In the early 2000s, I played an ambitious Flash game called Emogame and its politically-themed sequel. I was impressed by the effort that had gone into these games. (Note: I seem to remember that there was content that some might find objectionable, though I don’t remember exactly what.)

When I stumbled upon the game Continue?9876543210, its description made me curious and I did a little research. It turns out that it’s by Jason Oda, creator of Emogame. That and what I’d seen of the game so far was enough for me to justify a sort of impulse-buy.

Continue is the story of a video game character who has died. The player has chosen not to continue the game, so the character wanders the system’s memory, awaiting eventual annihilation by the program’s cleanup process.

The official site describes Continue as “artsy” and “philosophical.” These can be polarizing terms, but I tend to like games that aim for this sort of thing, even if they can be tedious in some cases. (If you haven’t played an artsy, philosophical game before, I recommend Passage. It’s free and takes only five minutes.)

The game’s character must come to terms with (while attempting to temporarily delay) his or her impending oblivion. This, of course, invites the player (of this game, not the player who chose not to continue the other game) to consider his or her own life and mortality. Some of the ideas and situations in this game are apparently based on a personal experience of Oda’s.

The same day I found Continue, I also discovered another of the author’s games called Skrillex Quest. This is a free one that seems to have been created on commission for music group (kind of like The Quest for the Rest, I suppose), and it’s also worth a look.

A couple more links:

• 2012 article about Oda’s game development history
• Andrew Vestal’s review of Continue

These are a couple of free independent computer games that I came across some time ago and found interesting. Both feature a glitchy aesthetic and neither offers much explanation.

 

Icefishing is a series of projects by Nate Gallardo. Icefishing I-IV are sound-only, and can be found on this Bandcamp page. The fifth is the game, and can be found here:

http://nategallardo.com/works/icefishing-v/

In each area of the game, you’re to find and enter an object that resembles a telephone booth. How to do this in each area is up to the player to figure out. At one point, I thought I had exposed an unintentional glitch and become stuck, but after a sort of detour I was able to continue.

 

 

For this one, even reaching the main part of the game can be a challenge, unless you are familiar with command line interfaces.

Here’s a hint (highlight to reveal): dir

And here’s the solution, if you need that:

1. remote
2. voidscan
3. dive

These are direct download links for the game:

• http://datatragedy.com/MOABD_PrinceOfArcade.zip (PC version)
• http://datatragedy.com/MOABD_PrinceOfArcade_Mac.zip (Mac version)

Alternatively, you can play it in your Web browser here:
http://www.datatragedy.com/wipmoabd/

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Here’s one more that I happened to discover the day after I originally made this post. Unlike the other two, this one doesn’t appear to have any goals other than exploring the nightmarish landscape. (I could be mistaken about that, however.)

These are direct download links for the game:

• http://underscorediscovery.com/orihaus/Césure_V1.0_32bit.zip (PC version)
• http://underscorediscovery.com/orihaus/Césure_v1.0_Mac.zip (Mac version)