Art games and not-games

Echogenesis is an interactive flash artwork in which you are encouraged to explore and engage with a series of natural environments, moving tableaux inhabited by various creatures and suffused with smooth ambient soundtracks. There's no game, no goal, just the experience, like a pleasant jaunt through a virtual biodome.





Tale of Tales is a progressive development studio that fosters a gaming experience that goes beyond traditional mainstream genres. Emphasizing "innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls," their projects tend to eschew competitive goal-oriented formats to focus on folkloric storytelling and the artistic experience.

The Endless Forest is a shared multi-user online 3d environment (it can be run as a game, and doubles as a screensaver) that exemplifies the Tale of Tales aesthetic. The world is an infinitely tiling forest which players are free to roam in the form of strangely eerie human-faced deer. Various items and locations in the environment produce various magical effects, such as changing the pelt or horns of your or another's avatar, and during special events the environment itself might become mutable, and experience transformations such as falling snow or a field of flowers coming into bloom.

Interaction with other players, who are identified by unique glowing glyphs in lieu of names, is entirely nonverbal, conducted in the cervine manner of head shakes, foot stomps, bellows, and nuzzles. Not only are you thus insulated from the possibility of encountering foul-mouthed trolls shouting "PwNeD, N00b" and the like, but people have tried and failed to disturb the tranquility of the environment: "it's impossible to grief the other damn deers!" lament a gang of Age of Conan PvPers, after all their hostile gestures are interpreted as friendly overtures. When there is no wealth or status to accumulate, nothing but the experience itself, there is nothing to threaten.





The Graveyard is not properly a game, but a kind of interactive visual poem using a game-like interface. You "play" an old woman hobbling slowly through a graveyard towards a bench. (Don't try to go off exploring on the side-paths -- as soon as I started my adventurer spirit got the better of me, and I soon got my avatar trapped in a corner off-screen. Stick to the path, lady.) Once you sit on the bench, you are treated to a song. Then you leave. That's the so-called "trial" version -- the full version, available for $5, is identical except that it includes the possibility of death.

With its painfully unheroic protagonist, strictly linear path, and moody, black-and-white visuals reminiscent of an old, distressed film, The Graveyard uses the gaming format to challenge the very idea of what a game is, and explores the possibilities of the medium as an avenue for artistic expression. The Graveyard is uninterested in setting you a challenge; it's telling you a story.





The Path and 8 are two more traditional games both in development by Tale of Tales. Based respectively on the folkloric roots of the Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty stories, they are conceived as story-driven adventures incorporating unusual gameplay features, such as 8's semi-autonomous main character who must be coaxed and guided rather than directly controlled.






Thatgamecompany specializes in games with innovative, offbeat mechanics that offer challenging gameplay in tranquil, pleasant environments.

Their breakout hit, flOw (featured here previously), the game where you play a simple sea creature continuously growing as you consume other creatures, folded a deceptively simple concept into an immensely satisfying experience. It was developed into a download for PS3, and has won numerous awards.





Their second offering, Cloud, which also garnered a couple of awards, was inspired by Katamari Damacy among other things, and features a unique game mechanic in which you fly around the skies controlling masses of clouds, in order to form particular shapes or make rain. It's a dreamy, exciting experience, offering a kind of wish-fulfillment for the longing to fly and a joyful, no-pressure challenge to complete.





Thatgamecompany recently announced their latest project for the PS3, Flower, which from the looks of the trailer will embody a the same sense of beauty and freedom as celebrated in Cloud -- perhaps this time with flower petals standing in for water vapor.





The Truth is What You Believe is an interactive flash work that invites you to "Participate in the world of Tom and Daisey", and promises "total consciousness on your death bed" if you complete it. It resembles a Samorost-style game in that you must hunt pixels to trigger events that will get you to the next stage, but the imagery is oneiric, poetic rather than narrative. It is essentially the abstracted world of a dream collage, where such basic logic as "keys open doors" applies, but otherwise all bets are off. More flash curiosity is to be found on the main site.





Tiny Grow is a charming and diverting little toy where you use a spinner to randomly grow alien plants and plantlike-devices, which you can then manipulate in various ways. There's no goal and no point, just some neat and strange things to play with.





Describing itself as a "digital poem/game/net artwork hybrid of sorts," game, game, game and again game is a kind of anti-game manifesto in an interactive, game-like form, in which the stated object is "move around, think." Executed in scribbles of pen and crayon, spattered with words and fragments of text, this game is a parody of a game, its pointlessness a shouted challenge.

Eye candy for your fingers

Or, in other words, "More interactive eye candy", as promised.

Castle Arcana isn't a game at all...it's just a delightful, whimsical, hand-drawn castle and grounds full of fun nooks and crannies to explore. Wait, I lied -- there is a hedge maze game. You can even go for a short drive or take home some souvenirs from the gift shop.




AOOA is a very interesting puzzle/game/interactive artwork. You are presented with a phone booth which you are told can take you to other places (not quite like the Matrix). Play around with the various objects in each level to reveal the number to your next destination. There's very little to figure out, so you mostly just get to sit back and look at the nice things.




TheHOUSE looks at first like another haunted house game, but in reality there's nothing to solve -- it's just a click-through spook-fest where you just find the hotspots to keep the shocks coming. With a suitably dark and grim atmosphere, and lots of jump-out-of-your-seat surprises (if you don't handle this sort of thing well, be warned!), this nicely-constructed experience should enjoyably fill a few minutes of your dark and stormy nighttime browsing.




This is a repost, but worth it. La Pâte à Son is a wonderful toy where you can put together pipes and different attachments to construct a music machine. Colorful beans are piped through the system, creating smooth, jazzy music in their various interactions. Apart from actually building the machine, there are plenty of options to play with, like bean number and frequency, and the quality of the notes produced. Great fun.




I'm not sure how to describe Opniyama. Superficially it resembles a platformer game. It's a huge, hand-drawn environment full of strange creatures and doodles, through which you must navigate by walking and jumping with the aid of a sort of grappling gun. Occasionally you will acquire seeds, which you can plant to grow into different kinds of plants. There seems to be no goal aside from the sheer pleasure of encountering odd and lovely things.




Next time: New Samorost-style games.

Interactive eye candy

None of these are exactly "games" in the traditional sense. For the most part, there are no explicit goals, no challenges, no way to win or lose. They all certainly have beginnings, and some of them have ends; others are infinite playgrounds for your enjoyment. They are all (with one exception) of the point-n-click genre, which suggests a game, even if some of these are more aptly termed "interactive flash animation." In any event, they are all engrossing, and beautiful.

Vectorpark contains no text, nothing by way of introduction or explanation. You are presented with a black screen containing three images, from which you may choose your "game". Park, the real attraction, is a broad, surreal landscape that changes and evolves with each mouseclick. Levers is a fun balancing game in which you must arrange a series of hooks and variously weighted objects to achieve equilibrium, without anything touching the water below. The unusual weights are dynamic objects; birds come out of the birdhouse to flap around and perch on the various hooks, changing the balance; the water tank can be filled and emptied; the snowman will melt if placed too close to the sun (one of the incredibly heavy objects you will receive in later stages). Finally there is Thomas, a series of non-interactive but very cool animations you may view.







Fly Guy is an incredibly cute little game from talented pixel-artist Trevor Van Meter. You are a bored suburban businessman, waiting at the bus stop, when suddenly you decide to take to the skies. There you will have a number of fascinating and whimsical encounters. Occasionally you will come up against something that will remind you of your mundane life -- like a copier -- and back down to earth you will go. But don't avoid anything in this game. Try it all out and see what happens.





Skyfish is another dreamy, flying-through-the-air game by Syougo Maruyama, creator of the excellent Samorost-style Kao Fu-Sen. You are a flying fish-person, a sort of reverse mermaid, swimming through the skies along with a number of odd creatures/things. When you touch them, the scene changes, and you are suddenly stroking through water, or space, or a nighttime cityscape. I haven't yet discerned if there is some goal, or if this is merely exploratory. Possibly you are meant to progress through a series of scenes without touching one of the creatures that will send you back to an earlier stage. In any case, the rhythmic swimming and wandering music provide a gentle, soothing experience, regardless of your destination.





Moxomoxo is the work of designer Matthieu Gueritte (visit his portfolio for more wonderful art and animation). It is a surreal, Bosch-inspired triptych of interactive animated scenes portraying the Garden of Eden, the Last Judgement, and Hell. With robots. The style reminds me somewhat of the robot subculture of Futurama -- this is what their robots-only version of religious artwork might look like. It's something you simply must see.





Happy Seed is a curious Japanese animated story. Like many Japanese links, it's hard with no context to tell where it came from or why it exists, but it tells the story of a strange square seed that comes down from outer space, and proceeds to transform the world of the little people who have all gathered around in curiosity. It does this by making everything square -- the little round houses become giant skyscrapers, their spherical vehicles are turned into big, modern blocky things, and in the end, the planet itself becomes one big cube. Flight of fancy, cautionary tale, or paean to the relentless forward march of modernization? You be the judge. It's awful cute, though.





I have a number of other links in this category to share, but I'll save it for another post. Up next: Arcade games.

Abandoned places

Today I bring you three incredibly beautiful, haunting, point-n-click explorations of surreal, abandoned places. They're not quite games -- they're interactive, but there aren't really puzzles to solve. I have them filed under the "eye candy" section of my games directory. They are all amazing, and you really must treat yourself and visit.

The Hospital. With the captivating tagline of "Stay a while, stay forever," this is a mélange of doctored and manipulated photos of a crumbling, abandoned hospital, with surreal twists and surprises. There is a bit of a challenge if you try to find the links to the original photos which are hidden in each room. I haven't done it yet, but I think there's a reward for finding them all. Spooky and awesome. In both French and (good) English.




The 99 Rooms. There really are 99 of these single-screen rooms, also manipulated photos of the abandoned factories and warehouses of East Berlin's industrial sector. Painted figures and animations fill the decaying spaces. The goal is simply to find the way to click through each of the 99 rooms to the end. Also very beautiful -- "morbidly-beautiful," as the designers describe it -- with great sound and music.
Update: You can hit SPACE to move through the rooms if your get stuck, or, if you really want one, someone has kindly taken the time to make a walkthrough for all 99 rooms. I didn't think anyone ever would; kudos.




NFH Propaganda. Features a Labyrinth of dark, run-down industrial ruins very similar to The 99 Rooms in term of concept, design, and execution. This one is quite a bit darker and grimmer, a horror version of 99 rooms with ghosts, corpses, torture, murder, body parts, screams...it's creepy and very well-done.




That's just a sample of the latest game links I've found that I'm bursting to share. I think I'll keep posting in categories like this. Up next: Room-escapers.