I feel that Genvo’s team largely achieves its goal of showing how games can be a major medium of expression. Be forewarned, the topics dealt with in the game are for a mature/adult audience. You guide a man from his childhood to adulthood, help him earn his first kiss, and ultimately find out where the father that abandoned him went to and make a life-altering decision with a pair of scissors.

The music and art is pretty spot-on. A gorgeous piano plays at times; other moods usher in fitting melodies. The colors are lush; however, the animation is a little crude, but not central to the game. I found the faceless protagonist eerie at first, but reconciled that in order to immerse a gamer into the role, it was a smart art design.

My only gripe with the game mechanics is that I had to right-click to select a “hand” motion, left-click to open a door, and then right-click again to walk through the door. Going through doors is a central plot device, and maybe it was a metaphor for people willfully choosing something, but following through with it; however, I just found it slowed down the pace of the game.

I also could have done without the creepy fetus, then again I suppose that says more about me. The English translation also had a few bumps. Most did not disturb the flow of the story, but I felt a few times as if something was lost in translation.

Can you spot all the hints at the adolescent’s sexuality?

At first after completing the game, I wrestled with the protagonist being a gamer/game developer. I wondered why he couldn’t be just a normal guy neglecting his wife. I felt this would immediately alienate the people that would play the game: namely, gamers. Then I realized that having the story center around a gamer is effective for the point behind Keys of a GameSpace.

I walked away with thinking the lesson is that people have choices in life as they do in games. These choices have consequences. Just as gamers analyze what to do in a situation on a game, they should do so in real life when confronted with certain issues or challenges.

The developers’ thoughts clarify one of take home points : “We also hope that our game will help the victims of psychological distress and that it will make some individuals think twice before they try to commit terrible crimes. These individuals will be able to experience through our game the consequences of their wrongdoings.”

I created what the developers describe as the only possible paradoxical ending out of the four possible ones. Maybe it was because I felt it was a game, just as I wouldn’t in real life jump on a turtle and make it pop out of its shell.

Maybe it was because I don’t think what I did in the game was a crime…

Tell us in the comments below what ending you achieved after you play Keys of A GameSpace (PC only) for free.

Just about every line could use a carpenter’s level, resulting an a dissonant Dutch angle effect. Likewise, every solid surface is filled with an ever-changing static and the background (and sometimes the foreground) is filled with an ominous orange fog. Your character is tiny; the levels are comparably large on the screen. Each has a sort of strange, one-straw-short-of-familiar shape to it. Ostensibly helpful text scrolls across the screen, though it spends more time taunting or giving inane protips or generally being bleak.

You can only jump and double-jump. Whenever you touch a spike, you die. When you die, you die in a sudden explosion of pixel flame, accompanied by a deafening Robotron-esque “CHAAGF!” It will make you jump, especially if you didn’t expect to mess up. You will want to avoid messing up, to avoid being startled.

All in all, a neat, expressive entry to the dev scene. Although a deliberately simple riff on the now-familiar art platformer, there’s something delightfully organic here. You can download Baggage or play it online at YoYoGames’site.

To further my frustration, the last save point was several minutes earlier — before the water level, and before a sequence reminiscent of everyone’s least favorite part of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. You know, the bit with the coral. So each time I reached the boss, both my character’s energy and my own were fairly well drained. And each time I failed, I knew I would have to navigate that whole sequence again.

And then something happened. Well, two things happened. One, I realized that I had recently earned a new power — one that I had never used, as I had been underwater all this time. Two, I randomly hit on a new strategy that used, though did not rely on, this new power. The next time I faced the boss, the encounter was over within seconds — and I realized it wasn’t so much a boss as a random obstruction.

My fault had been in filtering the event too strictly through my own understanding of game structure. And that is the uncertain balance tread throughout this game. For all its waves to tradition, Uin is still a biggt production. It may have an inventory, and a persistent world structure, and sub-quests, and cutscenes, and a fully developed (if eccentric) control scheme, but those details are incidental to the dream logic at play.

Matt Aldridge rose to prominence as an indie game artist through the surreal and unsettling La La Land series. Each of those games uses the tools of game design to sketch out an ambiguous and unstable situation, to which the player — cast in the role of Matt Aldridge himself — may respond only in a typically bizarre and reactionary role. La La Land 5, for example, casts the player as an eager bible salesman. Over the course of five days, the player walks left to right, lobbing bibles at fish while the Amway jingle loops in the background. With each day, fewer and fewer fish are awake to receive the player’s bibles, leaving less money for the player’s food budget. As the situation becomes increasingly desperate, the music becomes distorted and the background fills with static, while the player remains trapped in a narrow range of behavior, helpless as the game’s environment descends into nightmare.

Uin hews closer to that template than it appears; its progression is decidedly eccentric, and it’s hard to find an element that exists just for the sake of tradition. Much as in outsider art, the game appropriates familiar design elements and uses them to wholly its own purposes. There is, for an extended sequence involving digging for treasure. The game grants the player the ability to dig, which calls to mind an odd mark on the ground a few screens back. Digging at that spot indeed uncovers a trinket that carries the game forward, so at this point it seems pretty clear what the game wants when it asks for more treasure. Yet it turns out the only further use for the digging ability is to scratch at the ground for coins — which the player can do anywhere. So when a man asks for several hundred coins, basically that amounts to several minutes of menial labor.

In a sense it’s all comparable to the fetch quests and RPG battles that other games like to use to pad out their run times and give a false sense of purpose and achievement. Instead, biggt tells the player he has a boring job to complete before he can continue, and the player just has to spend a few minutes getting on with it. Afterward, the player can continue to dig at leisure — though the game never asks for further investment.

In this example it’s tempting to feel that biggt is making a point about traditional reward structure, much as in La La Land 5. One of the more compelling aspects of Matt Aldridge’s work is that it’s never clear where the brilliance starts and the inanity ends. Aldridge himself likes to play up the apparent randomness of his designs, perhaps to head off criticism. If Uin serves any purpose in his body of work, it is to illustrate that Aldridge does in fact know what he’s doing as a designer. In a sense it’s a shame to lose that mystique, as it narrows interpretation of his work as a whole. And yet, it does put a bullet point by the expressive qualities in his earlier games.

Though it may not be as immediately refreshing as his earlier games, Uin is possibly Matt Aldridge’s breakout work. As of this game, Aldridge is pretty much the Kafka of indie game design. It’s a rich and thoughtful game, that questions gaming conventions while spinning its own neurotic web of ideas. Its only lingering problem is that its deceptively familiar setup may fail to signal its intent as well as Aldridge’s earlier works.

The question then becomes, what’s next for biggt? Is he going to return to the short concepts that defined his own personal style, or is he going to press further into long-form narrative, with all the architecture that implies? If he goes the latter route, I am concerned of irony creep. I feel he’s stronger when setting his own rules, rather than riffing off of established forms. Either way, biggt has now proved himself as an artist to watch.