BENGALURU: Experimenting with random games can be bewildering yet entertaining. Deciding that my life needed a bit of an adventure, I undertook the process of exploring the lesser-played games. Incidentally, I stumbled upon Dr Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist which is a game that has a longer title than its gameplay duration. Short though the gameplay may be, I was left perplexed, and kept revisiting on thoughts of “How exactly did I even spend those 15 minutes?”
However, this is compensated by the fact that it is free to play on Steam. You are placed in the back-stage of an arena, and the game is supplemented with an omniscient narration: an annoying, yet magniloquent British voice telling you what to do at every move.
The ‘interface’, if I may call it that, is very interactive. You can pick up every piece of written paper and press every button. The inscrutableness is, in every paper you read, the same miserable employee’s letter of resignation. The more-often-than-not disquietness of the narrator’s voice, and his continued puzzlement on how to handle the anomaly that is the protagonist (me) -- made me feel rather involved in the game. Developed by the makers of The Stanley Parable, which is another beloved anathema by conventional gamers, there wasn’t anything more to expect from the very confusing ‘game-in-a-game’. Speaking of perplexity, another game has been trending in the Massively Multiplayer Online world (surprisingly not DOTA).
The website Agar.io was developed on Miniclip and is now available on mobile. This game proves that high-end graphics is not necessary for an entertaining gaming experience. The player is one of the colourful cells on a petri dish, and the competitors are cells from around the world. The target is to eat smaller ones and grow in size. The first time I played, I witnessed an unusual spectacle of a cell with the face of Barack Obama, bobbing away. I was quick to learn to float away as fast as I could if I encountered a large cell - they unsuspectingly enforce their cell division power and one of the larger cells will gulp you whole with the momentum from the fission. Don’t be afraid to experiment – you may learn nothing, but you can laugh about it later.
(The writer is an economics graduate who spends her time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)
