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How to Make It Home is an interactive fiction of rare artfulness, beauty, and thoroughgoingness.

The game is very lovingly developed – you might find dancing aliens, UFOs that float the perimeters, and guardians that watch over glitched corners. Among the many variants of „aliens make an exhibition about humans/the earth“ that I found while researching for this post, I liked this (and its complete refusal of all gravitas – that is nearby but not essential to the ideas and meanings that this setting mediates) the best.

The technical implementation, the curation and the art inside are all exquisite – to an amount that I had to check out the later successors, and found them to be even more impressive. The entire series is a reminder of the human ability to create and collaborate, outside of all monetary interest.

The result is a playful adventure that bears a somewhat sinister undertone at times – it almost stands like a comment about the isolated joy of the digital age. The developer plans to introduce a multiplayer mode – will the players have means to find each other, or will they strife through this vast effigy of our own world one by one, never meeting one another?

This is a very small, but great game: the small render and the few lines of text spoken by their owners are always enough to indicate a whole story – and emits enough human warmth to break the eeriness – at least for me – even though the low-poly room is basically just as bleak as any other.

Instead of moving an @ through a maze of lines, it feels like moving through a strange, mysterious world...a parabola on life itself.

What is there left to say? Messages from the Universe Graveyard is a well crafted, highly unique, baffling atmospheric, and just overall sparkling game – once you set foot into its surreal world, you are likely to be enraptured by it.

five angels come and name it fire is about a young moth that sets out to explore a world that is at the same time both quite naturalist, yet phantasmal. It is an occult, esoteric, delicate, and gloomy poem – with a language and imagery that reminds me to the lyrics of Tom Rapp and some of the darker parts of the output of Witthüser and Westrupp. For me, this is the best game in the authors repertoire.

The basal gameplay principle is well executed here, and for a jam-game of this scale, Escape Guldur has a surprisingly good overall production and balance – playing through it is a fun and satisfying experience

Despite being technically simple at a first glance, Agentia utilizes ideas drawn from poetry and philosophy that lie outside of the usual repertoire of game development. The way of drawing and describing the world is poetry in itself – nothing here is arbitrary – every layer of Agentia is a intricate poem, open to interpretation. This game is a masterpiece.

The player controls a girl that has to find a way through a dungeon maze while collecting notes and evading an angry Minotaur that chases her. You have no way of fighting back; the enemy has double your speed, so there is no way of escaping in the open field either – instead, you have to use your wits and get him stuck within his own maze...

The games aesthetics are great: Abstract images are shown between the levels, the texts and the title are somewhat cryptic – the overall atmosphere is mystic, occult, and mythical. ... „I, The Living Flame“ is probably as artsy as a non-abstract 2D Gameboy puzzle game can get.

You walk through various dream-scenes, crossing silent forests, shadowy temples, cold cities, floating palaces… These images and scenes are phenomenal, and the great strength of this game – they are creative, strange, and beautifully realized...Quantum Origination is a great game, and one can tell that a lot of time and thought was invested into this. The level of detail, the craftsmanship used in its creation, and the creativity of the shown world make it a unique game in every aspect, and one of the best „psychedelic“ games I can remember playing.

Located in the perfect spot between minimalism and aesthetic, looking like a abstract or concrete painting that came to life, and its pentatonic scaled sound effects and reluctant, for the most time invisible user interface are a perfect fit. ... Whetever you are a casual puzzle player or an hard boiled enthusiast – Pocico will offer you a good time with its witty, deep gameplay and its great style.

The game captures the atmosphere of old low-budget productions damn well, and felt highly nostalgic for me – while playing probably remarkable better than these titles ever did; the whole atmosphere is dreamy, enrapturing. Fitting to this, the environmental message is there, but – and that has become a rare thing – one with a positive note: The robotic, world devouring flies might still be defeated in the end.

Short interactive fiction fantasy game with a well written story.

Minimalist, down to earth, nearly non-violent dungeon crawler roguelike.

The sound design and graphical arrangement is minimal, the (often randomly chosen) texts are written greatly – they are highly poetic, beautiful, fey ...In „A row of chairs abandoned on the beach“, humans do consequently become coast, night, and sky – but the world is turned into a living, equitable, and vivid instance in return.

PRAXIS FIGHTER X shows pretty well both the chances and limits of following a traditional formula as a single game developer: It is rock solid in any aspect, and even good in some – but within a genre that is so rich of great and colorful games, many of them more experimental in both gameplay and sound, a bit more boldness in design-decisions on every layer might have been better – and ironically this is underlined by the very fact that it does everything it actually does probably as good as one can possibly expect from an underground game production. If you don’t mind the formulaic gameplay the likeable story, the very well polished gameplay, and the overall high quality make it a great pick for underground gaming enthusiasts and shoot ‚em up veterans alike.

„The Archivist and the Revolution“ is a well realized, highly political piece of hyperlink fiction that doesn’t need to hide behind most of the contemporary commercial science fiction stories I’ve read in the past few years; its direct language, its naturalist approach, the – rather pronounced – gameplay elements, and its clear political agenda make it enjoyable to underground gaming enthusiasts and a larger audience alike.

Solitary Stars feels much more like a window to its own little cosmos, and evades simple interpretations not only through the amount of different ideas and topics that are touched, but also through a skillful utilization of the hypertext technique.

Cartography of known spaces could be best described as a collection of digital-age poems.

"There is a lot of cozyness to be found between old ruins in the middle of deep woods, between small hamlets in which simple people live off the land, all framed by large mountainsides with deep dark castles and towers that hide powerful magic."

The level design is pretty good, difficulty and progression are well measured, and did I already say that the sprites are damn well made? Nothing experimental, ground breaking or even surprising here, but in the end „Blobworld“ is a rock solid, well made little platformer that comes a long way with its rather limited resources.

The throughout fine and coherent production, the the trenchant quality of writing and the consequence in utilizing the means of video gaming subsume to a great and unique gaming experience. Highly recommend to play this; a run will take you roughly 15 minutes.

..in the end, the supposed restrictions are broken – this game offers us its own answer to the question how free the individual really is.

This game holds an elegant, hypnotic beauty and goes down the path of minimalism in a bolt and consequent way that makes it rather unique – the playtime is probably around one minute. It is an adaption of a poem that doesn’t really attempt to refresh anything, and isn’t interested in re-contextualization; this is an approach that bears the risk of gliding into a uncritical relation to the source material, and of getting a bit dusty – the game plays very much like a game that was released when the poem came out could have looked like, like a forged relict from an era that predates the medium; and looking at the developer and their affiliation with goth this might have been exactly what they wanted to do.

The fact that the developer couldn’t bring themself to complete it, but left the full horror as a non-realized, yet threatening indication prevented by bugs and other small faults they never could iron out makes it somewhat more complete – not necessarily as a game but surely as an piece of art, that escapes finalization just as its topics it deals with escape the imagination of probably nearly any empathic person.

One of the digital poems done by Ondřej Throň.

The games that they created over the last five years are connected not only by common themes (among politics, mental health, social inequality, and the bleakness of a world shaped by commodification), but also by their playing with and occasional bursting of medium-limits and standards – all of them exist on the boundary towards the interactive fiction and often show a high amount of literacy; they are clearly more on the „art“-side of gaming, and often leave much room for interpretation

This is SF as it should – in my book – be done.

Noisy, distorted tunes accompany you while you ravage through deserted industrial sites, Calligari-esque streets and paganic churches – a dense, interesting and unique experience.