The laws of physics are the ultimate ruleset. Gravity and momentum have been used for centuries to help create the rules of a game, from sports to dice to racing. One of the more exciting features of video games is that we can now change these fundamental rules of physics. Momentum doesn't have to exert any force at all, or gravity no longer has to point down.

Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is a platformer where gravity pulls you towards the vertical center of the level. If you're towards the top of the level, you get pulled down. If you're towards the bottom of the level, you get pulled up. You can still jump and move about in the air using the arrow keys, just like a normal platformer. However, you can also use the reconfiguration of gravity to your advantage by pushing up when above the center and pushing down when below, slingshotting your way to increased momentum.

The altered physics here provide ample opportunities for strange but satisfying level design. Throw in several teleporting vortexes and oddly shaped platforms, and it just becomes fun to jump around the level. Of course, there is a goal to each level. There are 3 goals, in fact: One set of levels has you collecting coins, one has you racing for time towards the goal, and one has you exploring the level and talking to people. Each set of levels follows a different character.

The art style is just as odd as the physics. Each character is represented by what looks like a flying dong with wings. It's really hard to tell, because all the art looks like it was done in MS Paint. It manages to work though, creating a weird, vaguely-detailed world that is full off-kilter-looking things. The music is just as odd: It's several short, sparse tracks on a constant loop throughout the level. The entire game gives an eerie vibe of quiet unease.

The story is very interesting, and it's worth your while to finish the short game; however, discussing anything about it will likely ruin it, as it's a story designed to reveal itself over the course of the game. I'd highly recommend finishing the game, as it only takes about 15-20 minutes.

Why You Should Check This Out: Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is a platformer with unique physics where instead of just jumping you're mostly riding gravity to where you want to go. A unique but vaguely disturbing art style is paired with some quiet, haunting music to give a constant sense of tension as the story unfolds throughout the game. It's a game that reveals itself as you play through its short 15-20 minute length.

Forced death is something I've had an aversion to ever since the game Nocturne, in which you were forced into a hallway full of doors in which only one door didn't lead to instant death. Given the buggy nature of the game and the long load times, that hallway was not a fun experience. Instead it was more like an hour of desk-pounding frustration as I screamed at my computer screen every 5 seconds.

I've come around since then, as I've seen a few examples of death as a useful mechanic. Certainly Braid's rewinding of time helped me see the instructive value of the occasional death. There've been plenty of FPS games where the camera shows me who killed me, letting me know what I'm up against. There's also Starcraft 2, which what little I've gotten to play of the beta has me addicted to their replay feature.

Maru is different though. Maru, from Jesse Venbrux, is a 2D platformer where you jump between different platforms, moving toward a goal and avoiding spikes, except the gravity is towards the platform, not down--very similar to how Super Mario Galaxy works, but in 2D.

What stood out to me about the game though was how it handles death. You collect extra men as floaty little orbs that look just like your character's head. However when you die, you turn into a floaty little white orb of light. When you get back to where you died, you can pick that up. You then run into platforms that need those light orbs before you can proceed.

Death in a game can certainly be a learning experience, but having be required to pass? You get a little ball of light when you die that you have to collect and spend later. It's similar to how The Nexus works in Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, when you die you can attack demons for more souls in order to become more powerful. Except here, it's required to progress.

Why You Should Check This Out: Besides the forced suicide, it's an interesting platformer that has some really great physics. There's only 7 levels, though sometimes you may need to go through a level multiple times. The art and music are both pretty good for an indie platformer and certainly not generic. The multicolored platforms and weird, bugeyed protagonist give the art a different feel than most other games. While they're requiring you to die to complete the game, it doesn't feel too forced or onerous. Instead, it's a refreshing way to use death in a platformer as more than just a way to burn up extra lives.

Flotilla is the latest game from Brendon Chung, the creator of Gravity Bone. It's a simultaneous-turn-based strategy game set in space, where you take your handful of ships and fight tactical battles against things like tattoed chicken space pirates or crocodiles suffering from space madness, and win the occasional “best karaoke singer in the universe” award. There are several of you I know right now who are already downloading the demo.

For the rest of you, let me explain what I mean by simultaneous-turn-based. The gameplay lets you issue orders every 30 seconds and then lets you watch the results play out in real-time. Your comptuer opponent is doing the same, only changing his orders every 30 seconds. It's as if Homeworld only involved 2 ships and only let you set orders 30 seconds at a time. You usually handle only a few ships and are constantly trying to maneuver behind or beneath your enemy's armor, because hits to those weak points do massive amounts of damage. Since you can arbitrarily rotate your ship in any direction in space, this is trickier than you might imagine.

To add variety to the game, there's also some rogue-like elements. The universe is randomly generated with good and negative encounters on each planet. You start your adventure at the “Tutorial” system, which then allows you to fly off into adventures unknown. Each time you accomplish something, it adds a chapter to the story about your character. When you finally die, you click “Start Adventure” again and start the next adventure. I'm not sure what happens when you win instead of dying—primarily because I seem to really be pretty terrible at this game; I usually die 2-3 planets in.

There's also a co-op mode with an attached Xbox 360 gamepad. (At some point in the future, this game will also be coming to Xbox 360 Indie Games as well.) There's a skirmish mode against human opponents or bots that I haven't tried out yet either—the game just came out this week, so I haven't roped anybody else into multiplayer yet. (Hint, hint, goodjers!)

Each encounter (if you're successful) also rewards you with ship upgrades, which allow you to customize your fleet with improvements like increased firing speed or heavier rear and back armor. The randomized universe with ship customization gives endless opportunities to replay a new game every time.

The art style is whimsical and frequently hilarious—it never fails to put a smile on my face when I head to a random planet and end up staring down cats piloting a spaceship. The planets and ships in combat are fairly simple and abstract, but pretty—this is from the creator of Gravity Bone after all. The music gives a very 2001 vibe, with classical style and an emphasis of the grace and beauty of space combat. A turn-based game with classical music and beautiful scenery, what more could you want out of the art and music?

Why You Should Check This Out: Flotilla is an addictive simultaneous-turn-based spaceship-battle strategy game with a quirky sense of humor and some great art. The battles become pitched and intense, while still maintaining that turn-based sensibility. Ships frozen in air just before a missile barrage can leave you far more tense than any real-time clickfest. Combined with a randomized universe and rogue-like elements, the game is an endless universe of exhilarating, varied space battles.

I've heard many complaints about RPG fetch quests. Complaints like “they're annoying”, “ they're unnecessary” or “ they're totally unrealistic”. I've heard many of these complaints from my own mouth when yelling at my monitor at 2am. Yet if you stop to think, how much of your day involves doing equally mundane tasks for others? Go fetch the groceries, go fetch the kids, go fetch the copies for Johnson on the 3rd floor. It's kind of depressing to stop and think about how many of our relationships depend on glorified fetch quests.

Din is a game about relationships. You are an average guy, walking down the street. As you walk, you meet other people who begin talking to you. Occasionally an exclamation point will appear above their head, World of Warcraft style, and they will ask you to hit a certain key for them. If you hit the key, they are satisfied and continue talking. If you do not, they eventually become frustrated by your inability to meet their simple needs and leave you.

This sounds fairly simple, however as you walk down the street you meet more people who want to talk to you. None of them seem to be very polite, as they all begin talking over each other. The more effort you put into maintaining friends, the more friends you accumulate, and the harder it becomes to actually maintain those friends. Pretty soon you're struggling to hear even one or two requests out of the crowd following you spouting off requests. The only way to end the game is to ignore any requests and let your friends fall by the wayside.

Of course speakers are necessary to play the game. You cannot hear or understand the commands at all without sound. As such, the only way to pull out the various requests from the crowd is to listen to everyone and try to hear the key each friend requires. It's stressful, demanding and in the end it's all going to fall apart anyway. It highlights exactly what other games are doing less explicitly, only modeling relationships in terms of what you give others and what you get in return. Not exactly an affirmation of the human spirit, huh?

Why You Should Check This Out: Din is a game about relationships where you struggle to listen to the voices of your friends while trying to manage their needs so that they don't walk away. Sound is required as the only way to find out what they need is to listen to them, which becomes difficult as you get more friends that are constantly talking over each other. The only way to end it is ignore everyone and let them all stop following you. A cynical and somewhat depressing statement about how we relate to each other.

While there's decades of evidence for the ability of a game's social commentary to affect us, there's few games that go the extra mile and add intentional meaning. A game can subtly play with important ideas, but explicitly evoking those ideas to provide meaning to the player seems to be a bit too far for most games.

The occasional quirky title decides to buck the trend and go all out. Instead of trying to subtly play with an idea in the background, it instead chooses to put the meaning and context of the game at the forefront. These “message games” are not just trying to have a little fun, but also to say something meaningful to the player.

We The Giants is a simple, quick little message game where you play as one of a race of little cube people who always refer to themselves as “we the giants.” You are introduced to their rituals, first exploration, then clairvoyance, then finally sacrifice. When you sacrifice yourself, you are allowed to leave behind a bit of “wisdom” for the ages in the form of a bit of text, then your body becomes a building block among all the other bodies of the other people that have played the game.

You can follow the “wisdom” left behind by other players at their Twitter accounts. If you go there, you'll also see why I put “wisdom” in quotes.

Why You Should Check This Out – We The Giants is a message game – light on the game but heavy on the message. You are asked to sacrifice yourself for the good of the rest of your race, in order to build something bigger than just your character. It makes for a short, quick game. But sometimes meaningful games require you to do things that aren't about getting the highest score, but instead are about learning the message. In other words, they have to sacrifice fun in order to get at some ideas that are bigger than fun.

Galcon Fusion is the essential real-time strategy game--the genre boiled down to it's essence. It's a simple game that remains addicting and fun despite being able to count the rules on one hand.

The game screen is set up as a randomly generated bunch of planets. Each planet is randomly sized, and the size determines how fast it can produce ships. You start with one planet and 100 ships and move about the game board conquering neutral planets, which produce more ships, which can conquer more planets. Simple, huh? But there's another player (or 2 or 3) which has the exact same setup and is trying to conquer planets on that other side of the screen. It's a race for the planets.

Galcon Fusion exposes the fundamental dynamic of RTS games: Expand, get resources, repeat. To beat an opponent, get more resources faster than your opponant does. It's a beautiful simplicity and is a primer for the mechanics of any RTS game out there: No matter how complicated the game, they all boil down to these basic mechanics. These core mechanics also obsessively fun. For a game that can be completed in less than a minute, I can't count how many hours I've spent at my computer and iPhone sending little ships to their doom.

Such a simple game allows for many variations. There's a mode called “Assassin,” where you're given a target player and the first player to wipe out their target wins. Another called “Stealth,” where you can't see enemy ships moving in space. There are tons of gameplay modes available and they all work in multiplayer.

Multiplayer is really lots of fun and it opens up a world of strategy and tactics unavailable in the single player game. It works great and it's a blast to play. It doesn't support using your Steam account--you need to create an account specifically for the game--but it's still a ton of fun, and I'd recommend it if you buy the game (it's not available in the demo).

There's also an iPhone version that is probably one of the best iPhone games out there.

Why You Should Check This Out: Galcon Fusion is the distilled essence of real-time strategy games. The latest update has way more multiplayer options than before; new, higher resolution graphics; several interface improvements from the iPhone version; and Steam support with achievements. A game of Galcon can take less than a minute, yet it's addictive, simple and loads of fun.

Sometimes I like to just have brainless fun. I know I'm supposed to be featuring some innovative game with an art style that gives you a contact buzz just looking at it, but occasionally I just enjoy a simple game that's fun to play. Right now it's the addictive, top-down shooter Knight Of The Living Dead.

Did I say shooter? It's actually a melee-only combat game where you fight back wave after wave of the undead. You have to outmaneuver the little flesh-eaters without succumbing to their ravenous teeth, and all without the benefit of ranged weapons. It's a pure hack-and-slash situation.

You play as Sir Galahad, whose job it is to hold back the approaching zombie waves. There's not much else to it. You are given special holy powers in the form of cards, which randomly regenerate in the corner. You also level up, giving yourself points in damage, card strength, card regeneration rate and, finally, movement speed. You click with the left mouse button to attack, the right mouse button to use your special a card and WASD to move about the level. It's simple, addictive fun.

There's also a leaderboard where you compete for the quickest time finishing all the waves, and an ultra-hard mode with harder zombies.

Why You Should Check This Out: Knight of the Living Dead is a top-down shooter without any shooting, a melee zombie-kill-fest. You whack back wave after wave of the undead with Sir Galahad's trusty sword and occasionally receive a little help from special holy powers. It's mindless, bloody fun.

Of all the genres I find intimidating, scrolling shooters are the worst. The genre didn't earn the nickname “Bullet Hell” lightly. Modern incarnations are so intimidating to me that I get scared off by their screenshots–walls of multicolored lasers and enemies choking every pixel on the screen. Back in the day I cut my teeth on Gradius, but somewhere along the way, the genre lost me.

The history of the shoot 'em up genre is a storied one–it's a long and gradual path from Space Invaders to Geometry Wars. Genetos tries to map that history inside the game itself. A standard vertical scrolling shooter, your ship moves about at the bottom of the screen, and enemies come at you from the top of the screen. The twist on the familiar formula here is that you start out with a “1st generation” ship. The generations refer to the iteration of the shoot 'em up genre and associated platform. Therefore your first ship is similar to the ship from Space Invaders and it behaves just like it. You start in the “1st generation” level, which is again a variation on Space Invaders.

As you kill enemies, though, you collect pellets which fill up your upgrade bar at the bottom of the screen. Once the upgrade bar gets full, your ship is upgraded to the next generation, which is a Gradius-like ship. Your ship goes through several phases and eventually you'll work your way up to the modern shoot 'em up.

The levels follow a similar progression. You fight enemies scrolling down the screen toward you, and you face the occasional boss. Once you've completed the level though, you move on to the next generation's level. So you go from a Space Invaders-like level to a Gradius one, then to something that would look at home on the SNES. The gameplay evolves too; you start with only a gun, then gain bombs, then bullet time and several other weapons. It keeps the shoot 'em up interesting all the way through.

If you're not used to the genre though, I'd start out on the lowest difficulty setting. This isn't a game that treats you with kid gloves.

Why You Should Check This Out: Genetos is a history of the shoot 'em up genre, in game form. You move from a primitive Atari-level Space Invaders-like ship and enemies into more modern incarnations as you complete more of the game. Your ship, the level, the enemies and even the gameplay morph along with the history of the shoot 'em up genre. It's a trip down memory lane–and a fun, challenging shoot 'em up

More Matter Vol. 1 is a collection of two different experimental games. They're both about the same subject matter, relationships, but each are wildly different in tone and setting. The games swing from one extreme to the other–the first game deals with a first date, stargazing in the Seqouia, and the second game deals with a couple going through marriage counseling. While the games both occupy the two extremes of relationships, the entire package is a subtle statement.

The first game is called "Polaris," and you play a girl who seems unimpressed by her first date stargazing in the Sequoia. You start the game staring up at the stars while he talks about constellations and their meaning. He points out a constellation, and then the sky spins around randomly. You then have to find the constellation again. This gentle, quiet game sets the tone of a date in the woods stargazing much better than any game I've played (though I'm certain very few have tried). The fact that they even explore a game based around a date is refreshing, and they pull off the tone beautifully.

The second game is called "Handle With Care" and deals with a couple going through marriage counseling. Except after the first couple of sentences the scene fades out and you enter the mind of your character's “Internal Repression Service” in charge of repressing bad memories. It's a very industrial Black-Mesa-like room where you are sent repressed memories and told where to put them on the shelves. You can then choose to repress them or not, and watch the reaction of your marriage-counseling session on the “Main Optical Feed”. This game represents the internal conflict and soul-searching that a couple in marriage counseling goes through in a semi-abstract, gamey way, but the memories and emotions they invoke are very raw and dreamlike.

Unlike other experimental mods we've featured before, such as Dear Esther and Korsokovia, these two are significantly more solid as games. They're not just “narrative experiences” but games with rules, and it's very possible to lose. The fact that they explore such a subtle subject matter as relationships and do it so remarkably well shows we have a lot more room to explore in the narrative game space.

There is also a third game that should be out soon called "Much Madness", involving a person on a sinking submarine and the ghost of Emily Dickinson, however it has not been released.

Why You Should Check This Out: More Matter Vol. 1 takes narrative and storytelling in games and manages to tell subtle, emotionally charged stories about relationships. They range from the quiet, soothing first date of "Polaris" to the frayed, painful marriage counseling of "Handle With Care." It shows us where stories in games can go and that we have a lot more narrative territory to explore than Aliens and Star Wars.

Platformers have a long and honored tradition in game design. From Super Mario Brothers to Braid, 2D platformers represent the full gamut of attitudes and ideas about game design. In the indie space the genre seems to be the favorite place for experimentation, with countless entries uploaded to major Flash portals every day. Despite the crowded field, designers like Terry Cavanagh, creator of Don't Look Back, Judith and Pathways, can still make a genre that's a quarter of a century old feel fresh and innovative.

VVVVVV is his latest game, with an ever-smiling protagonist stuck aboard a space station. The game tweaks one of the basic mechanics of the genre: Instead of jumping, your character reverses his own gravity while standing on a platform. The level design exploits this well by gradually introducing the mechanics over the two levels in the demo. Fairly soon you're playing with several brand-new mechanics as if you've been using them since you were jumping on Goombas.

The story begins as your character, the captain, finds himself stuck in an unfamiliar space station. Soon he finds that his other crew members are scattered all over the odd installation, and sets out to rescue them. The game also features a Super Metroid-like overworld with an automap that keeps track of communications with other crew members. Soon exploration and teleportation turn the automap into a necessity instead of just a helpful accessory.

While the graphics are very basic, 8-bit Atari fare, they still manage to convey the world well. The chiptune soundtrack from Souleye is catchy and energizing, yet remains true to the old-school Atari graphics of the game.

Cavanagh explains at the conclusion of the demo that VVVVVV is about exploring a single game mechanic and not restraining the choices of the player. Despite some of the similarities to Super Metroid there are no keys or locked doors to stop you from entering an area. The only thing stopping you is the difficulty of each room. Do you go after the shiny trinket, the blue crew member or the pink one? There's nothing stopping you either way.

Why You Should Check This Out: VVVVVV is an innovative, challenging, well done 2D platformer. Terry Cavanagh plays with the basic mechanics of the genre and comes back with a game that's fun as hell and frustratingly challenging. The ability to flip gravity combines with some brilliant level design and creates one of the most enjoyable platformers I have played in a long time.