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Osmos

 You’ve probably heard of this type of game; big fish eat small fish and grow bigger, to eat bigger fish. This time, Hemisphere Games brings us a top indie game called Osmos: you are a single-celled organism (a mote) and have to propel yourself around and absorb smaller motes in order to complete the goal, which revolves around becoming larger, most of the time.

In Osmos, you control a small “mote” in space. You can propel yourself by ejecting a piece of yourself out of the other end of yourself, following Newton’s laws of motion. Be wary, you do not want to waste your size for temporary speed. You can gain more mass by absorbing smaller motes while avoiding larger ones for the time being, as being absorbed by a larger mote will result in failure.  Time spent waiting for the organisms to collide can be minimized with the time slider, which also lets you perform precise actions by slowing time down.

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And Yet it Moves

And Yet it Moves, is a top indie game by independent publisher Broken Rules. Released on April 2, 2009. Its interesting name is a direct English translation of Galileo Galilei’s famous remark, Eppur si muove.  The name is appropriate, as the game involves the world rotating around the main character, an unnamed white figure.

This particular indie game is set in a world reminiscent of a paper collage. The edges are lined with jagged white textures- as if the pieces were ripped out of a magazine itself. The character you control has the uncanny ability to rotate the world in intervals of 90°, affecting everything in it. Gravity will shift, bats will relocate to the “new” ceiling of the cave, and loose rocks will come tumbling down in order to crush you.