Best Of Indie Games: Window to Your Mind and Soul

[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 whimsical interactive toy, a castle siege simulator, a point and click adventure game, a steampunk platformer from the creators of Whirled, a WarioWare-type game, a playable collection of short stories, a mob control simulation game, and a Ludum Dare 14 competition entry that plays suspiciously like Valve's Portal. Game Pick: 'Windosill' (Patrick Smith, commercial indie - demo available) "An odd interactive toy disguised as a sequence of puzzles for the players to solve. The game basically involves searching for a key cleverly hidden somewhere in each scene, and once you've found this particular item you can then use it to unlock the door that hinders your progress from the current room to the next." Game Pick: 'Crush the Castle' (Joey Betz and Chris Condon, browser) "A remake inspired by Liam Bowmers' Castle Clout, boasting much superior graphics and a better interface than the original had ever offered. Knock down one castle after another with your massive trebuchet machine, as you travel around the map visiting each of the twenty-four locations that the resistance had claimed as their own territories." Game Pick: 'Mental Repairs, Inc.' (Renzo Thonen, freeware) "A point and click adventure game in the style of classic LucasArts releases, created by Renzo Thonen with the help of the Wintermute Engine. You play the role of a machine psychiatrist named Henrik Liaw, who received a fairly innocent emergency call from a large corporation requesting for some repair works to be done. Nothing ever goes smoothly in an adventure game, and once you're inside the building you quickly find yourself trapped with no clear exit from your little predicament in sight." Game Pick: 'Bang! Heroes' (Three Rings, browser) "A western platforming shoot-em-up with some pretty nice Steampunk-style graphics and a lot of gun-toting. Created by the guys behind Whirled, the game has a really great feel to it and has tons of little features to give a worthwhile gaming experience, like upgrades and achievements." Game Pick: 'When The Bomb Goes Off' (Tom Sennett, browser) "When The Bomb Goes Off is a look into the lives of lots of different people five seconds before a huge bomb turns them into ash. This is all achieved through WarioWare style minigames - some of them with obvious solutions, others not so. At the end a score is given to show how many of the situations you correctly acted out." Game Pick: 'The Bryant Collection' (Gregory Weir, freeware) "A collection of unrelated IF stories, originally sourced from a box of notes and story drafts that Gregory had acquired from a yard sale sometime in 2008. The short story titled 'Undelivered Love Letter' is a definite pick, simply because of the way the developer has limited your mobility and actions to one single scene in an airport." Game Pick: 'Gray' (Intuition Games, browser) "A mob control simulation game created by Intuition Games' duo Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend, where the challenge is to convince the rioters to change sides in an attempt to stop the conflict for good. You will need to match the wave patterns that appear when trying to strike up a conversation with any of the mob individuals." Game Pick: 'Portwall LD' (X-0ut, freeware) "X-0ut's barebones effort at remaking Valve's Portal in under 48 hours for the friendly Ludum Dare 14 competition. Veterans who have memorized the quickest routes for every chamber in the original can expect to be challenged here, partly because there are no heel springs to save players from a long drop to the ground."