Oh hey, so here's a thing: A flash game mixtape - a series of ten ephemeral and occasionally evocative indie browser games. Go check them out. Thanks to @crono_maniac for constructing the list and @pollysmps for pointing it out to me.

I'm just going to give my thoughts on these ten games below. I urge you to play them all first, of course, and then maybe prepare a coffee, sit down and just vegetate on what you've seen on your own instead. But hey, I gotta fill the rest of this blog up with something. Call it practice for this upcoming May Madness sequel.

Today I Die

It's initially quite difficult to figure out what this game wants from you. When you do figure it out, it becomes an interesting example of interactive poetry: A literal interpretation of the transformative power of words. It's not going to suddenly make you a more balanced person, nor does it really help you understand the author's angst any better (being accosted by one's proverbial demons has been done so often in fiction that it's lost all meaning, though Psychonauts still managed to pull off a great little disturbing trick with them) but all the same it's worth a gander. Keeps you guessing, at least.

Psychosomnium

I'm not sure this one has any symbolic meaning to it, beyond someone trying to recreate a quickly jotted down dream journal in video game form. There's some goofy and clever touches, but it feels like every half-baked Indie puzzle-platformer: One or more interesting conceits wrapped around the exact same hoary, elementary 2D platformer gameplay. Mind-bending gimmicks have become the modern equivalent of pro-active anthropomorphic mascot characters - all it takes is for a few of them to succeed and we're inundated with imitators.

Super Press Space To Win Action RPG 2009

Cute. The developer behind the game, Rhete, is part of the menagerie over on socksmakepeoplesexy.net, the kind of site I wish could make up Giant Bomb's substrata: One that shares an informal (yet informative and witty) attitude towards games, rather than the kind of meekly pandering garbage of Kotaku, the self-serious pomposity of Polygon or the banal, inoffensively sterile THX-1138-esque (or Demolition Man-esque, if you'd prefer) GameSpots and IGNs that seem to be the rule with most video game websites. In a perfect world, the forces of Giant Bomb, SMPS and sites of a similar laid-back, guileless and enthusiastic nature like Hardcore Gaming 101 and Chrontendo would combine to take over and become the dominating force of this great fandom of ours, and we'd never have to see another list of "top video game vixens we'd like to date rape instead of having to make do with body pillows" or big news features giddily promoting a handful of screenshots for a game that lost its verve three annual sequels ago, taken from "major media events" of far lesser consequence than is ever attached to them.

What? Oh right, video games.

This is a silly satire of too-simplistic-by-half modern RPGs. It's funny. Imagine you're in Dragon Age II or Final Fantasy XIII while you play it.

Dys4ia

This one's been doing the rounds for a while now: the educational game of what it's like for a transgendered person to go through the rigors of painful hormone therapy. Hardly laugh a minute stuff, granted, but edifying and empathy-inspiring all the same. It certainly engenders (so to speak) some open discussion.

Some of the slightly less forward-thinking people in the Newgrounds comments (beyond the ones just being complete dicks in general, because hey the internet is still a depressing place to visit woop woop newsflash woop) are chastising the lack of graphical prowess, but I think they've largely missed the point: The simple shapes and colors are meant to invoke a children's educational book, a la your "Everybody Poops" and "How To Brush Your Teeth" or "Father, What's Matthew McConaughey?" and so forth. The designer Anna Anthropy is saying that this is the sort of thing one should educate their children about, regardless of whether they're cis- or trans- themselves, and this game would be an ideal method with which to do so. That there's nothing particularly lascivious or cussword-y about its presentation only serves to support this interpretation.

Thirteen Gates

This one just broke my head after a while. It's a 3D maze game, but it uses bars of three different colored patterns to emulate said 3D maze. It takes some poking around to get used to, but you start to figure out certain cues and rules governing what you're seeing. In a sense (so to speak, again), it almost feels like what it would be to be blind: Jarring, at first, then frustrating but eventually acclimatable.

Asphyx

Now this is a little more unorthodox. The goal of this game, as the game itself will tell you, is to put yourself - the player - in the shoes of your little black knight guy protagonist (and I love those guys - look around this blog for a visual hint). Since a lot of the game is underwater, this means holding your breath whenever the dinky knight does. Perhaps not the wisest of things to ask a human being to do (or for a human being to do, for that matter), but the game does helpfully include a disclaimer not to hold it responsible if you somehow lose consciousness while playing. You don't have to play along, but it might be an idea if you did.

Hero's Adventure

Another one of these RPG satires. I don't want to say anything about it, lest I spoil the singular twist in the tail that is all these shorter games have to go on. It's a pretty good twist, though.

Lim

I don't know if this game was talking about social chameleons or bipolar disorder or were just a bunch of squares moving around because I glitched through the wall at one point and couldn't find a way forward. Maybe that's what it was trying to say: That the various "acceptable" personality types our society has constructed are ultimately built to repress who we really are, and we need to free ourselves from an ever-present "us vs them" mentality by refusing to follow the simple yet restrictive paths that our collective social development has set out for us.

Nope. I'm reading too much into it. It's just not a very well made game.

Freedom Bridge

Simple. Striking. Overt. Kind of topical given the setting. Have fun.

The End of Us

No use talking about this one because the designer all ready explained everything about it in a small blurb underneath the applet. Given its subject matter and the theme of the Game Jam it sprang from, you might immediately have an idea of what will happen, but just let it play out and see what happens.

By all means discuss these games yourselves, either in the comments here or on the aforelinked blog. I'd love to see more of these mixtapes; they're a fun and enlightening way to spend an hour.