Depression Quest

Depression Quest is a moving Interactive Fiction story about the difficulties of living with, and attempting to deal with, depression. Created with Twine, you're given a series of common scenarios, and a selection of possible actions to deal with each. Depending on your character's current level of depression, certain actions—inevitably the most healthy or social ones—will be crossed off, often forcing you to make knowingly destructive choices for lack of alternatives.
As a way of putting yourself in the mindset of someone battling the illness, it's a startlingly effective idea. Attempting to make even the most minute progress towards lightening your anxiety is a real struggle, and the smallest of things can fuel a heartbreaking downward spiral.

Depression Quest
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A Grain of Truth

A Grain of Truth is a browser-based HTML5 point and click adventure that stands out because of the fantastically weird world that developers the Rudowski brothers have built. You play as Myosotis, a story trader travelling the Endless Plains to hear the tales of the enigmatic Wiseman.
The plains are a lonely and atmospheric setting, in which you'll encounter a handful of characters and strange locations. A pirate ship mounted to the back of a giant beast catches clouds to make bedding, boulders hover in the sky, and a huge cracked rock holds the promise of intriguing discoveries.

A Grain of Truth
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Relive Your Life

In my first life I was humiliated by an albino bear for the benefit of a jeering Vegas crowd. My second life looked more promising. I was rich, popular, admittedly a bit of a tool, but still a success. That all changed when I missed a drive-by high-five with Kramer from Seinfeld, and wound up being tormented by an old pervert.

Relive Your Life is an interactive narrative punctuated by some incredibly basic minigames. From mashing the X key in a sperm fight to decide your gender, to typing out sentences or matching button prompts. None of them are taxing, but crucially you'll want to go back and deliberately fail them.

Relive Your Life
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Anchorhead

Horror games owe a significant debt to one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and not just because he's long dead and his work is out of copyright. Plenty of games have included references to his unique brand of cosmic horror, but Anchorhead is more inspired than most, drawing from several of his novels and stories to tell the tale of the a married couple who have inherited an old mansion in a creepy New England town. The sedate exploration of the game's opening segments eventually give way to tense, turn-limited puzzles as you struggle to stop an ancient, possibly world-ending ritual from being completed. No pressure then.

Anchorhead
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Journalière

A beautiful, bleak, surreal adventure set in one of the most architecturally interesting game worlds I've come across. No Future contest entry Journalière is silent and wordless, universal and alien—it also has a dancing minigame. Reminiscent of Jack King-Spooner's stuff—and if you haven't yet had the pleasure, please rectify that immediately.

Journalière
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Westerado

And now for something completely different, and totally ace. Westerado is a beautiful action/adventure/gratuitous western game, and stop me before I wax lyrical about the era-appropriate instrumental soundtrack. After banditos kill your family, you have to track down the responsible parties - or, instead, you could just shoot everyone in the face, foes and family alike. Westerado gets bonus points for making you unholster and cock your gun before you fire (and a million bonus points for letting you shoot the hats off bad guys). Little things, but they add a lot to the surprisingly fluid, sudden, tense combat. Between shootouts you'll solve problems, ride your horse, and stand in the breeze admiring the astonishing soundtrack. Westerado—play it now.

Westerado
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Olav & The Lute

An enigmatic adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic world, with a cracking central mechanic. Rather than combining objects with other objects, you're affecting the world with a (presumably) magic lute, by plucking at its colour-coded strings. It's a bit like Ocarina of Time, and a lot like LOOM; to open a door, for example, you'll pluck a certain combination using the game's moderately fiddly interface. Olav & Lute is a short, stark, striking adventure—it's also one you can download and play offline.

Olav & The Lute
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Life in the West

What if you lacked self-censorship? What if you posted every stray thought that entered your head? What if you were Kanye West? That's the premise of Life In The West, a short strange HTML5 game by Davey Wredon, creator of The Stanley Parable.

You log into Kanye's Twitter account, then, when "Inspiration" hits, rapidly mash your keyboard to auto-complete such immortal tweets as "I make awesome decisions in bike stores!!!" The quicker you finish, the more Kanye points you're awarded, which can be spent on following new accounts. In the manic rush of keyboard spamming and follower clicking, it's easy to miss the best part of Life In The West. The feed at the side is telling a story about a man's spiralling descent into madness.

Life in the West
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The Republia Times

You're the editor of a newspaper in a totalitarian state. Each day you must choose which stories to run and how much space to give them, impacting your paper's popularity and the government's approval with the general populace. Smart, cynical, and there's a great twist near the end.

The Republia Times
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flOw

flOw's minimalist appeal and dynamically adjusting difficulty curve has hooked hundreds of thousands. Use the mouse to guide a creature through an evolutionary mire, gobbling up smaller animals to grow, and hitting red blobs to swim deeper. When you eat, you evolve, but you can see large predators moving through the gloom on the levels below, waiting to swallow you whole. Serene yet addictive.

flOw
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Will Love Tear Us Apart

There are few more horrifying prospects than that of being made to re-explore the intricacies of an irrevocably broken relationship again and again. Will Love Tear Us Apart harnesses the theme's of Joy Division's hit to create a strange and disturbing experience in which you must treat with a hideous, swollen partner on a hopeless quest for reconciliation. The sparse line art evokes an empty, angst-ridden world as the game evolves from one phase to the next. It's a human communication breakdown abstracted into an interactive form. A fascinating experiment that demonstrates how fertile human relationships can be as inspiration for nightmarish horror scenarios. It's free, to, and you can play it in your browser at the link above.

Will Love Tear Us Apart
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One Chance

This browser game uses cookies to prevent you from ever replaying it: you've quite literally got one chance to see this brief point-and-click adventure through to the end. It's set in a future where all life on Earth will be extinguished in six days: what you choose to do, who you choose to spend time with, and whether you accept your fate or try to fight it are the questions you're asked to answer. What could be a cheap gimmick is actually very effective: it's rare that a game asks you to really live with your decisions.

One Chance
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OWWW

There have plenty of games riffing off Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV, but OWWW is probably the oddest, and definitely the only one to be set in Terry's mouth. I like to think of it as retribution for VVVVVV's bastard hard Veni, Vidi, Vici section.

You must explore the teeth and atriums (yes, really) of the oral dungeons, flipping gravity to avoid spikes as you navigate to each screen's key and unlock the exit. Each level has critters that move across the screen, but instead of hurting you, you can flip onto them to be carried past hazards. Delightfully weird and expectedly difficult.

OWWW
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Atum

In Atum, you play as a person sitting at their desk playing a side-scrolling 2D platformer. That desk is littered with detritus; everything from magnets and batteries to cigarettes and the lighter that lit them. Meanwhile, the white silhouette in the screen inside your screen keeps running into a variety of seemingly impassable objects on his way through this extremely meta puzzler.

Atum
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Shybot

Sometimes I'm in the mood for a silly-physics-based kissing game, an experimental first-person wanderer, an exquisite text adventure—or an unassuming robot-based plat former featuring a Game Boy colour palette and an infectious chiptune soundtrack. I suspect most of the words I've supplied to descriptions of other side scrolling plat formers would apply equally well here, but at the risk of repeating myself, Shybot is a mechanically exact jumping game with an adorable main character, set in a fairly sizeable, open-ended world. There will always be a place in my heart for one of those.

Shybot
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Escape Goat

Ian Stocker's excellent Escape Goat is now available in browser form, should you want to play the goat-based puzzle platformer without having to download or pay anything for the privilege. (Of course, you should consider buying the game's recently released Steam version if you like what you see.) Either way, you'll be playing a smart, witty puzzler with one hell of a soundtrack, and the cutest mouse companion you'll ever met.

Escape Goat
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Pause Ahead

Here's a novel idea: a 2D puzzle platformer with a time-bending twist. Okay, so Pause Ahead might not be original in concept, but it's proficient in execution. You must make your way through the difficult trap filled levels, completing them within the time limit despite a control scheme that seems unsuited to twitch acrobatics. Why it works is that with a tap of the Shift key you freeze time, rendering you unable to course-correct, but keeping your momentum. At the most basic level, that means running towards an approaching buzzsaw, freezing time and skidding past. As long as time's not moving, you'll pass through the danger unharmed. Hit a wall, however, and you'll lose your speed. If you're hovering over an obstacle when you resume, you'll instantly be killed.

Pause Ahead
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I Am Level

Oh wow, this is wonderful. I Am Level is a Spectrum-style game with some canny enhancements—there's a Metroidvania-like world structure, alternate costumes and even a leveling system—but at its core this is a ruggedly old-fashioned platformer with one hell of a chiptune soundtrack. The twist here is that it's also a pinball game; you're tilting the levels, and activating paddles, rather than moving the game's spherical hero directly.

I Am Level
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Ichabot Crane

You're a robot. With a detachable head. And in the ga...well, you get the idea. What distinguishes this wonderful puzzle game from the dozens of similar first-person puzzlers doing the rounds is how you use that head to advance. Left-clicking chucks it out in front of you, at which point the perspective switches to that of the robo-bonce now sitting on the floor. In a stroke of genius, you can head-hop forward with repeated left clicks, while simultaneously moving your headless robo-body with WASD. It's beautiful. It's also the closest I've ever come to being Bender from Futurama—until work on my robot exoskeleton is finished at least.

Ichabot Crane
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GeoGuessr

GeoGuessr builds a compelling game of investigative orienteering by using Google Maps' Street View to drop you randomly into the world, then asking you to locate yourself. Sometimes it's obvious—a sign or street name allowing you to hone in on your temporary home. Other times you'll be stranded in a barren landscape. Sightseeing has never been so competitive.

GeoGuessr
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