Before I go on a tear about this bizarre new game Blueberry Garden, we should chat about indie games (since it is one). I'm nuts about indie culture, and if you're on this site, you probably are as well. You dig the alternative over the mainstream, the underdog over the overlords. I don't doubt your taste in indie film, music, comics, and bien sûr, erotica, is impeccable.

But maybe you aren't sold on indie games. After all, the indie gaming scene is exploding, but it's not exactly accessible. Maybe you don't know where to start with indie games, beyond the ones that make it to the XBLA or the PlayStation store. Maybe the retro graphics, the Mario homages, and the thrill of downloading strange .exe's off the web with no idea if they'll eat your hard drive, just aren't your bag.

Chasing down the indie scene isn't meant to be simple however. After all, half the joy lies in the hunt: searching the blogs for something new, playing something other than the latest dude-shoots-dudes rampager, encountering a new voice that catches you off guard and maybe even makes you queasy. The press - both gamer, and mainstream - could do a more thorough job of spotting, cataloging and posing these talents like critters in a zoo. For now, I'm happy to dive into the wilds with a sketchy map and a tarantula hiding in my rucksack.

And nothing makes my point more elegantly than Blueberry Garden. After all, it won this year's Seamus McNally grand prize at the Independent Games Festival, which is akin to winning Sundance, or landing Pitchfork's album of the year. But it's not a "safe" pick. From minute one, the game is a total head-scratcher.

Here's the premise: you're Mr. Beak, and you live in a garden. Fruit grows here, and you also meet the wildlife, which includes clumsy fat birds, big blue moose, and little guys who look like marshmallows with party hats. Life in the garden is strange, but idyllic - at least, until you realize there's a crisis at hand, and only you can fix it.

This is the latest from creator Erik Svedäng, whose portfolio includes Pixel Cave Adventures - which you play in something called a Virtual Reality Cave, found only at the University of Skövde - and World of Pong, an online game where hundreds of people play Pong at the same time. (It is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks!)

Svedäng expects people to play Blueberry Garden twice before they beat it; the first time, you're just sussing out how everything works. You can take pleasure in the aesthetics, like the austere piano soundtrack and winsome visuals. At the same time, your left-brained gamer side wants to skip all the pretty stuff and work through the rules: What happens when I eat the pear? How high can I get on a running jump? How do I reach the giant pencil that's stuck in that cave? (And why do I even want to?) The game's chief achievement lies in fending off your reasoning, all the better to keep you wandering.

Aesthetics trump gameplay in another sense. Most of the movements feel clunky. Walking is a pain. Flying is, too. To reach certain destinations, you have to cruise to an altitude that's so high you lose track of the ground, 'til you think you're drifting aimlessly. (Maybe that was the point.) And while the game is technically a puzzle-platformer, you won't face puzzles so much as problems, and the tools you use to solve them feel rough and inexact.

But that's the point; the game's world is organic. It's built to creak and amble. After all, you're not controlling Sonic the Hedgehog: you're Mr. Beak, who's stiff and grumpy and a little aloof, but who nevertheless saves the day.

Beat the game, and you'll get a special reward: a link to a private page on Svedäng's website, where you and all the other winners can hobnob and swap notes. Svedäng even shows up to take questions. (Another reason to love indie devs: they're so touchable.) But truth be told, it's not that exclusive. Most people will knock their way through this thing in about an hour, which you should keep in mind before you drop cash on it. And maybe I'm focusing too much on the rules again, but the game seems to skip a chance to explore its own systems - to compound the difficulty, to use the animals in the puzzles, or to come up with any variations on the theme. It scores on charm but lacks depth.

But if you're new to indie games, and you want a title that'll show you what's up with all this fuss? Try Blueberry Garden. It's a perfect example of discovery in games and world-making in miniature. And who doesn't need a shot of 'wtf' in their gaming?


Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.

I'm no expert on superhero comics. But in the pile of comics in our living room, stuck between The Boys, Walking Dead, and Air, are a few out-and-out good guy vs. bad guy books -- and the best of the bunch is Ultimate Spiderman. Never mind that it's an unusually good retelling of the story of everyone's favorite geek hero. Never mind that Mary Jane has a mean right hook, or that Gwen Stacy went punk. I like the book because it gives us a Spider-Man who's still learning right from wrong.

Spidey taught us -- and say it with me -- that with great power, comes great responsibility. But really, that's just his opinion. And if he didn't have the memory of his dead uncle nagging at him all the time, would he always play nice?

As the SG Gamers group caught on, Cole MacGrath, the star of Sucker Punch Productions's PlayStation 3 sandboxer inFamous, owes plenty to Spider-Man. As the erstwhile motorcycle messenger, you can scale buildings and fall from any height -- not to mention shoot lethal bolts of electricity from your fingertips. Like Spider-Man, when you start out everyone thinks you're a menace: accused of being a terrorist who turned the city into a free-fire zone, you're scoffed and spat upon everywhere you go. But unlike Spider-Man, you live in a city that can't stand in your way. Sometimes the cops sneak out of their hidey-holes to take potshots at the gangs, and the military mans the barricades around the island. But inside the city limits, you are the law. And everybody else looks very, very helpless.

In most games, the run-of-the-mill civilians fall into two extremes: they're either crucial, or insignificant. In a game like Grand Theft Auto, pedestrians are just moving targets. Running down a sidewalk full of people may get the cops on your tail, and a stick-up might bring you a few bucks, but your rampages have no long-term ramifications. The little people just don't matter. At the other end, a real-time strategy game will give you a population to protect or an army to deploy -- and every last one of those folks is a resource. Lose one or two and it's no big thing, but waste too many and you're going to lose the game.

In inFamous, the civilians matter -- but they don't matter much. You can help them, but the rewards are minor. And thanks to that design decision, you'll focus on the role you want to play rather than the points you need to earn.

To be clear, you're also confronted with boldface, lunkheaded moral decisions between a brave act and a craven one, such as, "Do I take a couple bruises from this giant walking trash monster -- or let a dozen people burn to death?" These shift your hero rating as well -- but they're not as interesting as the choices you aren't forced to make.

Choose to be a hero, and you can stop every five feet and heal someone who's wounded and dying on the sidewalk. You get a few experience points for every save, but that's just a "thank you"; knowing that you've saved hundreds of lives is the real reward. On the other hand, have you ever tied your ex's dog to the back of a bus? Or maybe grabbed the last beer in the fridge? If you're the villain-type, inFamous lets you wreak havoc on an already wrecked city, torturing the populace and even draining the last gasps of life from victims dying on the street. All these crimes will nudge your karma toward evil, but in the scheme of things, a few murders here and there don't add up to much -- and anyway, you'll quickly learn how hard it is to do good.

Maybe Spider-Man had time to catch baby carriages and save grandmas from falling taxis. But in inFamous, stray passers-by love to jump in the middle of a firefight, and who the hell has time to protect them? Plus, most of them are obnoxious. I talked to one gamer who tried to play nice, until he got trash-talk from one too many civilians -- so he walked up to the guy and knocked him across the street. Could Spider-Man get away with that?

Yes, he could -- if he wanted to. And nothing made me appreciate the masked webslinger like trying to follow his example, and failing in so many little ways. Don't get me wrong: this ain't Watchmen. The story crams 50 pounds of nonsense in a 5 pound bag, and the hero is just some guy with a squeaky messenger bag and a rechargeable battery for a brain. But the game puts its stubby little finger square on how it feels to be the ubermensch. Nobody can judge you, because nobody can stop you. And yes, all those little people matter -- but they only matter a little.


Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.

It's week three and we're still in the "getting to know each other" phase, so now's the time to tell you about one of my favorite games in the history of gaming. I'm a shooter nut and a stealthy killer, so you'd think my top game would be a Half-Life or a Doom. But strangely, the one that's affected me the most over years is a plodding, talky role-playing game. I'm talking about Planescape: Torment, and I still remember the weekend many years ago when it sucked me in and consumed me whole.

10-years young this year, Planescape is brainy and brilliant. But back when I first fell in love with Planescape I didn't appreciate it so much as let it get under my skin. In fact, I wish I'd had it around age 15, because it's self-absorbed, existential, and possibly the most goth game ever made. It plays to the dreams of every teenager who thinks the whole world revolves around their problems. And it does it with wit, brilliance, flexible character development, and the voice of Homer Simpson. (Already sold? It's still available on GameTap, and eBay surely has copies too.)

Here's the premise: you're an immortal, but you're also an amnesiac. You can't die. But every time someone knocks you hard enough in the head, you lose your memories and start from scratch. You've lived hundreds of lives and experienced things most folks can't imagine. But your body's broken, your dreadlocks are frizzed, and your blessing has become a curse. It's time to solve the mystery of who you are and how you got this way.

Planescape takes place in a fringe universe that nobody but the most dedicated Dungeons & Dragons player has ever heard of. Out on the planes, death is beatable, reality is malleable, and the moral becomes physical. Streets can give birth to new streets. Whole cities can slide from one world to the next. Your best friend is a talking skull. In fact, you get to talk to dead stuff all the time. Right around the time I had to take sides between a village of dead people and a sewerful of hypersmart rats, I knew my latent goth side had found a most unholy coupling.

The gameplay is fiendish and subversive. For example, you aren't punished for dying; not only do you bounce back every time you're clocked, but suicide even becomes the answer to a puzzle. One of your sidekicks, a succubus named Fall-From-Grace, carries a diary in her inventory; but while you can see it and take it away, so far as I know, you'll never figure out how to unlock it. Which is a shame, because in this game, words are more fun than deeds. Planescape doesn't have branching conversation trees, so much as a gnarly, evil rainforest of dialogue, where smarter characters get better comebacks and the same answer can be delivered as a truth or a lie.

But more than anything, Planescape: Torment deeply groks the mindset of a moody, Camus-plagued adolescent. It makes you feel like you're grappling with an oh-so-serious personal problem, and the whole world was built to help you solve it. Everything around you reflects your dilemma, from the people you meet on the street, to the giant, endless wars on the horizon. And you can struggle through it any way you please: good guy, knuckle-dragger, bomb-thrower or genius -- there's content for almost any path you take. You can flirt with your best friends -- or sacrifice them to the giant pillar of flesh-eating skulls. Hey, who doesn't have some growing pains? (And 7th grade-style fantasies where frenemies die grizzly deaths.)

Of course, not everyone wanted to gaze at my navel as much as I did. Feeling way too comfortable in the adolescent mind of my character as I played I'd think the world revolved around me -- and just like in real life, I was wrong. Outside of a small circle of friends, my problems affected almost no one. I could be anyone and do anything, but the impact of my actions was nada. And no matter what I tried, the end of the game stayed the same.

I won't give away the ending, except to say that it's a bit of a fizzle. But I'd have it no other way. The finale is the smack in the face we all deserve, when it's time to grow up.

As with so many cult classics, Planescape has plenty to teach the industry. "Hero saves the world" is still the story of most of the games on the shelf today; "anti-hero saves the world" covers the rest. Both storylines try to put you in the shoes of a protagonist and invest you in their fate. But none match the total existential absorption of Planescape, where you are your own worst enemy -- and your only savior. And the only person who even cares is you.


Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.

We're on the playground, a pack of girls and boys, huddled around a fortune teller -- you know, the one you make from a piece of paper and pop on your fingertips, and you flip the peaks, back and forth, back and forth, to find the answer to your question. Will I be filthy rich? No. Will I get a new dog for Christmas? Unclear. Will I die before my time? Yes. Giggles. And then you ask the question again. And you get a different answer.

That same feeling hits me when I play the poetic micro games of Argentinean gamemaker Daniel Benmergui, who released his latest, Today I Die, earlier this month. It's an indie game, and it's an art game -- but I use that term carefully, because if you're new to that scene, you might think "art" means "oppressive, overanalyzed, and stuck up its own orifice." And that's not Benmergui.

All three of Benmergui's latest creations -- Storyteller, I Wish I Were the Moon, and now Today I Die -- are short and thematically sweet. Each one hinges on a simple mechanic that helps you tell a story. In the case of Storyteller, you get a fairy tale, and you can change the plot with a click of the mouse. Here's the story when it opens:



But say you don't like that ending. Just switch around the characters in the first and second panels, and you change their fates:



In a role-playing game, you could spend 50 hours getting to one ending, and another 20 to the other. Here, the path not taken is a click away.

Today I Die (see top image) also starts with a clever mechanic: poetry magnets. But that's not what you notice when the scene opens. A woman is tied to a rock and sinking into deep waters, her hair trailing behind her. A poem that reads like a suicide note hangs above her. And the only way to save her is to change the words.

Benmergui's blog calls it a game "about the daily choice of waking up in the morning." When I asked him to reconcile the gravity of drowning yourself with the hassle of crawling out of bed, Benmergui observes that: "We are conditioned to look at life as a series of milestones and achievements, so anything that is not one of those seems to be irrelevant. Like, what you do every day. The game is not about someone who suddenly changes her life in a single, spectacular moment like movies show people doing. It's about a constant choice, an everyday choice."

Benmergui enlisted his girlfriend, Guadalupe Iturbide, for her handwriting. She's also part of the inspiration. As Benmergui puts it obliquely, "The game was born out of something in our everyday life that changed, and an insight I had after that. What was shared was the change, but the game was made after my point of view. I picked a girl because she's inspired [by] Guadalupe. But that character also reflects myself. You could easily reverse the characters."

(You can also add your own characters to Benmergui's game. To make some scratch on a game he gives away for free, Benmergui is taking sponsors. For $75, he'll draw a pixilated portrait of you or a friend. For $497, he'll put you and your s.o. in either Today I Die or I Wish I Were the Moon. And somebody's already paid $995 to give Benmergui a new ending to the game. The buyer "is well known in the industry. He might want to show the custom game or not. I'll let him choose.")

I don't want to spoil a game that you could play in the time it takes to read this column. (Try it HERE. It's free!) But here's the gist: though you start as the drowning woman, you get a chance to turn things around. Shadowy sea creatures surround you; to beat them back, you have to "shine." And when you reach the end and swim to a world of "beauty," you also get the boy -- if you want him.

Benmergui's favorite ending is the one where the girl and boy rise to the surface together. For Guadalupe, "I asked and she said that it's the one in which she surfaces on her own, but I saw her face when she saw the other ending, so she might be lying."

Today I Die is charming. The poem is cute, and, let's say it, sappy: Benmergui even deprecates himself, comparing it to what "a depressed teenager (with little sense for poetry, like me) could have come up with." And the dark vs. light symbolism is not a brain-teaser.

But the real message lies in the mechanic. When I want to change from a "dead" world to a "dark" one and finally, one that's "free," I find the word I need and stick it right into the poem. Just like Storyteller, you're always one step away from rewriting the story.

Now think what that tells us about the story. From the title and the opening image, Today I Die gives us an emergency -- but as Benmergui tells us, the game is about an "everyday choice." This isn't a giant drama but a little one. It'll happen again and again. And same for Storyteller. Even though it tells three life stories in a heroic setting, it's actually a very small, toy-like gizmo. You're not constructing epics; you're playing with one outcome after another.

And there’s his secret. Benmergui takes the epic decisions that change our lives, and the little choices we make every day, and marries them in a single click. Victory, heartbreak, suicide, and salvation are all right there for you, and they'll be there again tomorrow. It takes me back to being a kid, when I could make a choice that seemed huge, and then shake it off and try something else. One day everyone's proud of you, the next you're in detention. Maybe you kiss Colin, and then you brush him off to kiss Stu. And maybe later you kiss Chloe, too. The point is not that every story has many endings; it's that the other endings don't go away. You gather around the playground and flip through the fortune teller, again and again, and the answers always change.



Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.