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Little Girl in Underland (Direct Link) by The Ivy, 10 MB.

Zombies, pandas, and lists. What do these three things have in common?

Answer: Pretentious indie girls LOVE them.

With NIGJam approaching, there’s no better way to lose your v-card to a hot pretentious indie gamer girl than by pretending to be at the pulse of independent games by namedropping a bunch of the really obscure ones.

As such, memorize this list:

5. Virtual Silence by Virtanen, is a game in which one of the gameplay mechanics is, basically, to ignore your way out of impossible situations. There are three levels, each with a clever puzzle at the end that will test the limits of your ability to both think and ignore things. It never really quite achieved NIGSource status because anyone with the ability to ignore their way past the first level would’ve already ignored their way past the big, blue download link. Indie chicks dig indie guys who are naïve. Practice being that by playing this game.

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Making games about being isolated (Knytt Stories, Untitled Story, hrmm, and OTHER kinds of stories) has become a bit of an indie games staple. But while these games ultimately boil down to platforming in really big, empty worlds with ambient music that fades between levels, JaJ’s Abandoned deftly avoids such comparison by removing any semblance of platforming from the genre. Hence, JaJ manages to create an altogether new genre — the “Mazexploratoidvania” genre.

Now granted these kinds of games have been done before — though Studio Pixel’s Ikachan (one of his last surviving indie works) only fails to meet this criteria due to its implementation of gravity of some sort (a rather clichéd game mechanic by now, to be sure) — but never has a game made me feel so isolated. Consider the fact that I spend most of my days alone in my room, listening to Ratatat and musing on the indie gaming community. Trust me, I know isolation.

Like conventional Metroidvanias, the game’s flow is ultimately determined by exploration — getting new items gives you the ability to explore new areas, and then you use the items you find there to explore even newer areas, and basically you’ll descend into the treacherous vicious circle of finding and exploring addiction, which is a lot like how I’ve constantly got to find a new fetish to arouse me in any way, which becomes normalized and thus the baseline to which I must find a new fetish — try to compare this to the games world and you’ll be pleasantly surprised, methinks.

The game starts off a bit slow, but give it bit of time and patience (just as you would the next “big” indie music album [oh the ironies of such a statement...]), and maybe you’ll find something you like. And even if you don’t like it, it’s still good to at least play it so you can pretend to like it.

Abandoned (Hi Quality Version Direct Link) (Low Quality Version Direct Link) by JaJ, 13MB and 6MB respectively

Let’s go…

Nothing lends art a false sense of credibility like black and white, and Zoglu Production’s Scrolling Survivor is without doubt indie gaming’s very own student photograph run through a filter in a cracked copy of photoshop. And to supplant the opening artistic salvo with some beefy ordinance, it’s French. Many games of our current period feature scrolling, it’s a rather passé technology, however few feature surviving, none quite so prominently as Scrolling Survivor.

Depending upon how European you are you may or may not remember the auto-scrolling stages of the little-known underground Japanese piece Sonic the Hedgehog for the Master System (though it takes aesthetic elements from the Mario series, a great irony), the main difference, and the overt basis of the game, is that the borders of the screen are permeable, and should you find yourself out of their confines for more than a few mere moments, your crudely drawn potato man meets an untimely end.

Reflecting a current hot-button political conern, the environment is your enemy — and its inhabitants, cannons, other bipedal beings, et. al, can do little but merely bump you off the screen. You are quite literally impervious to all other attack, with only your mobility and wits to triumph over the trials and tribulations you will encounter.

Now, given that your enemies can not hurt you directly, and that the environment is your only enemy, and that completing the levels more quickly and efficiently will grant you distinctions in the form of “ranks,” it is not hard to see a connection between “surviving the scrolling” and “advancing up the socio-economic ladder.”

Thusly, the future direction of our society ultimately rests in your hands, specifically your fingers that rest on the arrow keys and control, the worst key. Take control, assume social responsibility, defy the odds, survive, scroll, and Vote Republican.

Thanks…

Scrolling Survivor Demo (Direct Link) by Zoglu Productions, 1.4 MB

Ropes are in vogue and Forgotten Sky has them in spades. Made by a team of Cornell students, Forgotten Sky is basically Bionic Commando if Bionic Commando’s Bionic Commando’s Bionic Arm was made of rope and not of metal. Basically you swing around on a rope a lot, and the rope is limp, and that in and of itself is a pretty big deal. You can also use your limp rope to pull things like crates, or to fling yourself off of deadly sawblades, or into them if you are self-loathing (and which indie game developer isn’t?).

The story involves a guy named Caelum, who has a rope gun and a “katana-hoe.” I’d like to tell you more about the story, but doing so would marginalize the fact that there is a “katana-hoe” in the game, which is exactly what it sounds like.

This game is so indie not even IndieGames.com has written about it. Indie as hell.

Forgotten Sky by The Dynamite Bananas, 14 MB

As far as artgames go, Blueberry’s Advanced Set The Rope on Fire Cartridge not only takes the cake, but it is the cake. This is art games. This is the single pixel period in the “yes.” that answers the silly “are video games art?” debate (note, the answer is “yes.”).

A play on Mazapán’s seminal work, You Have To Burn The Rope, ASTROFC hits all the right notes. The gamepiece (yes, “gamepiece”) has pixels big enough to offend all but the niche retrocore crowd. Have a fancy HD set? Don’t play this game unless you want to remember that feeling you had when you first got it and realized that things weren’t nearly as crisp as you thought they’d be. This is the kind of aesthetic that reminds us of the superficiality of HD, plasma, LCD, CRT, et al.

The gameplay. How do I describe it? The phrase reductoironic comes to mind. If you have yet to play this game, I suggest you get off your highhorse and do so immediately before reading onwards, as the rest of this post may contains spoilers that could potentially ruin your experience of it. Here you are, given a simple task, to defeat the GRINNING COLOSSUS (a stand-in for the mainstream gaming industry? You decide). You are given hammers, but they are powerless against the grinning giant. Brilliant, a biting commentary on traditional gaming conventions. Your actions seem futile. Turns out the only way to defeat the beast is to take a different approach — to burn a rope, as it were.

Or. That is what we are lead to believe.

In fact, burning the rope only exacerbates (worsens) the situation. Maybe I’m reading too much into this (or perhaps, and more plausibly, others aren’t reading hard enough), but if we are to read the GRINNING COLOSSUS as the mainstreaming gaming industry, if our conventional means of attack — that is, conventional games — are powerless to stop it, we must resort to means that are more, dare I say, unconventional. We must create games that take our understanding of video games and turns them on their heads.

We must burn the rope.

But it is after burning the rope that we realize the follies of playing with fire. Our attempt to undermine “the industry” has only resulted in the creation of another tier of it — the “indie games” tier, a BURNING FIRE SNAKE – which industry giants (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) use to hegemonize and encroach on our works. XBox Live Arcade, WiiWare. We are fighting an impossible battle — a battle that cannot be won — and this is a point that is punctuated poginantly and concisely in ASTROFC. All in merely 708 kilobytes. Demake? Hardly.

Advanced Set The Rope On Fire Cartridge by Blueberry, 0.55 MB

Hello! I’m the high score whore that Mr. Podunkian had been warning you about. Now Pug Fugly (real name Chris Roper, but don’t tell anyone) has a new game out, titled The Hordes. If you’re as old as he is, then you’d probably remember credit-guzzling games like Galaxians and Space Invaders. You’d also recognize that the same ship from Namco’s arcade shooter makes an appearance here, but with a new lick of paint and maneuverability that wasn’t found in the original.

Here’s how the game works: you shoot aliens for points, and blow up larger aliens for power-ups. Grab the collectibles to upgrade your weapon and increase the difficulty level of the next enemy wave. Repeat this for massive points. But, hey! Don’t let upgrades go uncollected, or your weapon will “power-down” automatically. If you last three minutes out there in space then you might make it into the top ten. If not, stick to WoW instead.

The Hordes by Pug Fugly, 1.51 MB