A bit late this week, due largely to regular doses of cold medicine and needing to wake up at previously unheard of hours to be at work in time for Very Important Meetings with Very Important People. I’ll try and keep the coherence of this week’s installment up to the feature’s regular lofty standards, but I make no promises. Currently the only thing keeping me conscious is an inability to stop listening to Fall Out Boy’s ‘Hum Hallelujah’ at top volume. I blame the gateway drug that was ‘DOA’ appearing on Rock Band. I’m just the victim here, you see. Really.

This week’s games of note both come from the curious (but growing) genre of classic adventure games built in flash and playable via the web browser of your choosing. Quite naturally, the load times for each can be a bit of a bitch, between the rather high-level graphics and sound in each and the mechanics working behind the scenes, but it’s ultimately worth it as each game manages something genuinely impressive in a relatively small amount of space. Nit-pickers may argue that first game http://www.zapdramatic.com/mod1.htmMove or Die is a bit more “Choose Your Own” than pure “Adventure”, but these people should be disregarded. The puzzle blocks may be made up of words and emotional responses, but that doesn’t make them any less tricky.

The game opens with a man stumbling out of the woods and collapsing on an empty road. The road doesn’t stay empty for long, though, as mere moments later two friends speeding through the night run over him with their car. They stop to investigate, only to discover that not only did something other than their foolishness kill him, but he seems to be carrying a rather large amount of money for a vagrant wandering the woods. It’s at this moment that you, a nameless hitchhiker asleep in the back of the car up till now, wake up. You have to help the friends decide what to do not only with the body but the money he was carrying by arguing for and against the various pros and cons the situation presents. Even this short discussion is interesting, as the choices your offered for making your case cover a wide range of ground to argue from (including personal dreams, inner weakness, and fear in addition to expected angles like greed and logic). It only gets more complicated from here, as shortly after you get these characters to move in a particular direction some one shows up looking for the poor corpse in the road. It’s a game full of potential endings, and the arrival of this mysterious and menacing stranger can lead you to at least a few of them. Or it can lead you to the rest of the game, or somewhere else entirely. Whatever path you take through the story, though, it’s clear each of your actions have consequences both great and small for you and the other characters you encounter. As you progress a deeper mystery emerges, bringing with it harder choices and stickier situations where your conscious is truly your guide. It’s an incredibly complex system for a Flash game to run on, and clearly one created by somebody with not only a deep and abiding love for the Adventure games of yore but an eye towards what they could have become had the genre flourished. A lovely scene rewind feature is on hand to save you from any wrong choices you make, but this is that rarest of games that rewards even the mistakes you make with endings that feel natural to the story up to that point and a tease at later events you might miss out on.

Up next is Tipping Point, a more classic take on the Adventure game that creates a truly engrossing experience out of professional-level sound, graphics, and accessorizing herons.

You are a nameless couch potato, sitting bored and useless in frong of a blank TV in you shabby apartment at night. Passing out while channel surfing, you awake to a different program than the one you fell asleep to, one that seems to intrude a bit too much into the real world in the form of a gigantic bird perched precariously on your remote control. It’s here (as opposed to earlier) that things get weird, as a plea for help, a menacing automated cable channel operator, and a somewhat magic pocket watch lead to you being sucked into the pulled bodily into the scene on your TV. By turns simple and obtuse (again in the style of bygone Adventure games – specifically, those from once-great developer Lucasarts), Tipping Point’s puzzles offer a surreal challenge that so far feels all too believable. The photo-realistic graphics and quality sound work create a world that seems a natural fit for dream logic – of course the heron’s wearing a pocket watch, of course I’m wandering the beach I was watching on the screen just a moment ago – to the point that you never really question your action. Maybe it’s down to the load of point-and-click games I poured my free time into during my impressionable years, but Tipping Point so far feels less like a trip to aforeign land and more like revisting a favorite haunt.

Filed under: Flash Games