Originally released as a Flash game in early 2006, flOw was written by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark as a part of Chen’s thesis research at the USC Interactive Media Division. In the game, the player controls a simple aquatic microorganism whose goal is to consume other creatures and descend to deeper and more difficult levels of an oceanic environment.

Devil’s Tuning Fork is an unusual 3D exploration game created by a student team at DePaul University known as the DuPaul Game Elites. The game takes place in the dark, shared subsconcious of children in a coma, where the player must use waves of sound to illuminate their surroundings. The goal is to free yourself and other children who are imprisoned in this alternate reality and find the cause of the mysterious epidemic.

Hazard: The Journey of Life is a “Philosophical First Person Single Player Exploration Puzzle Art Game” where the player must work their way through a succession of byzantine corridors, solving a series of spacial problems, in order to liberate themselves from captivity. Each challenge rewards the player with a simple lesson, and the promise that they are just that much closer to freedom. The journey serves as an analogue for the types of problems one inherently encounters throughout life, and all the unpredictability that goes along with it.

I was first introduced to Golf? at the Independent Games Festival at GDC2005 in San Jose, and again later that year at the IndieGamesCon in Oregon. This game has since found a place in my mind as the ultimate holy grail of bizarre game art, painfully cemented by the fact that it was never officially released.

Created by a joint effort from Detective Brand and Chronic Logic, Golf? is in fact a golf game that features a sort of macabre, misplaced, French art noir film-meets Alice in Wonderland art style.

Painterly approaches to video game art are nothing new, though most attempts in the past have been to simply apply painted textures to models using fairly conventional rendering techniques. In 2006, Clover Studio developed Okami, which featured a groundbreaking display of Japanese sumi-e art, and has since been the hailed as the finest achievement in bringing a classical artistic sensibility to video games. Then, in 2008, lone indie developer Eskil Steenberg, under the moniker Quel Solaar, began releasing screenshots and videos from a project called Love:

Fig8, by Intuition Games, is a Flash game that borrows heavily from the aesthetics of architectural and technical blueprints. The game began as a student art installation before evolving into a game (full story at Intuition’s site). It’s basically a top-down bicycling game where the player literally rides through patent-inspired design documents. Beautiful

What struck me at first about IGF 2009 contestant Dyson is that I had a hard time deciding if the world I’m playing in is on the micro- or macro- scale. The game tells you that you are using seedlings to populate asteroids, but the asteroids themselves seem almost cellular. Either way, I was also struck by the very minimalist and utterly beautiful art for this game. Heavy in strategy, you start with a small group of flying “seedlings” populating an asteroid. You can cash in some of these seedlings and grow trees with them… some trees produce more seedlings, and some trees produce defensive spore-like missiles. To complete each level, you must populate other asteroids in an asteroid belt, while conquering an opposing army of seedlings, and defending your asteroids from them.

One of the more notable results of the 2009 Global Game Jam, was 4 Minutes, 33 Seconds of Uniqueness. Developed by Petri Purho (and team), who also created the clever indie breakout hit Crayon Physics Deluxe under his Kloonigames moniker. The game was created within a 24-our window and was provided by the competition with the theme “As long as we have each other, we’ll never run out of problems“.

In anticipation of Czech developer Amanita’s forthcoming Machinarium in October 2009, and as the first in the Uncommon Classic series (the beautiful and oddball games of times past), I present the Samorost series of games. Samorost and Samorost 2 are simple, Flash-based point and click adventure games that were released from 2003 to 2005. Samorost has gained somewhat of a cult classic status over the years, even after winning both a Webby Award, and Excellence in Visual Art award at IGF 2007. The art and programming for the game was completed almost entirely by Jakub Dvorsky.