  You need to not only be outside the blast radius when one of your shots hits, but also out of the trajectory of any shrapnel that may come your way.  And since this debris itself, once settled, becomes the new layout of the level, you could end up trapping yourself in a corner if you aren't careful, or blocking a previously clear part of the path from green to red you need to create.  It's a great mechanic - slightly random but never feeling unfair - and, when combined with enemies you need to avoid and eliminate, leads to some wonderfully frantic moments in an otherwise peaceful game.

Boom.  One step closer.

The visual aesthetic is a matter of taste, obviously, but I love the simple beauty of the levels, especially after looking at the inspirations that led to them, and the fact that the player deforms the level as they play lends the whole thing a sort of procedural art feel that I more often associate with music games.  Speaking of music, the soundtrack is pleasant, if repetitive, and the game is short enough (under 30 minutes, for me) that I never wanted to turn it off.  Controls are as straightforward and tight as they can be, and would indeed work on an Atari 2600 joystick:  arrows to move, spacebar to fire.  I played through the game once using the keyboard, and once with a gamepad after mapping the keys, and found it equally enjoyable either way.

I don't have much of anything negative to say about Tottenham, honestly, other than that I wish there were more of it.  I would happily have played through another 20 levels of this, and if Theta Games wanted to make more and charge some reasonable amount for them, they'd have my money.  It scratched an itch not many games scratch these days, unless you're playing something like Space Invaders on an emulator, and did so thoughtfully and with style.  Recommended without hesitation.

Tottenham is...

• a throwback title that recalls a simplicity of play few games capture well.
• comfortable in its own skin, never branching too far from a small, simple set of mechanics.
• inspired by endangered London Underground artwork, and honestly, how cool is that?
• a game I expect I'll go back to many times, and suspect some of you will too.

This tiny 5MB download is sadly Windows only, but should run great on just about any machine (or, I imagine, in WINE or on an Intel Mac running Parallels / Windows).  Don't wait:  go get it now.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.