More free indie games for you to enjoy

In February I posted about FreeIndieGam.es, a firehose of free games - the good, the weird, and the ugly. In this post we look at feeding pirates to pelicans, pac-man meets bomberman, crazy text adventures, and explorations along a magic line.

Think Outside the Box

Stuart Madafiglio

Think Outside the Box is a short puzzle game. There are 5 levels, and in each one you need to accomplish a goal - generally escaping. The puzzles are pretty standard adventure game fair - combine items in obvious and not-so-obvious ways to accomplish your goal.

The twist is that each level has multiple ways of completing it. In some cases there are a dozen or more. So unlike many puzzle games where you may spend a lot of time trying to find the one correct series of moves, you should always be able to find a couple of solutions that make sense to your brain. You can keep going, finding more answers, until you get bored of the level (or until you have found them all!).

The graphics aren't the prettiest, but the setting, characters, and humour make it fun to keep trying different things just to see what everything does. The pirate island level, which I think is the last one, is particularly strong.

Chompston

contralogic

"A game mixing elements of Pac-Man and Bomberman. Collect dots to score points. Drop bombs to defeat enemies. I made this to experiment with procedural level generation and musical gameplay, where all the sound effects are played in time and in key with the background soundtrack."

This is fun and addictive, and while the random level generation doesn't result in infinite gameplay, there definitely is a skill progression as you get the hang of the game. Mmm, makes me want to play Bomberman.

Screenshots for text-based games seem weird to me

Small Child In Woods

Brendan Patrick Hennessy

This. You should play it. A hilarious game that spoofs the Choose Your Own Adventure book. Well, we could discuss whether or not it is a game, but it certainly is interactive and funny. It's hypertext, so you don't actually have to turn pages, just click.

Here is the (entirely false) introduction by the author:

"In 1987, an anonymous team of computer scientists from the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic wrote a series of children's books based on the popular Choose Your Own Adventureseries. The books were hastily translated into English and a small number were exported to America, but the CIA, fearing a possible Soviet mind control scheme, confiscated them all before they could be sold."

Binary Boy 

Data-Fidelity

This is my favourite game of the bunch, and it's very creative. In a short span, the game explores a simple mechanic - flipping up and down above a line - through a series of very different levels. The extent to which the game does such different things is very impressive, and this is technically the most complex game. The gameplay is fun, the graphics are pretty, and it will surprise you in great ways. The boss fights in particular are tricky and fun. The only problem is that you can't save, which means you'll want to have an hour free to get all the way through to the end.

You can play the game in your browser, but it runs better if you download it from here and run it locally.

So, please give the games a whirl and let me know what you think of them.

Screenshots are from the games in question, and taken from freeindiegam.es.

For more free games, click here to see the whole series of Free Indie Games posts.