Once Upon Many Times

Krish Raghav — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:43:00 GMT

Daniel Benmergui's flash games present an interesting little conundrum.

Hosted over at Ludomancy (where he also maintains a fun little blog) - he calls his works 'experiments' in gameplay. There's none of the high score, goal-based progression you normally see with browser games. Instead, you get a gentle, meditative mood, multiple endings, and odd little five minute play things.

It's almost difficult to call them 'games' in the sense we associate most browser-based games to be. They are almost...setpieces, little malleable narratives that can be played around with.

A good place to start is 'I WIsh I were the Moon' - a strange story of a love triangle with five different endings. You click on anything to 'photograph' it, and then click elsewhere to place the photographed object there.

'Storyteller' is another work with a refreshingly different approach - in -you're presented with a (seemingly) straightforward fairy tale - three comic-book like frames and three characters, then allowing you to pick them up and drop them elsewhere at will. How you change one affects the others, and vice versa. 'What if the hero and the villain collaborated?' 'What if the princess planned the whole thing from the beginning?'

Also try 'Trials' - which offers a little puzzle game twist to the 'rescue the princess' narrative.

Daniel's games are experiments in other ways as well. Recently, he uploaded his games onto Kongregate and Newgrounds, two of the popular flash game aggregators. He was, understandably, hesitant - expecting either comment abuse or obscurity. He explains in a blog post:

'...My goal was to figure out if it’s a good platform to publish my work, since Ludomancy is very limited on the people it’s reaching now. I figured that the people of Kongregate would be accustomed to Armor Games-sponsored Tower Defense, Stick Games and casual RPGs, so I expected Moon and Storyteller to rate very low and only get comments like “gay” and “wtf not a game 1/5″.'

(Note: The links have been added for illustration, and were not part of the original post))

Instead, however, the game was quite well received, with a lot of comment praise, and even made it to the front page 'featured game' spot - The gold standard for flash game popularity. As of today, its been played 95000 times.

Kongregate and Newgrounds are still heavily skewed in favour of..well, the flashy flash games - but its good to see that there's a healthy reception for little experimental titles as well. (Remind me to wax bloggerific in another post about another experimental indie game designer: Jesse Venbrux)

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Play Things : experiments

Once Upon Many Times