Mysteryman64

Not a game for the impatient. You must slowly tease out the mechanics and how everything works, but once you do, the game becomes such a fascinating experience. Absolutely worth a play, just make sure you READ EVERYTHING and make sure that you actually pay attention to what you are doing and think about why you are doing it.

Thomas Was Alone is a great little platformer that will keep any sort of puzzle or platforming enthusiast amused for a few hours. You play as a series of rectangular blocks that serve as the avatars of AIs. Your mission? To escape the simulation your characters find themselves in. The writing and the narration is great, and you actually feel fairly attached to the little cubeoids fairly quickly due to how well personalized they were. The puzzles themselves are all fairly well designed, and they do a good job at making them fun to solve without being far too easy or impossibly hard. You even use the characters themselves to form stairs and the like for some sections. There are occasional points where you realize you have to backtrack a character due to needing them to move some other character, and while this is annoying, you usually feel as though its your own fault for failing to notice something rather than the game being tricky about you. My only other complaint is that the ending feels a bit weak to me, but the rest of the game more than makes up for it. Thomas Was Alone is definitely worth a playthrough!

Proteus is a pretentious attempt to be an "art" game. It tries and label itself as an soothing exploration game, but fails in almost every regard. The exploration itself is fairly dull and pointless since there are so few actual sprites. Within about 5 minutes, you've seen just about everything there is to be seen. The "music" is extremely lackluster and it feels as though almost no time was spent on working on the sounds to create something that would actually sound good when strung together. And while it has the barest pretenses **** and a plot, there really isn't much desire to continue on, because, as said above, the music generation is awful and the things to see aren't really worth seeing. It was potentially a very, very interesting concept, but it falls completely flat due to a complete lack of effort by its designer. I can appreciate wanting a minimalist style game, or having a game that's different from the standard fare, but this entire game was so poorly executed that its cringe worthy. Don't waste your money, time, or computer resources on this. If you're looking for a decent take on an artsy game, go with the much, much better Dear Esther.