Make sure the word wrap option is switched on; notice how your text passes the right edge of your window and pops out of the left? That screen wrap effect is the main attraction of The Fourth Wall, a fantastic 2D puzzle platformer from a team of game design students at the Digipen Institute of Technology.
While playing The Fourth Wall you can hit the Control key at any time to freeze the screen in place instead of scrolling to match your movement.
Once the screen is frozen your wizard can warp from one edge of the screen to the other, using the screen wrap for his own navigational needs. You solve puzzles and progress through levels by using your screen wrapping abilities to warp through walls or leap seemingly impossible obstacles by falling through the floor and out of the ceiling. The plot of The Fourth Wall is simple: you play a wizard who journeys far from home on an epic quest to get somewhere and accomplish something.
Kickstarter revolutionized what games get funded, Steam Greenlight allowed players to choose which titles got a shake on the marketplace, and we saw some truly fantastic games make their way to our PCs, consoles, and handhelds. Picking the best of the best from this past year wasn't easy, and this list could have easily turned into a top 50 or top , but we've got to draw a line somewhere.
There's no doubt you've got your own pecking order and we'd love to hear it in the comments below. Tell us who we forgot, what you think was overrated, and why your favorite indie games deserve to be at the top. Dance your way through pixelated depths to the beat of an awesome, rhythmically complex soundtrack. Stay on beat to slay the dungeon's dancing denizens, and don't forget to spend some time with the opera-singing shopkeeper.
It's right up there with the Doom soundtrack. Jody: There's no game I've had better luck recommending to people than Bastion. Everybody loves its narration and its music, which would be cool independently but become truly outstanding because of how they're integrated. You think you're hearing a beautiful soundtrack and then you discover the musician in the level you're exploring.
You think the narrator is a guy with a deep voice telling a story and then he reacts to how you play. Bastion is an action RPG about a ruined sky-city that rebuilds itself under your feet, nothing beyond the screen existing until you walk toward it.
Instead of playing inventory Tetris you choose two weapons from a growing catalogue, and are rewarded for choosing strange pairings with narration snippets and radically altered play. And if you don't like the combat then go into the options and pick a different control scheme. I'm not normally the kind of critic to sing the praises of an options menu but you can turn Bastion into Diablo if you want. Come on, that's awesome.
Jody : I used to watch an English cop show called The Bill. Back when it was good they'd sometimes dedicate half an episode to an interrogation, a guest star stamping their mark on the show. That's Her Story , only instead of cops it's you, years after the recorded interview, searching through video clips by entering keywords. Her Story plays out in those videos and that search bar, but it's also played on note paper you inevitably fill with conspiracy scribbles like Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
It spread even further after that, into an argument with friends about what really happened which I remain convinced I'm right about. Maybe I got obsessed? It's one of a handful of games I percented on Steam and I don't regret it. Wes: In tech, skeuomorphic design—making your music player in the form of a cassette tape, for example—is now quaint and frowned upon. But it's a rarely used concept in games, and Her Story uses it to great effect. I'd go so far to say that its dusty CRT computer interface is the best marriage of aesthetic and game design in anything I've ever played.
It's immersive in a subtle, well-earned way that makes Her Story enrapturing from its first few moments. Chris: I'm not typically one for turn-based games, and roguelike RPGs often break my heart when I'm forced to start over from scratch, but Dungeons of Dredmor immediately drew me in with its style and comedy.
I've never won a game, never beat or even met Lord Dredmor, never even gotten more than a few levels deep. It's still a joy to play for its writing, humor and surprisingly deep and amusing lore. Evan: The absurdity goes so far to soften the blows of its difficulty. You can build a Vampire Communist who wields Egyptian Magic, Fungal Arts, or Emomancy to fight hordes of weird robots, carrots, genies, and whatever the hell diggles are.
You can manually select your skills, but rolling the die and making the best of random skills is far more satisfying, and like the optional but actually totally necessary permadeath, makes every round feel genuinely different.
Case in point: Lovely Planet , a first-person shooter where you run increasingly complex gauntlets while shooting cute pastel shapes in a floating pastel land. But how, you ask. Because this is basically a platformer—a more-ish precision-oriented runner combining the fluidity of a Quake speedrun with the one-more-try quick respawn loop of Super Meat Boy.
It's a simple, morbid real-time strategy game in which global nuclear war is inevitable and 'winning' means losing fewer people than everyone else. In the early stages it's about placing missile silos which double as missile defense systems , airfields, radar stations, and fleets of submarines, battleships, and aircraft carriers.
As the war turns hot, the only option is to manage losses and inflict your own genocide, to make paranoid alliances and break them with bombs—ignoring that the fallout will kill everyone anyway. The brutality is rendered with War Games-style vectors, turning cities to dots and people to casualty numbers, emulating the calculated viciousness of modern drone wars.
James: Oikospiel is a dog opera game about dogs making an opera game. I think. The opera's employees, organized by the Union of Animal Workers, are trying to integrate the game dev dogs of Koch Games into their group, but these loyal pups love their jobs and boss Donkey Koch too much! Will there be Unity, or will Multiplicity prevail? With a soundtrack that mimics its frenzied landscapes, Oikospiel is a touching, psychedelic trip through videogame history with a meaningful message about labor.
Shaun: Are you playing the game, or is the game playing you? So much of our agency in modern games is illusory, or, more gratingly, reductive and binary. Are you going to go the nice path or the bad-arse path? Makes you think. Knowing it would be meta-commentary, I rebelled by not rebelling. Sabotage it, go the wrong way, hide in a closet and refuse to leave. Shaun: Survival horror too often devolves into repetitive efforts to fend off undead with unwieldy weaponry, but Soma is different.
They manage to wring an overwhelming sense of dread and despair from a mere dark corridor, not to mention the sprawling sub-aquatic outdoor areas peppered throughout. Shaun: Thumper is like an ugly, loathsome, despair-inducing industrial techno song come to life.
And that's a very good thing. In our Top Evan described it as "a documentary about the path you take to heaven or hell when you die" which is just about the most alluring description for a video game I've ever read.
Yes, it's a tough, precision-oriented rhythm game, but it's a precision-oriented rhythm game that feels like a collaboration between Gaspar Noe and Laibach. Bo: I'm a sucker for local multiplayer games, and Nidhogg is one of the best. Somewhat of a cross between fencing and tug-of-war, Nidhogg's 1v1 matches play out over the course of many brief but violent clashes, resulting in a tense back-and-forth that's every bit a battle of wits as it is one of skill.
And like all good local multiplayer games, it's easy to pick up and play but has a well of strategic depth that makes it difficult to master. The recently-released Nidhogg 2 builds on its predecessor with a new grotesque claymation art style as well as a handful of new weapon types that mix combat up just enough to make things exciting without hampering the original's simplistic greatness.
The result is a fantastic fighter we keep coming back to—especially if an office bet needs to be settled. Shaun: Fez accumulates more poignancy with age. As time passes, each of us will realise that certain uncomfortable truths have always lingered just out of our sight, waiting to pounce.
And others will persevere, dig deeper whether wisely or otherwise , for conspiracies and better buried secrets and boy does Fez have secrets. Fez is a game about the hidden regions of our world that are always there, always mysterious, usually forbidding. Fez is timeless in the way it can convey a wealth of emotion and contemplation through its systems alone. Wes: After its fairly simple introductory hours, every discovery and deduction I made in Fez felt like a hard earned victory, or the unraveling of an impossibly complex puzzle.
I love the sensation of "this can't possibly be the solution" in a videogame, only to discover that my crazy hypothesis was correct. That's what Fez is all about. And I love how clearly you can feel the immense amount of thought and polish that went into it; it feels every bit the intricate, perfectly tuned puzzle someone spent half a decade slotting together, piece by piece, until everything was just so. Shaun: Some of the most noteworthy indies from the last decade have been adventure games, but it took until for one of the highlights, Night in the Woods , to emerge.
Jody : I wanted to wait. I wanted all five episodes of Kentucky Route Zero to be complete before I climbed into it and drove off. That's how I played The Walking Dead, and rumbling through that in one week contributed to its effect.
I caved in and played Kentucky Route Zero though because a poet recommended it to me, and that's not something that happens every day. It's there when someone calls an office bureaucracy "the paperclip labyrinth" or describes topology as "the science of continuous space". Kentucky Route Zero is an adventure game of the modern kind, where decisions and dialogue rather than puzzles pace your progress.
It's about finding a lost highway, but it quickly buries you in a kind of American mythology where mystery roads are the least strange thing.
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