Best Of Indie Games: Evacuate the Kingdom

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. rounds up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.] This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The delights in this edition include a Tron-like game, a browser-based platformer centered around the adventures of a dwarf, a new experimental game from Cactus, and a first-person platformer which requires switching between the shadow and 3D world frequently in order to solve tricky puzzles. Game Pick: 'STRINGLINK' (Sasakoge, freeware) "A challenging single-player Snake game with some nifty additions. Instead of eating dots on the screen, you earn points by changing directions when the speeding craft is hovering over a coloured tile. A 'mix of Tron and Ikaruga', as Kenta Cho notes on his Twitter page." App Pick: 'Cube Kingdom' (Ramza3D, freeware) "Cube Kingdom is an application that can be used to create 3D models out of blocks with the same size and dimension. Squares can be placed, erased or coloured over with just a click or two, and there are sixteen different colours that you can choose from to apply to your building blocks. A handy tool that might be useful for designing structures quickly before building them in Minecraft." Game Pick: 'EVAC' (cactus, freeware) "A 2D platformer consisting of only a handful of rooms to explore, created by cactus in under three hours while he was in the Netherlands to give a talk at the HKU-organized Festival of Games. The game is absolutely quirky, definitely interesting and undeniably experimental, although one should expect nothing less than the unexpected from the unnaturally prolific Swedish developer." Game Pick: 'Shy Dwarf' (Jaromir Plachy, browser) "Plachy Trpaslik (Czech for 'Shy Dwarf') is a short but sweet little platformer that tells the story of a small dwarf's journey into the unknown. Along the way is some simple platforming and strange sights that you'll want to experience. The whole game is nicely animated apart from the dwarf himself, which is strangely just a black blob with a hat on." Game Pick: 'Somnia' (Cryptic Sea, freeware) "Somnia is a 3D first-person perspective outing revolving around light and shadows. Each of the puzzles must be completed by flipping between the shadow and the 3D-world, and platforms which seem unreachable are quite easily accessed through 2D shadow platforms. When it finally clicks in exactly what you're meant to be doing, it's a moment of sheer wow-ness."