Diablo’s Indie Game Picks, part1

This is going to be an infrequent array of musings and excavations inside the indie game scene. Two games to start off this week: “A Small World” and “Grow”.

[Editor’s note: this post is a first of a new series by written by Freewaregenius contributor Diablo, focusing on the indie game scene]

A ‘Small World’ of one’s own

A Small World is a beautiful, explorative, web-based game developed by David Shute. You enter the world as a lonely figure framed in a close-up shot of what looks like a room. As you progress in each level the camera gradually zooms out as an indication of how far you managed to reveal in the world.

What’s noteworthy about this game is the deliberate bare-bone aesthetic reminiscent of 8-bit games. It’s surprisingly engrossing to walk around and explore the decrepit scientific disaster that has befallen this world, assisted in large part by the haunting soundtrack.

Watching things ‘Grow’

Growis a special breed of games that comes from Japan. It’s a game about emergent causality in the way actions affect outcomes in unexpected yet exciting ways. In its third incarnation it paystribute to the earlier Grow games -which are worth checking out. Each one of the Grow games has a theme and a specific algorithm in which the order of objects ‘thrown’ into the scene has aprofound effect on how they evolve or ‘grow’.
This game provides hours of replayability due to its mesmerizing array of combinations to be uncovered..