Games

Made by the author of The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide is a wonderful interactive storytelling experience about someone struggling to deal with something they do not understand.

It's hard to provide a detailed review without spoiling it, but I highly recommend the game.

A Bird Story is an hour-long narrative-driven game about a kid and a bird.  I really enjoyed it.

Cube & Star is an exploratory game where you are a cube spreading color across the world.  The game was interesting, and it's the type of game that I would like to see more of, but the gameplay leaves something to be desired.

Defender's Quest is an RPG tower defense. Your "towers" are archers, mages, and warriors, and you can equip them, level up, and allocate skill points.

I got the game through a Humble Bundle, and it was fairly good.  The basic game isn't that long, but if you want to 100% it, it'll take a while (you have to play through the whole game and the whole New Game+ with only your six basic towers and without recruiting additional towers, and then you have to level up a whole additional batch to beat some of the extra levels).  

Extra Credits is a series of 5 minute videos on video games as art, and it is superb. Its target audience is video game aficionados, developers, and critics, and if you like video games, I highly recommend it.

140 is a minimalistic rhythm platformer.  The basic idea is that the game mechanics are tied to the music.  So, if a platform moves, it will move on the beat.  That gives it a very intuitive feel. At the end of a level, there's also a boss fight,  which is an interesting digression from the main game.  The bosses keep to the tempo and all feel very unique.

Papo & Yo is an indie video game telling the story of a boy and his abusive, alcoholic father.  In the game, you are a kid in a magical world that has to interact with a monster to solve puzzles.  The monster is friendly until he eats a frog, at which point he becomes enraged.  In the game, the boy deals with the monster until, at the end, the metaphor is explicitly called out, and the boy gets some closure.  Overall, I liked the game a fair amount -- it told a story well, and the conclusion was good -- though I think the game could have been better.

In Mark of the Ninja, you play a ninja trying to get back at a high tech weapons manufacturer for attacking your clan.  It's a fairly standard stealth game -- there are lots of guards to hide from, bypass, or assasinate.  There are some interesting skills that you gain throughout the game (eg, ravenous insects that can devour an enemy) and some challenges.  To get the full points on each level takes a bit of work, but the game itself isn't very hard.  The ending was okay, but it felt a bit lacking.  Overall, the game was fun, but it wasn't anything special.

Antichamber is a non-Euclidian puzzle game, which basically means that it's good at messing with your mind.  In many ways, the game is like an indie Portal.  Both are very fun puzzle games that challenge the way you think about problems.

Reus is a fun god game.  You control four giants (ocean, mountain, forest, and swamp) that are trying to foster humanity by controlling the environment.  The game is fairly simple -- you can put animals, plants, and minerals down near towns, and you can upgrade each of those natural sources, and humans sometimes war with each other if they get too greedy.