games, mostlyGeography on a globe you can spin, a party game about holding your nerve, a paper plane you fold yourself, a sewer you would rather not, a minute you have to count out for yourself, a kitchen that serves beans on toast whatever you order, a sunny plot of land where the bugs would rather not be caught, and a night's worth of dreams to get delivered before the sun comes up. On Steam, in the browser, and on phones before long.
Geography, on a globe you can spin.
Identify countries by name, pin cities under a bullseye, match flags, and duel higher-or-lower on populations. Every miss draws a red arc between your guess and the answer, so you always see how close you came. 251 countries and around half a million real places, across 20 modes.
A party game about nerve.
One balloon, a capacity nobody is told, and the growing suspicion that you should have stopped a second ago. Hold to inflate, let go before it bursts. Whoever is holding it when it goes loses the round.
Fold it yourself, then find out.
Draw creases on a sheet of paper, fold it by hand a piece at a time, then throw it off a tower in a very large empty hangar. Nothing about the flight is scripted: fold layers into the nose and it flies fast and firm, angle the wings down and it rolls over, leave the tail flat and it dives.
Ride the sewer, choose wisely.
You are a small log of poo with big dreams, riding the current to the water treatment plant. Three gates come at you at a time and exactly one of them is a good idea: double your size, bolt on more lumps, or take the one that halves you. Jump the weirs, duck the drums, and do not let the heat dry you out, because a poo that stops moving is a poo that has lost.
Sixty seconds, sixty taps.
Click or hit space once a second, sixty times, and find out whether you actually know how long a second is. The report at the end gives you your steadiness, your fastest and slowest gaps, and the drift that crept in while you were certain you had it.
Three meals a day, one recipe.
You are sat at a British kitchen table and the menu offers breakfast, lunch and dinner. Whichever you order, the camera pushes in on a slice of toast, a tin of beans arrives from somewhere above, tips over, and empties itself across it. Order again and the kitchen will do exactly the same thing, with a receipt that grows less apologetic every time.
Catching them is the easy part.
A fenced-in plot of land on a sunny afternoon, and a net. The bugs live where they ought to — skaters out on the pond, cicadas up the trunks, something with a glow in the cave under the cliff — and every one you catch is only provisionally caught. The rarer it is, the bigger it is and the more it is worth, the harder it fights the bucket, so the walk home is the actual game.
Dreams to order, before sunrise.
You are the one carrying the sand. Fill the bowl, pick out a sleeper, and get the dream to them before the sky starts going light. Every night is numbered and every night is counted: the ones you got to, the ones you did not, and a sunrise that arrives whether or not the bowl was full.
The pieces got tired of waiting.
A tower full of rooms, three waves and a boss to each one, and five heroes taken from games that were left in a cupboard. The chess champion fires down ranks and files and cares where everything is standing. The tycoon weaponises his own bank balance. The general arrives alone and leaves with an army. The detective works out what a thing is weak to and then does exactly that. The tinkerer builds machines that set off other machines. Every boss hands you an upgrade that rewrites an ability rather than nudging a number, and by the top floor the rules have stopped applying to you.
A very small frog. A very tall climb.
1,577 metres from a pond to the moon, and nothing on the way up that wants to help. Hold space to gather a leap and let go to commit to it, because the frog is a physics object from the moment it leaves and so is the ledge you misjudged. Nine zones stacked on each other: calm water and oversized leaves at the bottom, a tree older than the concept of frogs, a tower somebody stopped maintaining, machinery, ice, and cloud that is only ever a strongly worded suggestion. It counts your falls. It also counts your ribbits.