A Dive Into The Indies

Recently on Steam two great indie games were released; Machinarium and Eufloria and I decided to give them a shot since they were both spoken of highly at the Independent Games Festival and at the PAX expo.

 

Machinarium

 

 

 

First off, I can easy tell why this game was awarded "Excellence in Visual Arts," it is a very unique looking game, everything looks hand drawn, the animations flow smoothly and it all comes together in a nice, fresh experience. The game stars a robot's struggle to rescue his robot girlfriend from a couple of robot bullies (robots galore!). One interesting fact about this game is that it contains no dialogue. The story is told through hand drawn hilarious cartoons which are very entertaining and doesn't take away from the gameplay.

 

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure with puzzle elements; solving puzzles in each level advances the story getting you closer to your beloved robot girlfriend. The puzzles are cleverly hidden in each level but if the player is stumped one hint is provided each level as how to complete the level but if puzzles in-between are too difficult to solve you can unlock a "hint book" of sorts but to unlock it you first play a side scrolling shooter as a key fighting your way through a maze of spiders to get to the lock and unlock the book. The book provides step-by-step help on the puzzles related to the level which is nice so you're not stumped hours on end on one level and also so the casual gamers don't give up hope on the game (I'll admit...I had to unlock that book a couple times).

 

Machinarium is a genius puzzle game that's worth playing just to take in the great visuals and animations and is very unique to the point and click adventure genre.

 

The other indie game I was quite intrigued by was a strategy game, "Eufloria."

 

 

 

 

Eufloria is another great title I can preach about the great visuals. It's almost like you're looking under a microscope commanding organisms and taking controls of cells but in fact these circles are asteroids and you control seedlings that grow trees to grow stronger and abundant to rid the galaxy of "bad seedlings," the "grey's."

 

It's a basic strategy game. You have your trees that give you more seedling units and you have your defense trees that shoot back at enemy seedlings trying to overrun your asteroid. Each asteroid has certain attributes that attune your seedlings; power, speed and energy. Energy toned seedlings can capture asteroids faster, power seedlings are good for taking out defense trees and speed seedlings move fast. Flowers can be grown to upgrade grown trees on asteroids too. Flowers attached to seedling trees give your seedlings more health while flowers grown on a defense tree grow attack flowers that are like mini Death Stars; great at attacking other seedlings or best left orbiting a friendly asteroid for defense.

 

Eufloria might not be as in-depth as your Warcrafts or Starcrafts but it's still a very enjoyable game and is casual enough to be enjoyed by anyone which I think is the main aim of the game or the main aim of any indie game in fact.

 

If you have some spare dollars laying around and you want something to tide you over before Call of Duty or Dragon Age comes out then I suggest looking at these two indie titles, their unique design and gameplay won me over and maybe they will win you over too.