Fugdale’s Funhouse

These two psychology-based games will put you in the driver’s seat. You will have to choose actions or words as you progress through both games and your actions and words will have consequences. These games fall into the choose-your-own adventure category and both have unique interfaces. So make the best decisions and see how they play out.

Alter Ego - Live Your Entire Life Again

This text-based game feels a bit like taking an online survey or personality test. The simple interface consists of a series of questions and choices. You progress by choosing from the options presented by clicking radio buttons next to your choices.

Start by choosing your sex and completing an initial brief survey about your likes and dislikes. This establishes your basic demeanor throughout the game. You will then experience your own birth and start as a baby experiencing the first sensations of life.

The game progresses through 7 major stages of a person’s life, including infancy, childhood, teenage years, young adult, college age, middle adult and old age. Various icons for love, family, relationships, brain development, emotions, etc present themselves on a tree chart. You can explore each type of development in any order you choose. Sometimes your choices will make it so you can’t follow certain paths and other paths will open up if you make the right choices. The fact that you can make many different choices and develop your personality in many different ways makes this exercise in reliving your life very interesting.

As you get older, you will have new challenges, including finding jobs, starting relationships, getting married (or not), having kids, saving money, increasing your knowledge, etc. If you don’t have a good job, you won’t be able to afford a house. You can even acquire credit card debt. If you so choose to go down the darker paths of life, your game experience will reflect that.

At any stage of the game you can skip to the next level if you desire and you can also look at your stat sheet to see how you have developed. You will receive ratings on many different areas of your life including: familial, intellectual, physical, social, vocational. Aspects of your personality receive grades as well. You will develop in areas of calmness, confidence, expressiveness, trustworthiness, and happiness. Your income, debt, job and relationship status, and acquisitions will display as well. The game will save your progress so you won’t have to play the lengthy game in one sitting.

As you complete each section of life, the game will provide you with a detailed evaluation of the kind of person you have become. You will get advice on how to turn things around and areas where you don’t meet societal norms. You can even make certain choices in all areas of life which will cause you to die prematurely and in some cases you will cause the death or suffering of others.

The game seems so completely fleshed out, that psychologist could almost use it as a test run for making more positive choices in life. Although I wouldn’t reccommend the game for those purposes. Alter Ego feels like a text-based version of the SIMS. If you would like to relive your life and make different choices this time around, you should definitely try this game on for size.

Facade - Stop the Bickering Couple

One of the most original games available, Facade puts you in the middle of an emotional situation of having to help your friends reconcile their disastrous relationship. You must first download this game to your computer, but it plays on both mac and pc. Once started you will select from the list of available names (no luck if your name is Luwanda or Rupert). Then you will get a phone call from your good pal, Trip, to come over for dinner. When you arrive you will quickly discover that Trip and his wife, Grace are having a heated discussion.

From the moment arrive, everything you say will cause some sort of reaction from the couple. The game puts you in a 3-D graphical scene. You navigate around the room using your arrow keys. You can select objects with your mouse using the hand icon. You also use the hand icon to do certain physical things like kissing or hugging your friends. (Try kissing the person of the same sex for interesting reactions). Other than that, you simply type what you want to say and the characters instantly react to whatever you type. Sometimes they go on arguing and sometimes they get offended or you bring about an awkward silence. When the situation heats up, occasionally swear words get bandied about, so this game is definitely recommended for mature players.

This game truly has remarkable game play. The characters seem to respond to almost anything you tell them and their reactions feel appropriate most of the time. The situation you find yourself in feels volatile, however, and sometimes the best of compliments will get a negative reaction. I had to play through the scenario many times before I could actually get the couple to reconcile. Usually I get booted out the door within 5 minutes for saying something mean. (I enjoy telling Grace to shut her mouth and watching her get all stunned). But the more you get them to talk about themselves and what is bothering them, the more likely they will reconcile in the end.

I have included 8 really interesting and occasionally challenging point-and-click adventure games from five different designers. These games represent some of the best designs in the point-and-click or graphical escape game genre.

Samorost 1 & Samorost 2 - Point-and-Click Adventures

Amarita Designs presents two very fun graphical advenutres with Samorost 1 and Samorost 2. Both adventures have incredibly lush and gorgeous graphics, quirky characters and great directional sounds and music. The puzzles in both adventures have intuitive and simple solutions. You won’t have to spend too much time figuring out how to advance your character to the next level, but the game manages to entertain throughout the process. The backgrounds and attention to detail, along with the stunning sound effects and animation techniques, garnished these games with several well-deserved awards.

In Samarost 1, you guide the main character across several areas of terrain in order to help him save his planet from impervious doom. Gameplay is pretty easy and it takes about 10-30 minutes to work your way through it.

In Samarost 2, provides a slightly more challenging sequence of puzzles than version 1, however you should still work your way through the game in under half an hour. This time aliens kidnap our main character’s dog and he has to work his way through the catacombs of an alien planet to rescue the pooch.

Samarost 1: Free
Samarost 2: First Chapter (Rescue the dog) is Free. You can pay 6 bucks to unlock the full version and play the second Chapter.

Hapland 1, Hapland 2, and Hapland 3 - Three incredibly complex puzzle point-and-click games

The Hapland series, created by Rob Allen, has so much appealing game play value that I find myself going back to play them again after first discovering them in 2005. Each version continues along the same theme as the previous. The graphics consist of simple colored line drawings and minimal sound effects.

But despite the simple looking design of the games, the intricacies of the puzzles will keep you engaged for hours even days. Each version of the game really contains one massive puzzle which must be solved by clicking on people and items in a specific order. Clicking on certain items out of order can and will result in death, mayhem and forfeiture of the game. You may however, not realize your error until it’s too late to correct it. The Hapland Games differ from other point-and-click games in the fact that if you mess up a sequence you have to reset the game and start over. Once you discover how a certain element effects another element (aim your cannon in the right direction or have an item fall on another item correctly) you will start to piece together the master sequence.

The best advice I can give when playing is to click on everything and see what it does. You will probably die or get stuck several times, but you will learn what effects clicking will have. The trick is to find the right sequence of clicks.

All in all these games exemplify the very best in point-and-click (escape) games. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Just prepare yourself for a mental workout.

You can find complete walk-throughs of all three games at Jayisgames.com. All three versions are free to play.

Daymare Town - Minimalist Point-And-Click Adventure

It’s called Daymare because it resembles a nightmare, but it takes place during daylight hours. The theme lends itself well to the minimalist dream-like line-drawn atmospheres.

You will find all sorts of little items to click on and at some points the puzzles become extremely challenging. Sometimes the items to click blend in with the background so much that you will hardly think to run your cursor over them. At times you may find yourself wandering all over seeking out every tiny item to examine, and other times the game rolls along easily.

This may not be the most impressive point-and-click, but it is one of the most difficult. I couldn’t see any feature that allows you to save your progress, so be prepared to play it all the way through in one sitting to make it to the end. The game doesn’t lasts a long time, and because some of the pieces are very tiny and because some of the areas to click are very obscure, you will probably spend several hours at least trying to figure it out. Hint: If you reach a screen and can’t figure out where to click, keep trying, almost every screen has something hidden in it and you can only find certain items hidden behind other objects. You will find detailed walk-through by clicking at the links below the game.

Daymare Town is free to play.

Sphere - Escape the room Adventure

Sphere has instant appeal with it’s near photographic quality atmospheres and very minimalist approach. At first it doesn’t appear to offer many options for things to click on. I played for about 5 minutes before getting stuck. However, eventually you will discover that one element you need to continue forward.

You basically have the objective of escaping from the room you find yourself in. The room has the feel of a tidy apartment or office space. The theme of spheres does come into play throughout the game.

As with most point-and-click games you have to do a fair bit of exploring for tiny areas to click on. Luckily for this game, the backgrounds all have clean tidy looks to them, so there are only so many options available on any screen. Yet you will still discover areas you overlooked the first time around.

The sound effects are minimally used throughout. The game does offer a chance to save your progress and you will probably need it. To play straight through may take several hours. A walk-through is available, however it is written by someone who doesn’t speak English very well, so deciphering the walk-through is almost as challenging as playing the game.

Sphere is free to play.

CDX-The Game - Elaborate Graphical/Video Point-and-Click Adventure

This adventure game, produced by the BBC, has great visual appeal and an elaborate video-based storyline. You mainly as Adam, a man confined to a wheel-chair who has lost his memory after a car accident. You start out discovering information about Adam…who he is, what he does…and soon discover other people in Adam’s life. Adam finds himself involved in a mysterious conspiracy involving several murderous baddies who want to retrieve an ancient relic dagger that Adam discovers he has possession of. As you progress through the episodes of the game you will have the opportunity to play as other characters.

This game expands on the concept of point and click to the nth degree. In fact many portions of the game seem like a movie. A movie in which you have control over most of the decisions the lead characters make. The point-and-click portions feel similiar to other games of the genre, but you have the addition of being able to telephone other characters, chat with them over email, listen to the radio for audio clues, etc. As you discover items and information, video sequences will trigger. But instead of just watching the sequences, you find yourself participating in the choices the characters make from whether to lie or tell the truth to using humor or sympathy to engage a character in conversation.

The game also has several sub games. For example, at one point you have to quickly maneuver your character on a motorcycle through city streets by changing the direction of street signs. These sub games give the entire storyline exciting and surprising twists.

Unlike most point-and-click adventures, you can die if you make the wrong decisions or don’t finish an assigned task in time. The game uses an episodic saving mechanism. You sign up with a user name to play and at the end of each episode you can save your progress. Each episode lasts roughly 10 - 30 mintues depending on how quickly you discover the clues you need.

I enthusiastically recommend this well-designed adventure game. It is free to play.