Best Of Indie Games: Into the Mouth of Madness

[IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. rounds up the week's top indie games, this time including a pair of rougelikes and a 2D platformer in the style of early Castlevania games.] 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 pair of roguelikes from the 7DRL competition, a 2D platformer in the style of the early Castlevania games, a unique abstract shooter with automatic difficulty rebalancing, and a new weekly game from Nathan McCoy. Here are the highlights from the last seven days: Game Pick: 'The Soul of Dracula' (bunaguchi, freeware) "The Soul of Dracula is a 2D platformer inspired by the Castlevania series, featuring appearances from mainstays such as Death and the Count himself in the role of level bosses. You play as a vampire hunter who must venture into the Dark Prince's castle and defeat him using only your whip and the familiar array of ranged weapons at your disposal." Game Pick: 'Redivider' (Nathan McCoy, browser) "Redivider is a Java-based arcade game with a very simple ruleset, created by Nathan as part of his weekly game release initiative. In each level you are given ten seconds to complete an objective, which could either be eliminating circles, dividing them, or a combination of the two." Game Pick: 'Leave Home' (hermitgames, commercial indie - demo available) "In Leave Home, the difficulty of this abstract shooter increases whenever you do well in it and scales back accordingly when you begin having problems keeping the ship in one piece. A demo that features the first level from the full game can be acquired from the official page." Game Pick: 'Madness' (hmp, browser) "Madness is a seven-day project that explores the theme of insanity in a roguelike very well, where players take on the role of an adventurer who has to descend ten dungeon floors and defeat the evil Dungeon Master who resides at the lowest level." Game Pick: 'A Most Peculiar Adventure' (Ido Yehieli, browser) "Think roguelike meet Small Worlds, and you'd have a pretty good idea of what Team Lantickall's A Most Peculiar Adventure is all about. Viewed from an overhead perspective, your quest is to find a complete set of suits, each hidden somewhere in four separate secret caverns on the area map." Game Pick: 'Nicemetal' (Babarageo, browser) "Nicemetal is a tower defense game with an interesting gimmick, originally created by babarageo for distribution at Comiket 76. There are a number of unmanned defensive structures in each map, and you have to send out soldiers to operate them for a short amount of time before they'd return back to base."