This Week's Waste of Time

Looking at the 130 playable games on Increpare's website it's difficult to fathom that Stephen Lavelle has a day job. Maybe cutting-edge game designers get a stipend in the UK (God knows how they do things over there). Regardless of how his creations get funded, they generally sit somewhere on the fun/interesting/confounding continuum.

Lavelle strips down his more accessible puzzle games to the bare minimum of artistic trapping, focusing instead on pure gameplay. Games like the shape-matching Cascode requires some exploration on the player's part to master. His most recent release, Box, intuitively introduces you to the play mechanics before ramping up the difficulty. The real brilliance of Box is its ability to come together like a puzzle, sometimes through trial-and-error and other times through mental gymnastics. Lavelle manages this balance of strategy and exploration in a way that can be hard to quantify, but the feeling of accomplishment upon completing a level speaks to the designer's talents. If you yearn for more puzzling, try Constellation Z.

The experimental offerings range from the text-based Hush to the light-hearted sexuality of Garden of Delights. I'll spare you descriptions of these games as they take a few minutes to complete. Best experience them for yourselves. My favorite audio/visual poem (if that isn't too pretentious a categorization) is Whale of Noise. The boxy pixels and austere soundscape make for an unexpectedly somber and effecting environment to explore.

Click here for an index of Increpare's myriad free-gaming offerings.