It's the morning - well, afternoon - after the curry night before, which means ow my head. It also means ow I'm dead, thanks to a raft of browser games that want to kill me and others in various ways. Get into the Christmas spirit (gin) by crushing your beloved, manipulating blocks, and having a skull for a face. Enjoy!
Skullface by Greg Sergeant
Skullface reminds me of N , even if the physics of the main character WHO HAS A SKULL FOR A FACE WHY DOES HE HAVE A SKULL FOR A FACE don't seem quite as fluidly perfect. It's also a bit Dustforcey/Super Meat Boyey, which is to say that it's a 2D platform game where you navigate spiky environments against the clock. Importantly - most importantly - the soundtrack is pretty great. Also it has that whole face-skull thing going on.
Spike: A Love Story Too by Matzerath
Have you ever wondered how the Thwomp from Mario feels? He's so angry, so determined to turn Mario into patty, but no one ever stops to ask why . I'm hoping Spike: A Love Story Too will provide the answers. Like its predecessor, it puts you in the shoes... spikes of a crushing block of grisly death, employed to squash the human, the monstrous and the amorous alike. It's a great, satisfying game, my favourite part being the charmingly nervous expression of the be-suited people before you flatten them into a pile of blood and guts. Merry Christmas, everyone!
TANK FIRES BLOCK by Kenta Cho
TANK FIRES BLOCK is a game I can't play, partly because using the arrow keys to aim feels like an obscure and horrible torture method but mainly because I'm terrible at this sort of thing. That doesn't mean it isn't any good of course - I'm also bad at walking across the road, and I hear that's quite important - but it does mean you won't get much insight from me. Anyway, this seems like a clever shooter - you fire blocks instead of bullets, as the name suggests; success involves using them to shield yourself from enemy bullets. (Thanks to IndieGames for discovering this.)
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Three Body Problem by Robin Burkinshaw
IndieGames also uncovered this ridiculously addictive arcade game, which puts not one but two orange monsters on your tail, who will chase you to hell and back - well, to hell and back across a minimal playing area. Your goal is to touch the purple squares, when they appear, making contact with as many as blockly possible before the ginger grim reapers catch up and turn you into a puddle of pixel juice. The AI makes it. That and the graphical effects, the sound effects, and pretty much everything else.
Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.