Badland

Badland is about as successful as a one-button game can get. It takes the screen with a beautifully mysterious and haunting atmosphere of both sights and sounds, and takes your wits and your touch with clever, puzzle-based, sidescrolling action.

You control a creature as mysterious as its environment: it's something like a porcupine with wings. And those wings provide the single control element of the game: tap and hold to fly; release to fall. It's extraordinary that such simple controls can guide you through an absurdly engrossing and intense narrative. I use the term "narrative" loosely, but there is nevertheless a narrative to this game, however abstract it may be.

The goal of each level is to survive, to make it to the tube at the end that sucks you through to the next level. Your creature will collect necessary powerups along the way--some that make it larger, some that make it faster, and some that make it spin. Your creature will die many times (along with hundreds of its clones you'll collect along the way), and it will be sad every time. (Especially when you've just collected, like 20 clones and every single one of them except for the one in front gets slashed to pieces by an enormous buzz saw.) But hopefully it will be worth it to experience this cruel and stunning new world.

What this game lacks in length (only 40 short levels so far), it more than makes up for in replayability. There are achievement-style goals to accomplish after completing levels--things like collecting every powerup, and making it through a level without dying and returning to a checkpoint--and even more than that, the fast-paced nature of the game lends itself (with incredible ease) to multiple playthroughs. While I would strain to call this game difficult, its difficulty feels right, and it keeps you watching out for your curious protagonist. Badland is part game and part narrative, so it feels right to get stuck only once or twice before escaping to another obstacle that threatens death.