Welcome to Stabshank, a maximum security penitentiary that I’m about to flood with murderers, thieves, videogame pirates and other ruthless criminal scum. The best way to play Prison Architect is to start with calmer, less stabby minimum security prisoners, then bring in the psychopaths when your security is more solid, but I won’t be doing that. I’m going to fill my basic low capacity prison with some really, really bad people and a skeleton crew of guards.

As each truck of convicts rolls in, I’m going to pick one and follow them. I want to see how deep the simulation goes, and whether their crimes dictate their behaviour. I’ll track their lives until they die, escape or are otherwise incapacitated.

I won’t be installing metal detectors at the front gate or in the canteen, so any contraband – shivs, drugs, forks, etc – will be freely circulating. I don’t want Stabshank to be too efficient or secure. I want these guys to get angry, because the angrier they get, the more likely they are to do something interesting. By which I mean stabbing.

Stabshank is open for business. The first truck pulls up and the prisoners step off into the delivery area. I’ve decided to focus on James Pritchard, a 50-year-old con with a rap sheet longer than the Magna Carta. He’s serving 15 years of a life sentence for double murder, and I notice that he’s managed to sneak in some garden shears. I could have ordered a guard to search him in lieu of a metal detector, but I leave him be. He probably won’t stab anyone with them.

Pritchard has a wife, four sons and a daughter, but he won’t be seeing them any time soon. There are no visitor rooms at Stabshank. A guard leads him to his cell and doesn’t seem to notice the deadly garden equipment shoved down his trouser leg. Immediately, I spot a problem. I forgot to plumb in the cell toilets, so I quickly order my workmen to do so – not realising that this will involve opening the cell doors. Predictably, Pritchard uses this opportunity to bolt. But I don’t worry too much, because the area outside is blocked by two gates that only guards can access.



More prisoners have broken free, and a riot erupts outside the cell block. Pritchard, aided by another inmate and fellow murderer, attacks a guard with his shears. There’s blood everywhere, but the guard is only knocked unconscious. Pritchard plucks the keys from his belt and they run towards the nearest gate.

Before any more screws can come to quell the riot, they unlock it and make a run for it. I order a lockdown to stop anyone else getting away, but it’s too late. Pritchard and his buddy have escaped, and will probably kill again. Oops.

Order is restored, but the lack of an infirmary means that a few guards, and some prisoners, are lying bloody and unconscious at the scene of the riot. Life ain’t pretty at Stabshank. It’s night, so I speed up time and wait for the next batch of cons, which is arriving at 8am sharp. John Cadwallader is our next prisoner, a 34-year-old man convicted of torture and forced imprisonment. Oh, how the tables have turned. He has no family and is serving ten years.

After getting used to his new cell, Cadwallader is escorted to the yard where he mingles with the other prisoners, occasionally lifting weights. While he’s busy, I dismantle all the telephones in Stabshank. This cuts off contact with prisoners and their families completely, which should get them nice and steamed up. I also decide to build a few solitary cells. Guards will shove unruly prisoners in here, giving them time to cool down and think about what they’ve done, or develop a slow, burning hatred for the no-good pig who tossed them in there.

Cadwallader is disappointingly sedate for a guy whose turn-ons include locking people up and torturing them. When Prison Architect’s cons aren’t rioting or stabbing, they’re pretty boring, wandering back and forth aimlessly, eating, pumping iron, showering. They don’t have much personality, and their behaviour seems to only be determined by their security status, not their crimes.





In a prison filled entirely with minimum security prisoners, it’s like running a holiday camp. But that’s the big house for you, I suppose. As Morgan Freeman says in The Shawshank Redemption – a film quoted in Prison Architect’s tooltips – “Prison life consists of routine.”

But then, suddenly, action! It’s chow time, and the cons are gathered in the canteen. Because there’s no metal detector, I notice inmates brandishing forks and knives that they’ve stolen. When a convict has something he shouldn’t, you see it appear briefly in his hands, giving you the chance to direct a guard to search him – which I won’t be doing, of course. My tiny kitchen can’t cope with the amount of prisoners in the canteen, and some of them miss their chance to grab some food before it runs out, including our man Cadwallader.

Another riot breaks out. The entrance to the kitchen – the one the prisoners use and the staff entrance – are both heavy jail gates, so I order a lockdown and trap the cons inside the canteen with a few guards and, unfortunately, a cook who was collecting empty trays. The gleaming white tiles of the mess hall are coated in crimson blood as the prisoners fight each other and the staff. If there’s one place you don’t want a fight to break out, it’s a room full of knives and glass.

The guards hold their own. Cadwallader is one of the last men standing, and tries to fight two of them singlehandedly with a knife. They manage to handcuff him, and I lift the lockdown. Now he has the privilege of being the first prisoner in Stabshank’s short history to experience the thrills of solitary confinement. There’s a problem with the doors in the latest build of Prison Architect, so we have to manually lock them to keep our troublemaker in. It’s going to be a long night.

So riots seem to be a pretty regular occurrence here at Stabshank. Luckily I kept an empty building aside, which I now decided to turn into an infirmary. Not so much for the prisoners, but so I don’t have to keep hiring new guards. I install a few medical beds then hire a doctor. Doctors will automatically stick to their ward, but can be ordered to leave their post temporarily and heal injured inmates and staff elsewhere in the prison. I build a morgue as well, just in case. The injured rioters are carted off to the infirmary and I await the next batch of prisoners. Stabshank is almost full, so some of these guys will have to be put into temporary holding cells.



It dawns on me that everything that’s happened so far has been a consequence of the environment, not the prisoners. Pritchard escaped because I foolishly opened his cell door; Cadwallader started rioting because of a food shortage. Despite their detailed bios, the cons in Prison Architect aren’t particularly smart or unique. But the game is in alpha, and it makes sense that Introversion would focus more on the large scale simulation than the smaller details. For most people the prisoners won’t be thought of as individuals, but as a single entity that they have to manage.

The next truck arrives, carrying half a dozen more ne’er-do-wells. I decide to focus on Stephen Palmer, a 41-year-old serving 35 years at Stabshank for attempted murder. Previous convictions include criminal damage and, again, attempted murder. He has a wife and daughter, but because of my unreasonable no-phone-or-visitors policy, he may never speak to them again. Oh well. That’s what happens when you keep attempting to murder people, dude.

The cell block is packed, so only a couple of the new intake get cells. Palmer is thrown into my communal holding cell with the rest of the stragglers. It’s fine to keep inmates locked up here for a night, but they don’t like it much, and it’ll cause a riot if you keep them in there too long. Palmer roams around, occasionally stopping to use the toilet, but I notice that ‘freedom’ has appeared under his needs, which means he wants to escape. Not on my watch. The needs system is similar to The Sims, and there are ways to decrease their urgency. If a prisoner is missing his family, for example, a phone call or visit (in a nicer prison) will calm him down.

Palmer appears to have sneaked a saw into the prison, although he could have stolen it. His burning desire for freedom combined with a deadly weapon is a recipe for disaster. I build a few extra cells to thin the holding cell out, but Palmer still doesn’t get one. Despite the fury bubbling inside him, he doesn’t misbehave. As the other inmates sleep soundly in their beds, he paces back and forth in the holding cell, unable to sleep. I decide to bring up the reports menu and freeze prisoner intake. Stabshank needs some pretty major expansion, and tighter security. With all these frustrated high-risk prisoners on the books, I’ll need a CCTV system and lots more guards.



The next morning, Palmer is mysteriously well-behaved again. Maybe he’s resigned himself to life in the slammer. I briefly consider putting a phone box in the holding cell so he can call his wife and kid, but pity has no place in Stabshank. It’s chow time, and the prisoners pile into the canteen. I hover over Palmer, waiting for him to snap, but nothing happens. He eats his breakfast, then quietly returns to the holding cell.

But then I spot the fork in his hand. Seems our friend has been scheming, and now has a weapon tucked away in his uniform. Yard time. The prisoners gather in the yard. Now that I’ve ripped all the phones out, they either amble around aimlessly, or lift weights. All of a sudden, a fight breaks out. Palmer has forked another prisoner. The screws rush in and I lock the place down, trapping them all in the fenced-off yard. Fight! It’s hard to see what’s happening, with around 25 cons all duking it out, but the sheer amount of blood being spilled suggests it ain’t pretty. We catch a glimpse of Palmer in the midst of the fracas, still fighting, but with only a sliver of health left. He’s in bad shape.

When the dust settles, the yard is littered with bodies. They’re all unconscious, except for Palmer, who has succumbed to his injuries. He’s Stabshank’s first death, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer attempted murderer. His body is dragged to the morgue. There’s no way to get rid of bodies in the build of Prison Architect I’m playing, so he’ll just lie there on the slab forever. Prisoners can steal contraband from dead guards in the morgue, so it’s best to keep it behind a locked door.

Prison folklore is always about personalities; about legendary escapes, or ruthless criminals. That’s the one thing Prison Architect is sorely missing. The simulation of the prison and building process is taking shape nicely, but the prisoners are little more than automatons, shaped by the world around them, and not their backgrounds or criminal records.

I’d love to see special ‘hero’ criminals with different traits, like a master escape artist, or influential mob boss. Currently, there isn’t much going on in the brains of Stabshank’s motley crew except: “EAT. STAB. POOP. ESCAPE.”

After months of alpha releases, Estranged, a first-person shooter/exploration mod for the Source Engine, has finally entered beta! With new (and reworked) maps, new voice work, and new models, Estranged casts you as a fisherman stranded on a mysterious island where many of the residents have gotten a bit bitey. Solve physics puzzles, talk to a few oddball locals, and engage in occasional bouts of armed combat with zombie-types and guards as you explore the mod's first three-chapter act. You don't even need Half-Life 2 to run it, only the free download of Source SDK Base 2013.


It was supposed to be a three hour tour. A THREE HOUR TOUR.
The mod begins with a a boat caught in a midnight storm, a mysterious radio message, and a crash on the docks of a dark and spooky island. After exploring a few empty buildings, you'll engage in some environmental puzzles: throwing small objects to break windows, and moving and stacking larger objects to clamber over obstacles. The overall mood is unsettling, enhanced by some effective and elegant music cues. Nothing is terrifying, but the overwhelming feeling is that things could get terrifying at any moment. Which is therefore terrifying.


Nothing good has ever happened in a tunnel.
Eventually, you'll find a small, cozy home and its inhabitant, a polite fellow who seems pleased to see you. Unfortunately, he’s not able to radio for help: something is blocking the signal. After assisting him with a small chore, you come to realize something has gone quite wrong on the island. The water supply has been compromised, somehow, and those who drink from it become, well, very angry. Outfitting you with a pistol and a handful of bullets, your new friend sends you off to find the source of the radio jammer.


Use your bullets wisely: you won't get many of them until much later.
The zombies (or infected humans, I guess) are scary. Not because they shriek, or because they’re horrifyingly rendered. They just look like grubby people with glowing eyes. But when they show up, it’s without fanfare: no screeching or wailing, no lightning speed, no jangling music cues. They’re just sort of... there, all of the sudden, trying to get you. The effect, or lack of effect, is jarring. Thankfully, they're not hard to kill, provided you pick your shots well. Ammo, initially, is scarce.


No. Really?
In addition to a single weapon (which will be a pistol, a hammer, or a machine gun, depending on where you are in the game), you've got a flashlight that runs on a series of ever-dwindling batteries. In other words, a typical video game flashlight. Is it time someone looked into these crappy, energy consuming flashlights we get handed in games? Or should we question, at gunpoint, the battery-makers? Someone is dropping the ball here. I have a flashlight in my kitchen drawer that I've used intermittently for years, and the batteries have never died.


It's a swipe-card you actually have to swipe! I was so excited I carried it around for the next twenty minutes.
Anyway, a massive corporation has built a research facility on the secluded island, and if you know anything about massive corporations doing research on secluded islands, you know a) they're probably to blame for any horrifying monster-people you encounter, and b) they're going to be real dicks about letting you snoop around in their buildings. And snoop you shall, even getting a little Deus Ex as you look through company email accounts.


"I didn't ask for this," growled Adam Jensen, as he solemnly ate the missing lunch.
The puzzles are of the old-school variety: find some valves to close to allow passage through a flooded sewer, restore power to a pump system by plugging in some electrical cables, get a tram running, disable some dangerous electrical activity before crossing through a flooded room, that sort of thing. None of them are particularly mind-bending, but that actually works to the mod's advantage, letting you proceed at a healthy pace without feeling frustrated or impatient.


This familiar-looking fellow is afraid to get his feet wet! Or maybe it's the electrical bolts. I'm not his psychologist.
The revised mod consists of Act I, which comprises three chapters, which take maybe one or two hours to play through. The combat is fairly sparse, featuring only occasional encounters with zombified workers, and an enjoyable extended shootout with the facility's guards, who are trying to keep the truth about the island from being discovered. There's a fair amount of platforming as well, but again, it's nothing that will slow you down for long, letting you continue to explore without getting frustrated.


The note says "BACK IN FIVE MINUTES." Cute.

Installation: First, you need Source SDK Base 2013. if you have Steam installed, clicking here will install it for you. Then, download the mod here. It's an .exe file, which will install itself when run. There's also a Linux version here.

I've always quite fancied being a hacker, and before the black helicopters arrive to take me off to a secure location, I'll clarify that with an admission that I'm pretty damned useless when it comes to the technical side of operating computers. I'll have to make do with hacker-themed video games instead, such as the two Grand Prize-winning entries in the Oculus Rift VR Jam. Oddly, both games involve VR hacking - though only one is literally called Virtual Internet Hacker. For more details, and to download fellow winner Ciess, tilt your giant VR goggles below the break.

You'll find the list of finalists here. Of those games, E McNeill's Ciess won the Open Call Grand Prize, while Lau Korsgaard's Virtual Internet Hacker came home with the Indiecade Selected Developers Grand Prize. The winners will receive a not-too-shabby $10,000 each, along with a trip to October's IndieCade Festival for an opportunity to showcase their work. Korsgaard's game isn't available to download, but you can grab Ciess here - I'd imagine you'd need an Oculus Rift to make the most of it though.

The runners-up look just as intriguing, however, and most of them are freely available to try too - so if you somehow do have an Oculus Rift lying around, you'd be mad not to give them a go. As for the rest of us, we'll have to make do with the following videos.

Before indie was Indie there was La-Mulana, a terrifically challenging free platformer inspired by ye MSX games of yore. It was recently updated and put back on PC, Spelunky style - in fact, it's currently 80% off on Steam, if you've waited this long to brave its trap-filled ancient temple for yourself. The idea of a sequel had never even entered my mind, but I'm hardly going to turn my nose up at the recently announced La-Mulana 2. This belated follow-up will star the original hero's daughter, and may be less perplexing than its occasionally obtuse predecessor.

There's not much to go on over on the official site, but IndieGames were able to play the game at TGS. From them we learn that developers Nigoro are aiming to make this sequel a wee bit more approachable, for instance by panning the camera in the direction of activated switches, so you'll have some clue how your actions are affecting the world. Despite that, the game will still be rather brutally difficult, as revealed in an interview with USGamer - who also have the first screenshots of the game.

"The difficult gameplay in retro games, I want to keep that," Nigoro's Takumi Naramura said in the interview, "and keep that kind of fun – you grind away at your game, and once you're able to clear something, you feel a real sense of satisfaction. I want to keep that feeling. I'm not going to get rid of that. But we're thinking about how to evolve other parts of the game."

It's early days for the game; the only thing set in stone is the protagonist, who will pick up the mantle (and by mantle I mean whip) from her father. We'll doubtless hear more over the coming months, but for now - woo-hoo - more La-Mulana is on the way.

This article originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 256.

Prison Architect has sold 124,691 copies and made a gross revenue of £2,679,730 ($4,031,925). If you’re one of the remaining major videogame publishers, that’s pocket change, but if you’re Introversion it’s more money in ten months of alpha sales than your previous four games made in over 12 years. If you’re Chris Delay, the game’s lead designer and programmer, it’s the opportunity to start a family. And if you’re the three founders - Chris, plus college friends Mark Morris and Tom Arundel - it’s the difference between being comfortably wealthy and living in fear of spending time in a real prison.

“Tom was convinced that we were going to go to jail,” says Chris. “He was convinced that we were going to go to jail because he thought that for most of 2010 we’d been trading insolvently, which means trading knowing that there’s no chance you’re going to survive.”

Prison Architect is the game that saved Introversion, one of gaming’s most interesting and longest-serving indie developers, but if you’re a gamer then it also represents a bunch of other, similarly excellent things.

It’s intensely British, like all of Introversion’s games. This time, it’s a continuation of what Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog were doing in the ‘90s, crafting darkly funny management games like Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital.

It’s proof that alpha funding can work, benefitting everyone involved by giving Introversion the money they need to make the game, and letting players be a part of that process from an early stage.

And it’s another example of how videogames are at their most exciting when they put control in the player’s hands. Prison Architect will have a story-driven campaign mode, but at its heart is a rich, Dwarf Fortressinspired simulation of tiny digital men, their needs, their grisly crimes, and even their families.



In its alpha state, that campaign mode hasn’t been added yet. Play the game today and you’ll begin instead with an open field and a ticking clock counting down to the arrival of your first batch of prisoners. Before they arrive, it would be prudent if you had built them a holding cell, using the few starting materials and handful of workers provided.

Once they arrive, your next steps present themselves naturally. People need go to the toilet and shower, forexample, so you’d better place those things. You’d better place a water pump too and lay the pipes for that. Also, people need to eat, don’t they? So you’d better build a cafeteria and stock it with benches and tables, and create a kitchen stocked with ovens and chefs.

And since some of the people in your prison are murderers, you should hurry to place some locked doors on that kitchen, and hire guards to patrol the cafeteria to stop your captives from fashioning shivs out of sporks (shorks). And also, wait, they need to sleep, so some beds are needed, and probably cells for privacy, and solitary confinement for punishment.

And suddenly it’s four hours later, and the 150 prisoners now trapped within the walls of your failing prison are rioting, and escaping, and you’re broke, and you can’t quite remember how it all went so wrong. So you start again, and vow this time to do it all better.

Or instead, maybe you open Steam Workshop and download one of the hundreds of prisons built by other resourceful players, to see how it’s done. You install huge, sprawling mega-prisons, and prisons in the shape of the FTL spaceship, a space invader, and the Tower of London. There’s a vast amount of content here, and even with the game incomplete, a tremendously dedicated community.



“When people buy into an alpha now, it’s questionable as to whether they’re even buying the game itself or whether they’re buying into a process: to see a game be developed and be a part of that,” says Chris.

“For me, with DayZ, I was there in the beginning. Back in those days, it was updating every week, and it was extremely exciting because there was all this new stuff going in all the time, really big game-changing stuff. I wanted it to be like that for Prison Architect: that every update would add something big and meaty that would make you reconsider the game again, like ‘I’m going to build a whole new prison as a result of this because the whole game has changed again.’”

Steam Workshop support came in alpha version 8, released March 20, alongside a new planning mode. Alpha 9, released April 24, brought the ability to put your prisoners to work in your laundry, kitchen or workshop. May 30’s Alpha 10 added riots and riot guards, and June 28’s Alpha 11 added hearses, allowed prisoners’ sentences to end - which I’m sure they appreciate - and introduced native support for generating timelapse videos.

Looking at these monthly updates stretched out behind and in front of the game, you quickly get a sense of how big a project Prison Architect is. As Chris and I talk about the issues that surround the game - from its simulation and its politics - I also quickly get a sense of how difficult the project is. It’s an example of an indie developer tackling a huge, unexplored mountain, of the sort mainstream development might find too risky to scale.

The monthly update schedule means that by the time you read this, Alpha 12 will have been released. Chris isn’t shy about talking about Prison Architect’s future.

“I’m working on contraband and stealing contraband from around the prison,” he starts. “Gary’s working on dogs and dog handlers. The idea is, because there’s going to be a lot more contraband floating around the prison, dogs are going to be there, primarily detecting narcotics and booze and poisons and anything that can’t be detected by a metal detector.”



A lot of the game’s development works this way: every system is interdependent, so long-requested features sometimes take a backseat until the groundwork has been set.

“We actually have escape tunnels working right now,” says Chris. “A few prisoners can dig escape tunnels. They intelligently dig around buildings, and if two prisoners are digging, they join up and form one master tunnel digging out, Great Escape-style. But we’ve never put it in the game because there was no way for the player to deal with it.”
Dogs are the way to deal with escape tunnels, too. “Dogs on patrol around the edge of the prison will bark and scratch at the floor when they walk over an escape tunnel.”
The Great Escape reference is significant. Prison Architect isn’t aiming to simulate a real-world prison, but the idea of prisons as they exist in the public consciousness. That means it’s not really set in America, despite the iconic orange jumpsuits, and it means that tunnelling is a problem, when real prisons have steel re-inforced walls that make tunnelling impossible.

“As soon as we say ‘the game is set in America’ or ‘this prison is in Scandinavia’ or ‘this is a British prison’, we just create all these false connections of what it should be like that we’re not really interested in creating,” says Chris.

This doesn’t necessarily mean cutting features entirely, but it does mean making sure those features are applicable across cultures, like the game’s treatment of gangs. “Our gangs are like street-punk gangs. The American systems have got vast organisations. The Aryan Brotherhood was such a big gang at one point that they managed to arrange to have a whole bunch of other Aryan Brotherhood senior members transferred to the same jail temporarily, and they had seniorlevel board meetings. I don’t think this exists in British jails.

“If you go to South American jails, they’re completely different again - they’re heavily into drug cartels, very violent and often have huge areas of the jail that are no-go areas for the guards and staff and are self-policed. They’re almost like a rough neighbourhood, but the guards would never dare go in because it’s just too dangerous.” Setting it in a nowhereland allows Chris and the team to dig their own tunnel around some of the setting’s politically dangerous terrain. “In the very first trailer we ever did, we only had one prisoner sprite, and he was white. Somebody posted a comment saying, ‘I see there are no black prisoners and no black guards. No surprise that a bunch of white guys from Britain would be utterly racist in their presentation of prisons.’” Avoiding geographical ties - and even a specific time period - makes it easier to be ambiguous about these other issues.

The solution was to make skin colour random for the entire population, but it wasn’t an easy decision. “We obviously had a discussion of, ‘are we going to model the percentages of each racial group that’ll be in the jail, because that would be realistic?’ No, I don’t think so. Even though it is based on reality, it’s still potentially racist to do that. And for what? You’ve gained no gameplay mechanic for doing that.”



Even by sidestepping contentious issues like race, and darker material like prison rape, Prison Architect has to walk a fine line in how it balances its simulation. Not everyone’s idea of prison is the same, and there’s a difference between the statistical realities of incarceration, and the role plays in people’s ideology. As an example: there are a lot of studies which detail how best to reform prisoners, but not everyone agrees that prisoners should be reformed.

Speaking to Chris, it’s clear that he’s read a lot of those studies, and a lot about prisons around the world and throughout history. It’s also clear that he has his own worldview, even as he fights to make sure the game allows multiple playstyles.

“We have this sort of long-standing aim to make it possible to have a right-wing prison,” says Chris. “Not because we’re right-wing. Our game is ridiculously left-wing at the moment, because at the moment the way to win is to satisfy your prisoners’ needs, which is a profoundly leftie view on how prisons should operate.

“So you should be able to run a prison whereby the punishments for anything can be turned up to 11 and be ridiculously over-the-top, so even complaining gets you an hour in solitary. Then, once you’ve had your hour in solitary, you should be suppressed for a whole day. You’re under the power of the prison, and you don’t have the will to fight back for at least a day or so, and the more extensive your punishment regime, the more that will happen.”

Prison Architect isn’t set anywhere specific, but there should also be room within the simulation to create real styles of prison. “You’ll be able to build American-style supermax prisons. American supermax prisons are basically like your worst nightmare, whereby you spend about twenty-three hours in your cell every day and you get about an hour of exercise and zero human contact. Just basically hellish, horrible places, and we should be able to make prisons like that in Prison Architect as a valid strategy.”



The way to do that is through a planned Civilization-style scoring system. When each of your prisons comes to an end you’ll be presented with a set of stats about how well you did: simple numbers like how many prisoners you held, but ultimately also how strongly you punished your prisoners, how well you protected society by stopping them from escaping, and how well you reformed them by discouraging them from re-offending upon release.

Things will work a little differently in the game’s campaign, where the simulation at its core remains the same, but the story aims to explore more specific political issues.

Chris doesn’t want to spoil the story, but he does offer up one example. “We have a chapter where a politician decides that he would like to run an experiment. He says to you that you should try and create a full reform prison where budget is no object. Assuming money was no factor, how much could you actually do with a reform prison? How well you do at that level has repercussions in the story.

“That’s where we’re going to try and deal with the really hairy issues head on. And then when people come to play the sandbox, we’re hoping that we will have seeded their mind a little bit with some of the moral issues behind each of the decisions they might make. We’ll let the player build an execution chamber in the sandbox, and I’ve no doubt that people are going to build vast execution prisons, but I don’t really have a problem with that.”
The harder part of balancing the game is making sure that no single strategy overpowers everything else: both because of the ideological message that would send, and because that min-maxing playstyle can discourage players from being creative with their designs.
Right now, in alpha, the optimum strategy tends to change with each new version. “Everybody’s got really into workshops,” says Chris. “They generate so much money, they keep your prisoners happy, and eventually they’ll also give skills to your prisoners as well. So they’re all good.”

This is one of the reasons why the revised contraband system is coming next. “Turn on the contraband overlay and you find that there are hacksaws and hammers and escape tools in the workshops in abundance, and that you can’t possibly stop your prisoners from stealing them all, so you’ll have that trade-off,” says Chris. “If you want to have an enormous prison workshop, you’ll have to have a corresponding enormous security setup to stop the proliferation of tools and the digging of escape tunnels.”

If you do decide to build that enormous security setup, with metal detectors, dogs, and random searches, it will come with its own downsides. “More metal detectors and more dogs and more searches will piss off your prisoners and result in more trouble, so there’s always going to be upward and downward pressure, and it should self-balance as a result.”



If all the talk of political ideology, race and simulation bias sounds grown-up, it’s because Chris and Introversion are grown-ups. The game balances its dark subject matter with the cuteness of its sprites, and some humour. But for all the times when we think of indie development as being scrappy and punk - that Hotline Miami model of sloppy provocation - it’s striking that Introversion have been doing this for almost 15 years. They are nearer to 40 than they are to their 20s. Two of the founders have children. They have mortgages.

It’s taken a long time, then, but it’s heartening that Prison Architect is Introversion’s break-out game. Both because I’m talking to Chris from his home office and not a cell, but also because it means that indie development - the developers, the movement, the games themselves - are sustainable.

It’s worrisome to consider how close Introversion came to collapsing. “When we were getting ready to close up and declare bankruptcy, I did actually apply for jobs at other games companies,” says Chris.

“I applied to Ninja Theory. Alas, I think I’m unemployable. I think they wrote a letter to me saying, ‘although you’ve written a few indie games, we don’t see how you’re going to work in this big team.’ I think they were probably right to be honest. I’m 35 now, the last time I had an actual job at a proper company I was 21. “Thankfully they said no, and that was when I decided I was going to stick it out with Introversion.”

This was in 2010. Development on Prison Architect started in September that year.

There might be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is certainly such a thing as free lunchtime entertainment. Over the following pages you’ll find a list of the best free indie games on PC – from 20-minute diversions to weekend-consuming, endlessly-expanded strategy epics.

All of the games on this list are free in their entirety. That means no microtransaction-supported free-toplay games and no shareware. We’ve also excluded ‘pay what you want’ games on the basis that developers who give you the ability to chip-in would probably like you to consider doing that. That said, there are always exceptions and you’ll find games on this list that sit in a grey area – normally where there’s a substantial free version with the option of also buying an upgraded paid edition. In these cases, we’ve gone with our hearts. Which is to say that we argued about it for hours.

Once we’d assembled our longlist we all voted for the games we liked the most and tallied up the scores to produce the top 50. The top games are the ones that have had the biggest impact on us, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find gems further down the list.

50. Moonbase Alpha

Developer: NASA
Link: www.bit.ly/mbaseg



Tom: Staying alive on the moon is a logistical nightmare, as Moonbase Alpha’s publishers, NASA, know only too well. As an astronaut founding the first lunar structure, you and up to five friends must deal with the aftermath of a meteor strike that’s knocked out millions of dollars worth of sensitive space kit. A perfectly good reason to ride around in a fancy lunar bus, build your own repair robots and utilise the low gravity to perform huge, slow-motion chest bumps when things go right. You’re timed, and awarded points based on the efficiency of your repairs, so good teamwork is essential if you’re after good leaderboard standing.

49. Ending

Developer: RobotAcid
Link: www.bit.ly/14NfIAz



Chris: You move a single icon in on an grid, solving tile-based combat challenges to progress to the next stage. What makes Ending stand out from innumerable other puzzle games is its randomly-generated roguelike mode, where you explore a dungeon that works on the same principle.

48. UnReal World

Developer: Enormous Elk
Link: www.unrealworld.fi



Graham: Roguelikes are traditionally about delving into mysterious dungeons in search of treasure. You can play UnReal World that way, or you can play it as a realistic hermit-simulator. It’s set in ancient Finland, so you’re as likely to die of cold and starvation as from attacking enemies. So fish, hunt, and practise your hideworking, and hope you can survive the long winter.

47. The Republia Times

Developer: Dukope
Link: www.dukope.com



Chris: You’re the editor of a newspaper in a totalitarian state. Each day you must choose which stories to run and how much space to give them, impacting your paper’s popularity and the government’s approval with the general populace. Smart, cynical, and there’s a great twist near the end.

46. Space Funeral

Developer: TheCatamites
Link: www.bit.ly/spacefuneral



Phil: You can learn a lot about this game from its opening menu, which takes the obvious RPG Maker buttons – New, Load and Quit – and replaces them with the less comfortingly familiar ‘BLOOD’, ‘BLOOD’, and ‘BLOOD’. You play Phillip, a depressed boy, who, with the help of his trusty Leg Horse (a pile of severed limbs), cries his way through a thoroughly caustic and deliberately unpleasant JRPG pastiche.

45. Space Station 13

Developer: Something Awful
Link: www.bit.ly/station13



Tom: Everyone has a role to play in this anarchic multiplayer space-disaster sim. As the ship’s AI, or the captain, police officer or engineer, you’ll have to complete your duties to stop the station from falling into chaos, but you might just be given a traitor role and told to assassinate the captain, or spawn as an alien monster. Even before these antagonists are introduced, the requirement for mass cooperation between internet strangers creates an entertaining state of utter shambles. Expect to explode. A lot.

44. Realistic Summer Sports Simulator

Developer: Crackerblocks
Link: www.bit.ly/rssports



Phil: Each of RSSS’s 15 minigames is a selfcontained challenge of QWOP-like flailing (see 60). You must click and drag on your athlete to score in the crude 2D representations of each sport. What do you click? Where do you drag? RSSS never tells you, leaving your experimentation to collide with its basic physics. People, horses and scenery go flying, and every failure is ridiculous enough to raise a laugh. But beyond the basic comedy lies a proper challenge, each event a satisfyingly tricky test of precision and patience.

43. Meat Boy

Developer: Team Meat
Link: www.bit.ly/pcgmeatboy



Chris: It lacks its paid-for older brother’s flashier features, but the original Meat Boy is a chunk of PC platforming history. The series’ fantastic controls – at once crisp and squishy, ping-ponging Meat Boy bloodily off the environment with each leap and slide – got their start here, and the first set of vertically-scrolling levels offer a stiff challenge. Very much worth upgrading to Super Meat Boy once you’re done.

42. flOw

Developer: Jenova Chen
Link: www.bit.ly/flowgame



Tom: flOw’s minimalist appeal and dynamically adjusting difficulty curve has hooked hundreds of thousands. Use the mouse to guide a creature through an evolutionary mire, gobbling up smaller animals to grow, and hitting red blobs to swim deeper. When you eat, you evolve, but you can see large predators moving through the gloom on the levels below, waiting to swallow you whole. Serene yet addictive.

41. Kingdom of Loathing

Developer: Asymmetric Publications
Link: www.bit.ly/11IycEl



Tom: Scratch all the layers of polish and visual fluff away from your favourite RPG, and you’ll find Kingdom of Loathing underneath. You create a stick-man hero and spend daily adventuring points to raid sketched-out dungeons, kill strange monsters and level up. Your actions resolve instantly, so this is a game about making decisions rather than honing twitch skills. An irreverent sense of humour keeps the grind from getting boring. Be a Disco Bandit! Fight Sinister Fudge Wizards with your Disco Ball! It’s a winning formula.



40. QWOP

Developer: Bennett Foddy
Link: www.foddy.net/Athletics.html



Graham: QWOP is named after the keys you use to control it: QW to pump your sprinter’s thighs, OP to arc his calves. The experience is what I imagine it’s like to be an alien placed inside a robotic humansuit, pulling levers to manoeuvre the appendages. The result on screen is simultaneously tense and hilarious. One leg stretches out, the other hops pathetically, the runner’s balance starts to slowly topple, keys are hammered in an attempt to try to return upright, and then it’s over. Your score: 1.4 metres.

39. Slave of God

Developer: Increpare
Link: www.bit.ly/slaveofgod



Graham: Increpare is better known for his puzzle games, but this neon, fuzzy, abstract club night hits you in different places by capturing the highs and lows of a night out. The dancefloor is full of spinning, elbowy forms; join them, and you might get drawn into the pull of another reveller, but you’ll only ever end up alone. Head to the club’s toilets, and you’ll start peeing on the floor before you even reach them.

We bumped into Slave of God in a club back in January. Graham, Chris and Marsh proceeded to chat about it in podcast form here.

38. Companion

Developer: Roburky
Link: www.bit.ly/135b7Ke



Graham: You’re a square floating in a black void, and there are three types of objects in the environment: stars, which stick to you; cuboid objects which do nothing, and jellyfish-like creatures which move towards you and electrocute you on contact. Then, very quickly, you meet another square like you, only smaller. It’s sleeping. You poke at it, and it wakes up – and hoots at you. Hello! He then follows you around, tooting curiously at the objects you find, and experimentally butting at them. Companion is a fiveminute experiment – and a successful demonstration – of how to build a relationship between a player and an NPC.

37. Robot Unicorn Attack

Developer: Adult Swim Games
Link: www.bit.ly/ruattack



Graham: A stylishly camp auto-running game about a robot unicorn leaping across gaps and listening to the Erasure song ‘Always’ on repeat. If that doesn’t make you want to play it, I definitely don’t wanna be with you / or make believe with you / or live in harmony, harmony, oh love.

36. Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story

Developer: Christine Love
Link: www.bit.ly/aintyourstory



Phil: A visual novel in which you play a high-school teacher in the year 2027. Given access to the private messages of your class’s social network, you become increasingly involved with their lives and relationships. It’s a thoughtful exploration of privacy, with a surprising conclusion.

35. Facade

Developer: Procedural Arts
Link: www.bit.ly/12IXnRT



Tom: This one-scene interactive play casts you as sole guest at the most awkward party imaginable. Your hosts, Grace and Trip, are on the verge of marital breakup and can’t help but use you to snipe at each other’s flaws. A wobbly but fascinating study of social awkwardness.

34. Warsow

Developer: Chasseur De Bots
Link: www.warsow.net



Phil: This cartoony FPS takes its cues from the old school. That means twitch combat and the opportunity to boast skill, speed and precision. It’s movement system steals from the best – Quake and Unreal Tournament – to create an online shooter that offers both deathmatch and race servers. Master the simple but versatile control scheme and you’ll be circle, strafe, wall and rocket-jumping your way past lasers, bullets and explosives. But don’t let the high skill skybox put you off – Warsow is purely transitory arcade action. There’s no progression or tracking, and the bots and varied modes mean that you can just jump in, jump around and get fragging.

33. Slender: The Eight Pages

Developer: Parsec Productions
Link: www.bit.ly/11IF7NE



Rich: Collect eight pages attached to stuff in some woods while a prick in a suit stands around and looks at you. It doesn’t sound that scary, but the internet’s own Slenderman is a powerfully creepy kind of eight-foot bastard. Your biggest roadblock to collecting all the pages is your own fear.

We chronicled our first encounter with Slender Man here, before returning for more long-armed scares a few months later.

32. Hide

Developer: Andrew Shouldice
Link: www.bit.ly/pcg-hide



Chris: This indie horror game runs at a tiny resolution and is upscaled to provide a disorientating, monochrome experience. You hunt through a winter wilderness while being chased by mysterious, distant flashlights. Similar to Slender, Hide stands out through its presentation and restraint. There’s no silly-looking monster to bump into, it’s all atmosphere and perseverance.

31. Desktop Tower Defence

Developer: Paul Preece
Link: www.bit.ly/desktoptower



Tom: A moreish maze-building game that turns a tiny patch of desk into a warzone. Increasingly powerful creeps swarm in from the left. Slow them with ice rays, blast them with missiles and craft a long intestinal catacomb of death out of gun turrets to ensnare and destroy them.



30. Hexagon

Developer: Terry Cavanagh
Link: www.bit.ly/pcg239-6



Chris: Hexagon is essentially Super Hexagon’s Hexagon mode, in its entirety, for free. The premise is incredibly simple: you rotate an arrow around a circle and try to thread a path through a pulsing neon hexagonal maze. As an exercise in focus, reflexes and pattern recognition, it’s every other arcade game triple-distilled: a quick, high-yield dose of flashing lights, pounding music and inevitable crushing failure.

29. Red Rogue

Developer: Aaron Steed & Nathan Gallardo
Link: www.redrogue.net



Phil: This side-scrolling action roguelike posits that anyone who delves into a dungeon full of monsters is more than a little unhinged. Red Rogue’s heroine feels like the most monstrous thing in the game’s randomly generated levels. It’s the way she and her minion calmly despatch imps: blood spurting across the otherwise monochrome rooms. That feeling can easily slip into overconfidence. Whether it’s forgetting to scan for traps or making a poor deal with a chaos god, careless decisions are quickly punished.

28. Samorost

Developer: Amanita Design
Link: www.bit.ly/1dqU4Uy



Graham: Samorost and its sequel are adventure games as Moomin creator Tove Jansson might have made them. Its patchwork art is made out of photographs of logs, plants, old cans; its white, handanimated main character speaks in whoops and illustrations; and it all takes place on asteroids in space. With no inventory, it’s your job to solve puzzles by poking and prodding this world to reveal charming animations. Its creator went on to make the paid-for point-and-click Machinarium, but I prefer this.

27. Imscared

Developer: Ivan Zanotti
Link: www.bit.ly/imscared



Chris: An inventive horror game that takes over a folder in your hard drive. Every time you boot it up it will place you somewhere new, and somewhere scarier. It only takes half an hour to complete, and the standout moment is a puzzle sequence that remixes the basic item-collecting of Slender and accelerates it over a couple of frantic minutes spent being chased around in circles in an underground carpark.

We were, understandably, a bit scared upon first discovering Imscared back in 2012.

26. GIRP

Developer: Bennett Foddy
Link: www.bit.ly/GiRP



Chris: It’s just as easy to fail at as QWOP, but I find GIRP gentler somehow. You climb a rockface (and avoid falling into the sea) by holding down various keys on your keyboard to indicate where to place your climber’s flailing hands. Let go, and he lets go – turning the game into a kind of small-scale Twister – or full-scale Twister, if you’re lucky enough to get to play it on a set of rejigged dance mats.

25. Diaspora: Shattered Armistice

Developer: Diaspora Dev Team
Link: www.diaspora.hard-light.net



Phil: A standalone FreeSpace 2 mod set in the Battlestar Galactica universe, Diaspora dispenses with heavy-handed real-world allegory in favour of recreating the show’s most iconic and exciting space dogfights. Good choice, modders! As a hotheaded Viper pilot, you battle toasters, pull 180 spins, and ‘come in hot’. The presentation is fantastic, and the voice acting solid, but it’s the scale of battles that sells the experience. Your first encounter with a Cylon Baseship feels as overwhelming and dangerous as the show suggests it should.

24. One Chance

Developer: Awkward Silence Games
Link: www.bit.ly/1chancegame




Chris: This browser game uses cookies to prevent you from ever replaying it: you’ve quite literally got one chance to see this brief point-and-click adventure through to the end. It’s set in a future where all life on Earth will be extinguished in six days: what you choose to do, who you choose to spend time with, and whether you accept your fate or try to fight it are the questions you’re asked to answer. What could be a cheap gimmick is actually very effective: it’s rare that a game asks you to really live with your decisions.

23. Toribash

Developer: Toribash Team
Link: www.toribash.com



Graham: This turn-based, physics-driven fighting game arrived in the PCG office in 2006. We would crowd around a single PC to watch each other flail, directing limbs individually in a hopeless attempt to connect a punch. Search YouTube today and you’ll find slickly edited montages of players performing the most absurd tricks, but it’s no less fun to fumble and feel your way towards some gory end.

22. SCP: Containment Breach

Developer: SCP CB Team
Link: www.scpcbgame.com



Rich: Seen in the cold light of day, your main antagonist – a bulbous white Tellytubby of a thing – couldn’t frighten a particularly frightened child. But put it in an endless succession of gloomy rooms and its Tinky-Winky arms suddenly look like they could snap your neck in a second, its Po-face becomes a scary mess of yonic slashes and sick-green eyes. Containment Breach’s power is doubled by drawing on the SCP mythos: a set of invented (or are they?) internet stories about horrors and monsters locked up by a shadowy organisation. The terror-Tellytubby is SCP- 173, and later versions of the game have added more monsters.

21. Super Crate Box

Developer: Vlambeer
Link: www.supercratebox.com



Graham: A single screen of platforms, with a steady stream of monsters pouring in at the top. A crate appears. Grab the weapon inside. Collect as many crates as possible to reach high scores, but each crate gives you a new weapon, and each weapon forces you to adapt your tactics.



20. OpenTTD

Developer: OpenTTD
Link: www.openttd.org



Graham: Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a classic of the management genre, created by Chris Sawyer before he discovered rollercoasters. This open source recreation was built by and for those who would rather vomit over an improperly balanced spreadsheet than a stick of candyfloss. One of the best, and most frequently updated, indie strategy games ever made.

19. Brogue

Developer: Brian Walker
Link: www.bit.ly/brogue-game



Graham: It simplifies roguelike controls by using the mouse, but it’s the monkeys that made me love it. Free them from their goblin captors, and the little thieves become your friends, following you on your adventure until you drink the wrong potion and teleport yourself over a cliff.

Graham wrote many more words about Why He Loves Brogue (not to mention Brogue's monkeys) here.

18. Nitronic Rush

Developer: Team Nitronic
Link: www.nitronic-rush.com



Chris: Initially a university project by students at DigiPen, Nitronic Rush is an arcade racing game inspired by Tron, WipeOut, and F-Zero. You drive a transforming virtual future-car in a twisting neon city, and a series of jet engines mounted around the chassis enable you to twist, airbreak, spin and even fly, limited only by your vehiclefs heat level. The gamefs fantastic presentation enables it to compete with the best arcade racers on the PC, if you ask me . and Team Nitronic are clearly having more fun with the format than most of their peers. A Kickstarted successor, Distance, is due later in the year.

We made Nitronic Rush one of our Free Games for the New Year way back in 2011.

17. Alien Swarm

Developer: Valve
Link: www.bit.ly/swarmgame



Rich: Valve’s four-player arena game has a deep understanding of the kind of cooperative interaction that makes you love, hate, love, and then really hate your friends in the space of a 20 minute mission. It’s chest-burstingly full of opportunities for both heroism and public failure.

It turns out Tom Francis wrote a lot of words about Alien Swarm, including a touching tale of heroics, a guide to playing the game in first-person, and an interview with Valve revealing why it was released for free in the first place.

16. ZangbandTK

Developer: Tim Baker
Link: www.zangband.org



Graham: Released in 1990, Angband was a traditional roguelike – ASCII graphics, permadeath, fantasy setting. It begat Zangband, based on Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber series, and which in turn begat ZangbandTk, which added a graphical interface, sound effects, and other things to make the game playable by human minds. A great starting point.

15. Digital: A Love Story

Developer: Christine Love
Link: www.bit.ly/15nobck



Phil: Part visual novel, part investigative adventure, Digital returns you to the world of the late ’80s internet. You dial up BBSes, message their users and hunt through their forums. All to understand the mysterious disappearance of a girl who sent you poetry.

14. TrackMania

Developer: Nadeo
Link: www.trackmaniaforever.com



Graham: Your first time around any of the user-created tracks is a minutes-long exercise in failure: you’ll round the first corner and fall down a pit you had no way of seeing. Instant restarts are a salve for frustration, and it’s not long before you know when to hit the accelerator hard, when to prepare for a jump, when to bank hard left when sailing through the air. After that, it’s all about becoming the fastest in the world.

13. Zineth

Developer: Arcane Kids
Link: www.bit.ly/zinethgame



Phil: A high-speed skating game that’s somehow more stylistic and exaggerated than Jet Set Radio. There are missions to complete, secrets to uncover and a bizarre Twitter obsession to ponder. But all are distractions next to the effortlessly cool feeling of building momentum through the weird cel-shaded city. You can grind, slide and wall-ride your way to improbable speeds, using the ever increasing velocity to launch yourself towards the game’s ultimate goal. For reference: the game’s ultimate goal is skating to the moon.

12. Battle for Wesnoth

Developer: Battle for Wesnoth
Link: www.wesnoth.org



Chris: This is a massive fantasy turnbased strategy game developed, run, and continually expanded by a dedicated community. Battle for Wesnoth is one of my favourite netbook games because there are so many campaigns that you’ll basically never run out of things to do – and the turn-based pace is perfect for short sessions or gaming in places where you can’t use a mouse. Extensive guides for creating your own races, campaigns and maps make it easy to shift from player to developer, too.

11. FreeCiv

Developer: FreeCiv Community
Link: www.bit.ly/16DE1zd



Rich: It’s Civ, right, but it’s free. Oh, if only the developers had thought of a way to express that in a name. We’ll just have to make do with a version of the classic turn-based strategy game that we can play in our browsers thanks to the witchcraft of HTML 5. There’s an installable version, too, and although FreeCiv doesn’t have the glitz or polish of Civ III and onwards, it’s still tapped into that voodoo current of compulsion.



10. Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden

Developer: Tales of Game's
Link: www.talesofgames.com



Rich: The best freeware JRPG about ex-NBA basketballer Charles Barkley and his flight from an evil Michael Jordan in Neo New York after he performed an illegal chaos dunk that caused the post- Cyberpocalypse I’ve ever played. The combat is acceptable, but it was the freewheeling funnies that kept me playing. The creators had a shared love of taking the piss out of indie games ultrareverential to SNES-era JRPGs, and made their own game – but instead of filling it with earnest heroes and bad bishonen, they used sewer-dwelling poet furries, the giant floating head of ghost Bill Cosby, and a monster made entirely of sugar.

You should play Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden.

9. Canabalt

Developer: Adam Atomic
Link: www.bit.ly/16Dolf6



Chris: The game that invented the endless runner, and also the game that proved that it is impossible to jump through a window if you are actually trying to do it. I love Canabalt for its atmospheric, low-key sci-fi visuals and Danny Baranowski’s amazing soundtrack.

Rich: Those pissing windows, man.

8. Stealth Bastard

Developer: Curve Studios
Link: www.stealthbastard.com



Phil: It’s a stealth game: there are traps to avoid, patrols to evade, shadows to cling to and terminals to hack. But Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole repurposes these genre staples to neatly fit into a 2D puzzle platformer. Time spent waiting is kept to a minimum. Instead, you’re encouraged to sneak, leap and clamber through the darkness, activating switches and buttons to progress through the intricately moving levels. The expanded, money-costing Deluxe version has overtaken the majority of the game’s website, but you can still access the original through a tiny link in the bottom corner of the page.

7. Cave Story

Developer: Doukutsu Monogatari
Link: www.bit.ly/12CJrYX



Rich: The sheer size still impresses. It’s a vast, shooty platformer in the Metroid vein, and stands out for having been developed in one Japanese man’s spare time over five years. Paid-for versions have had their graphics retooled, but the original, free version is just as tight and rewarding.

6. N 2.0

Developer: Metanet Software
Link: www.bit.ly/17fdpXq



Graham: It’s all about the replays. After hundreds of attempts in which your walljumping ninja is sliced by lasers, burst by missiles and crushed by thwomps, you get a replay of your successful run to the level exit, in which you seem to dodge each threat with psychic reflexes. There are hundreds of levels, and thus hundreds of opportunities to feel so satisfied.

5. Neptune's Pride

Developer: Iron Helmet
Link: www.bit.ly/neptunep



Rich: Or, How To End A Friendship In One Easy Strategy Game. The action is simple: move ships to conquer planets, then build an economy on those planets. The glacial pace ensures that as you set nefarious plans in motion against your best friend, they have hours to marvel at your cruelty.

We like Neptune's Pride so much we made it our Webgame of the Year back in 2010.

4. Dwarf Fortress

Developer: Bay 12 Games
Link: www.bit.ly/10VSmYQ



Graham: Climbing DF’s mountain of menu madness means a weekend of reading guides and scratching your head, but once you’ve scaled its ASCII peaks, the world’s most complex simulation game stretches out in front of you towards the horizon of PC gaming. After ten years of development, the game generates religions, political histories, entire societies, and then challenges you to build and manage a thriving underground city, starting with seven depressed, alcoholic dwarves and a few supplies. You’re as likely to starve to death as you are to be trampled by wild elephants, and you’ll definitely fail, but you’ll have fun dying.

You've read the tale of how seven drunks opened a portal to Hell, right? Well if you haven't, go do that here.

3. Masq

Developer: Alteraction
Link: www.alteraction.com



Graham: When you complete a playthrough, you get half a dozen images showing other scenes you might have missed. In the 15 minutes it took you to reach an ending, you attempted to keep your fashion design company solvent, solve your best friend’s murder, and resolve some tension with your wife. You probably failed at all of those. But then, in among those frames at the end, is a shot of you tossing a frisbee for a young kid on a beach. A kid? You didn’t even meet a kid. Why are you playing with him, and how do you get to that beach? You go back and try again... and again, each time stumbling down new branches of Masq’s seedy, soap opera world.

2. Gravity Bone

Developer: Blendo Games
Link: www.blendogames.com



Graham: We often condemn linear games, but Gravity Bone makes it obvious that all we crave is more interesting worlds and stories to be pulled through. It communicates your instructions through posters and notes, it populates its colourful world with blockheaded spies and bossa nova-style, and its use of ultrashort flashback vignettes is structurally more interesting than anything most mainstream games even attempt.

Tom: Using the Quake 2 engine was an inspired move, removing the loading zones that might scupper the sporadic smashcuts that make Gravity Bone so pacey and exciting. The use of filmic rhythms and references show that ‘cinematic’ needn’t be a dirty word in games.

1. Spelunky

Developer: Mossmouth
Link: www.spelunkyworld.com/original.html



Graham: By crossbreeding roguelikes and platformers, Spelunky solves longstanding problems with both genres. The clear graphics and controls of its platforming forebears make the traditionally awkward, ASCII-graphics roguelike genre easy to understand, while the random level generation of its Rogue heritage prevent Spelunky’s platform dungeons from ever becoming boring or predictable. The result is a game that looks superficially like Mario, but where playing it is a long series of meaningful choices, and where a wasted bomb can be the difference between finding the fabled city of gold and being hurled over a cliff by an angry yeti.

Phil: It’s the combination of difficult platforming, random level generation, and a reliable ruleset that makes Spelunky one of the few roguelikes where death isn’t just an educational experience, but an inventive and funny one too. It’s not just that an angry yeti can throw you off a cliff; it’s that afterwards, you can land next to even an angrier shopkeeper, who’s still pissed off about an incident earlier in the game when a stolen statue triggered a boulder that crushed his friend’s shop. He’ll either shotgun you to death or erratically plunge into the abyss himself. If – by sheer luck of interweaving game systems – you do survive, seconds later you’ll mistime a jump and land in a pit of spikes. Because Spelunky.

Tom: Spelunky’s flair for the unpredictable refuses to fade after hundreds and deaths. The level generation formula will always throw up tricky new formations, its denizens will spawn in new configurations. That bat you’ve dodged hundreds of times before can kill you on the 101st attempt. Spelunky is here to mess you up, and it will continue to mess you up forever. Experience helps, of course. You might start to recognise dangerous set-ups that you’d once try and blunder through, but when total mastery isn’t an option, you can only fall back on your wits. That’s the key to Spelunky’s brilliance. It never stops being interesting. You’re always improvising, making plans, and getting killed trying to outwit a goddamn bat.

Chris: The way Spelunky uses slapstick to salve the frustration of an accidental death is my favourite thing about it. Failure is an integral part of roguelike design, and finding a way to turn it into a source of fun feels like the final piece of the puzzle.

Graham: If Tom Francis was still here, he’d talk about his hours-long pursuit of the city of gold, and how he eventually found it. I have played Spelunky for as long as Tom, and I haven’t found it. I haven’t even completed the game, even though I can now reach the final boss with hardly a wrong-placed rope along the way. If a game can hold my attention for so long without that ultimate gratification, I think that’s a pretty good sign.

Tom Francis went on a quest to discover Spelunky's mythical City of Gold. Follow the link to discover how he got on.

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, a game that wanted to play its cards, right? Too bad the definition of insanity turned out to be 'trying to get away with that pre-internet'.

Blizzard may be taking the gaming world by storm right now with its World of Warcraft CCG Hearthstone (and before anyone says anything, no, I haven't got a code yet either), but that's far from the first attempt to merge worlds and cards. Obviously. There was Scrolls only a few months back, for starters. Several Magic: The Gathering games. EA's Battle Forge. A few more. Go back to 2000 though, and there was this little action game/CCG hybrid, which I would snarkily refer to as Sanity: Pointless Subtitle if every screen in the actual game didn't make it clear that its true name is simply "Aiken's Artifact".

Oh, and its big selling point was "Starring Ice-T".

And Monolith wondered why it didn't sell...



I'll be honest, I'd forgotten how strange this game was. The basic idea was to merge a kind of action-RPG style with collectible cards, with a few given away for free and (if I remember correctly) plans for booster packs that would keep the multiplayer fresh and interesting until the end of time. This being a 3D action game from 2000 though, with the internet still a novelty to most, that was a thing that Was Never Going To Happen. In the end, creators Monolith couldn't even be bothered to patch it properly, and Sanity went into the weird and wonderful pile of games kept spitting out in an attempt to find something that worked. This would eventually result in two beloved successes that would make the company's name - No One Lives Forever, or to be more accurate (and courtesy of the same skill at naming that gave us this game's lousy title) The Operative: No One Lives Forever and its sequel No One Lives Forever: Even We're Not Going To Push That, and F.E.A.R, which stands for Forget English, Acronyms Rule.

In getting to that point though, its name appeared on a ridiculously wide range of games - either as publisher or developer - including a cartoon mascot platformer called Claw, a truly awful adventure called Maabus (we'll be getting to that at some point, I'm sure), blatant Gauntlet rip-off Get Medieval, and most famously, Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, or to give it its full name, "We're Watching A Shitload Of Anime In Our Office Right Now: The Game". Sanity ended up somewhere in the middle of the pile - not hated, not loved, and landing with nobody quite sure whether to expect an intriguingly different kind of game, or the least enticing thing to do with cards since the sequel to Samantha Fox Strip Poker decided to start where it left off, with the epidermal layer. (Disclaimer: May not have happened.)

There are anti-psionic grenades. They're brightly coloured, just to make their users feel ultra-wussy.

The surprise when replaying it now was that while I can't say it was better than I remembered, it is a hell of a lot weirder. Originally, I was planning to mock it for its silliness, like the fact that main character Agent Cain's superpower is essentially being the personification of the 90s. He wears silly shades. He looks like he fell right out of a Dark Age comic called something like Musclebuster. He's voiced by Ice-T, who at best deserves to be renamed simply "Orange Juice" as a result. Even ignoring that the character just screams "We wanted Wesley Snipes instead!", just listen to his enthusiasm in this interview clip:



And good lord, are the details silly in retrospect. There's a point on the first level of this futuristic action game where your character's handler - who almost remembered to get dressed in the morning - earnestly demands Cain send her some information via fax, via a phone that looks like a housebrick with buttons. Cain has an evil brother, called - of course - Abel, begging some serious questions about the scientist responsible for this. (Admittedly, this is still less silly than people who like protesting gay rights by declaring "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" without apparently remembering how their kids turned out. How many lives did that parenting cost in the World of Darkness alone?)

"Dress code? Oh, Cain, just wait 'til you see what YOU'LL be wearing for most of this game..."

But here's the thing. Like a lot of games, it starts with its tongue in its cheek, at least with a mild prod. By about halfway through the first level though, it's openly taking the piss with a catheter. The premise of the game is that psionic powers have been discovered and are now spreading, with Agent Cain working for the department responsible for handling them. Who's your first target? A woman who runs an evil psychic hotline, whose attempts to get Cain to join her almost immediately descend into insults about cupcakes. You get a mind-reading power, and just about everyone gets a secret to uncover.

And later... well, I'll get to later in a minute.

Give you the finger? Brother, I'll give you the whole hand.

The CCG element is that people with psionic powers draw their abilities from specific totems, like Fire or Sun or Storm, with each power represented by a card. You gather them up during the single-player game, building a deck - though unlike most, you can swap and change whenever you like. A couple of them are very handy for pushing blocks around. They become increasingly important, and time-consuming.

Cain's speciality is Fire, which makes for an immediate head-desk moment when you're told that he has a tendency to cause a lot of collateral damage when he goes on missions. Really? The guy whose only powers involve explosive fireballs with incredible concussive force sometimes misses? Who'd have thought it?! It's as if the boss who sends him into civilian areas needs his head examined, and not for evidence of psionic ability. Idiot. You want subtlety, use a sniper rifle.

Each of the bosses has their own theme, and by killing them, you get to absorb their powers. Others are provided by cards dropped or otherwise unlocked during missions. Somewhat oddly, they're treated as being tradable in-game too, with people selling 'talents' and characters handing cards over that perform different actions, with a black-market for them. By the end, you've got a huge range of attacks and utility spells, though the fact this is an action game renders most of them pretty useless.

"Hello, is that the past? Could you send me some magazines wittily called 'Megazines'? I miss those."

The big in-game problem is that the more powers a person uses, the more insane they become - as depicted by a blue ball of liquid that can be replenished by picking up vials of blue serum. "But Richard," you cry, "Isn't that just mana?" I ignore the question because I can't hear you. Unrelated though, this is of course means it's just mana, and only Cain apparently has to give a damn. He's also fitted with one of the dumbest things imaginable - a chip in his head that knocks him unconscious if he deliberately or accidentally injures an innocent. That sounds fair enough, but there are quite a few innocents, they're often toting shotguns and other weapons, and the only way to be sure is to let them get the first shot in even after killing lots and lots of people like them. Making this sillier, you're regularly expected to threaten people with a gun to make them do things, like open a security door. Hopefully word of this chip doesn't spread to the criminal underworld too quickly, because I forsee a few Problems...

Dr. Aiken's brain surgery really hurts, hence the saying "Ow, my Aiken head."

The first level, aside from taking out Miss Cleo with fireballs, is set in a trailer park with Cain taking out the trash. It's not the most interesting of levels, and from 2000, that went for just about every level in every action/RPG/adventure - it would be a couple more years before polygons allowed for really interesting stuff. After that though, things get ridiculous hilariously fast - seen visually in Cain's outfit. He starts off in a badass future-cop suit, but about halfway in has to go undercover with a tour group and ends up wearing an eye-gouging Hawaiian shirt. He stays in the Hawaiian shirt for the rest of the game, which includes fighting demons and going up against the devotee of a civilisation munching abomination.

"Hey Cain, it's that girl in the boob-shirt from four pics ago. Just wanted to say 'told you'. Laters!"

Then it really starts to get silly. A whole level is devoted to taking on an illusionist, but before you can even fight him, you've got to take part in a lethal gameshow. You'd think this would be an excuse for waves of enemies. Nope! Trivia. You and two other contestants are put in deathtraps and asked questions, with the winner going on to face the boss in the final round. You get questions like "What's the name of the park in the middle of the city?" and "What is the origin of psychic powers?" He gets "Who is the sexiest man in the world?" just so he can preen and answer "Why, would it be me?"

At this point, even Cain starts calling bullshit.

It's America's favourite gameshow, Psionics Got Talents! (Literally)

But then it gets so much stranger. Throughout the game, there's a government agent who keeps calling Cain to get him to do his dirty-work, who sounds almost exactly like Half-Life's G-Man. And then there's the Artifact itself... dug up in the desert, and the source of the world's psionic powers... which turns out to be a disembodied head called Ted, who talks like Stewie Griffin and then spends the rest of the game in a kid's backpack getting very frustrated at how often Cain gets knocked out by goons to allow for level transitions, and how much he and the kid he's travelling with keep getting kidnapped by supervillains.



He is of course awesome. There's something so much fun about completely powerless characters who still think they can talk the talk, whether it's responding to Cain agreeing to fight a battle of wits with "Oh god, there goes the big rescue!" or randomly asking questions like why golf pencils don't have erasers on the end. He's especially unimpressed in the final battle, when the kid acting as his legs for the duration runs back from safety to help Cain in the final fight (which involves using Force Push to knock his brother off the urban equivalent of the Reichenbach Falls) even when the disaster has been averted and everyone's just heading off for dinner and the sequel that obviously never happened.

Aaargh! Small psychic girl in a Monolith game! Get any paintings you don't want covered in blood off the walls!

What's going on with the disembodied head? COUGH blatantgalactusripoff COUGH. The big secret of Sanity is that there's an eldritch abomination called the Sanity Devourer - or rather, not called that, but Ted decides human tongues can't pronounce its real name - which goes around eating psionic civilisations. Ted's job is to find them, unlock their psionic potential, and then signal his master for lunch. He's bored of doing that now, especially since it usually means lots of waiting around, and so has no plans to, but another crazy psionic wants his job. I'll admit it, while the inspiration for this may not be completely untapped ground, I sure as hell didn't see this plot twist coming.

Oh, and then the game ends on a rap. Nineties Man To The Rescue!

So much for "There is only Zool"...

While the game itself isn't that great, Sanity turned out to be one of the more pleasantly surprising Crap Shoot games of late to return to. I remembered a lot of the silliness, but not how much of it was intentional, along with how much it genuinely tried to combine a little action, a little adventure, and a novel (if flawed) approach to multiplayer. The result hasn't aged well, but the ideas behind it are to its credit. Certainly, it's easy to see how the company that made this also made No-One Lives Forever, with surprisingly good writing underneath its initially very generic setting. It wasn't good enough to really deserve to succeed, but to be remembered fondly despite its flaws? Definitely.

Though it's still an international tragedy we only got two NOLF games. Sigh.

Crowdfunding has become an effective solution for the smaller developers who don't have the time or resources to pitch themselves to publishers. We love to hear about the success stories, but unfortunately, plans can sometimes go awry. Subutai's dueling simulator, Clang, has fallen into the latter category.

The developer posted an update to Kickstarter confirming that it's out of money, and development on Clang has been temporarily suspended until it can find additional financing.

For those who aren't privy to all things dueling-related, Clang is a 1v1 arena-based sword-fighting game where players use various styles of swordsmanship to best their opponent (think Bushido Blade). However, Subutai was also developing a motion controller to simulate what it's like to actually swing a sword—until someone else beat them to it.

Subutai Corporation is currently promoting a different Kickstarter project called “STEM,” a new kind of controller that’s built to be used with virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift. Subutai argues in its post that Clang’s success is dependent on STEM’s success. It's worth mentioning that a different company called Sixense is kickstarting STEM. Luckily for Subutai, Sixense’s Kickstarter has more than doubled its original goal.

Clang’s developers didn’t come out and say Clang was dead. Most of them took temporary jobs to pay the bills while they work on Clang during nights and weekends until they find a suitable investor to breathe new life into the project. As such, it’s safe to expect Clang won’t come out anytime soon.

Most of the post makes Subutai come across as a company that didn’t have a solid plan or timeline. Here’s a particularly baffling and hair-pulling quote in the “lessons learned” section of their post:

“Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime.”

That line makes me question whether or not Subutai takes the project and its Kickstarter investment seriously. It comes off as a sarcastic joke about its inability to focus on and deliver what it promised.

Downright colossal paragraphs follow that statement and basically say, “It turns out we needed more money than we asked for.” Subutai also said there’s not much people can do other than be patient.

Obviously this is a bummer, especially if you invested any kind of money into Clang, but Subutai also isn’t the first developer to underestimate how much its project would cost. Subutai certainly isn’t blameless (it considers the basic definition of modern commerce a “hidden catch”), but hopefully the developer can pick itself back up and make the game it always wanted—one evening at a time.

It's a testament to Arma 3's depth as a military simulation that it gives players so many vehicle options when staging battles. But it can also be tricky to figure out the most effective way to use vehicles and infantry together, given that complexity. Thankfully Arma 3's latest official community guide has our backs.

The combined arms tutorial above is the latest in an ongoing series from Andrew Gluck aka Dslyecxi, an Arma player in the ShackTactical community. In his usual low-key style, Gluck goes over many of the various possibilities for role-based warfare and tactics.

"Armored support is best employed to defeat comparable enemy threats, or when infantry needs significant overmatch capabilities to accomplish their mission," Gluck says in the video. "In short, it's better to bring heavier guns than the enemy whenever possible. Armor must be carefully considered against the capabilities of the enemy. If the enemy has numerous anti-tank guided missiles, it might be better to hold back friendly armor until those missiles can be neutralized by friendly infantry."

As we noted in our review, the most spectacular and defining aspect of Arma 3 is its massive scale. Finding the best way to come to terms with gigantic maps like Altis—through the smartest use of infantry and vehicles together—must surely be one of the keys to victory.

 

If you’ve played any Ubisoft game on the PC, chances are you’ve encountered Ubisoft’s online service known as Uplay. Experiences with the service have ranged from “fine” to “argh,” though Ubisoft is hoping to make the experience a bit better with its upgrade to Uplay 4.0.

The big news coming out of this announcement is the addition of Twitch integration into the Uplay client. Anyone playing a Ubisoft game can broadcast their playthroughs through the Uplay client. Hopefully, the Twitch integration will alleviate some of the headaches that can arise from video streaming.

Certain publishers have stood against livestreams of their games, though more and more of them are reversing that policy. Ubisoft’s relationship with the PC community has been rocky at times, so it’s nice to see it moving in this direction.

Aside from Twitch support, the new version of Uplay is also getting a supposedly better download manager and support for automatic updates. I haven't run into any issues with Uplay personally, but I certainly know others who have. We'll find out if this latest version of Uplay fixes those issues when the update releases sometime this October.