FuzzyCo

Steam is doing this holiday promotion where you can get prizes for earning special achievements in various games. It's been a good incentive for me to try out a few games that I've gotten as parts of bundles or such and had never gotten around to playing. And Yet It Moves is a cool game that I had played a few levels of and then set aside, but finished last night after being reminded of how cool it is. The look of the game is very interesting, seemingly built out of torn paper. And gameplay-wise it's a platformer, but with the twist that you can rotate the entire world 90° at a time. It's short, but fun.

FuzzyCo grade: A

And speaking of point-and-click adventures, absolute classics of the genre are the Monkey Island games. I devoured all of the LucasArts games in the 90s and so I'm a little surprised that it took me two years to play Tales of Monkey Island, the latest installment of the series (now produced by Telltale Games). I suppose I was a little nervous that with a different development and creative team, the game might not live up to the humor of the original games. Happily, that was not the case. ToMI is just as wacky as ever.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I don't know if Professor Layton invented the detective solves a mystery by a solving a bunch of more-or-less-related puzzles, but that's the first one I encountered, so it's my standard I hold other games of the sort up to. Puzzle Agent is in the same genre. The graphic style of the game is very distinctive, based on the art of Graham Annable's Grickle. The puzzles are, as is common in this sort of game, sometimes only tangentially related to the plot. The plot is, delightfully, a little bit dark and odd—there's been a accident and a disappearance that need to be solved, but it seems like just about everyone in this snowbound Minnesota town is just a bit off. The game is a little short and the ending seemed a little abrupt, but I suppose it's good that I'm left wanting more rather than being worn down by a surfeit of puzzles.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

(Also available on Steam and also available on the iPad and iPhone [last two, iTunes links].)

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game from the same developers as Samarost. It's available directly from the developers, with soundtrack bonus, and on Steam. I got my copy with the Humble Indie Bundle—which is no longer available, but if you like these sorts of games I'd definitely sign up for their mailing list because it's always a great mix of games at pay-what-you-like.

Machinarium has a bit more of a narrative than the Samarost games, which you discover as the game progresses. It also solves some of the click-everywhere puzzle frustration of the earlier games by introducing the restriction that you can only click places that your little robot protagonist can reach. Cuteness levels remain dangerously high.

FuzzyCo grade: A

This is a game I liked so much, I bought it twice. I got the Mac version when it came out and I loved it, but I was low on free-time-in-front-of-the-computer and so it languished. But when it came out on the iPhone [iTunes link] I bought it again and the combination of commute-playability and zombie-cuteness made it to plow through. It's in the category of "tower defense games"—where you have little direct effect on the attacking hordes of, in the case, zombies, but you can plant (literally, in this case) defenses in their way.

Spudow!

FuzzyCo grade: A

Braid is an innovative little take on classic platformer games -- and indeed many of the elements are obvious nods to Mario, Donkey Kong, etc (there's even a level titled "Elevator Action"). Rather than reveling in its 8bit roots, like say, Retro Game Challenge, Braid takes those elements and updates them with gorgeous art, an enticing soundtrack, and an enigmatic storyline that meditates on why our hero is chasing after this princess anyway.

But the biggest addition is a focus on the notion of time in platformer play. Each of the six different 'worlds' plays with a different aspect of time control. In one, for example, the whole world is in lock step with the player's motion -- as you move right, time flows forward and as you retreat left, time reverses. It puts quite a complex spin on the normal "jump here and here to solve this puzzle" play.

I played Braid on the Mac, but it's also available for the PC and Xbox 360.

FuzzyCo grade: A