The Indie Love Bundle: six amazing games

I’m a big fan of “casual games,” the sort of thing that’s often played in a web browser; point-and-click puzzles, side-scrollers with some sort of twist, beautiful abstractions with lovely sounds. I stumbled across the Indie Love Bundle, a collection of six fantastic independent games (all of which have won some sort of award or another) for only $20. The catch is, you’ve only got until midnight on Friday to buy it.

I’d played demos of a few of the games before but hadn’t splurged on them, but at this price I bought mine today. A brief rundown of the games included:

• And Yet It Moves: a puzzle-platformer where you can rotate the world to change gravity; the graphics look like torn-paper collages
• Auditorium: an abstract game that requires you to push and pull a stream of colored lights to fill up the various meters; the music is affected by the gameplay
• Aztaka: a side-scrolling RPG set in the Aztec world
• Eufloria: a space-exploration game that involves … growing plants from the resources on the planets you discover
• Machinarium: a point-and-click adventure about a little hand-drawn robot
• Osmos: a physics-based abstract game involving absorbing other motes, while shooting out motes behind you to move (and shrink)

All of the games work for Windows; all except Aztaka and Eufloria work on Mac as well. And the great thing is, if you purchase the bundle you can choose individually whether to activate the game for yourself or send it as a gift. It’s a fantastic alternative to some of the other video games you may be playing, and the diversity in types of gameplay is remarkable. (Plus, it’s always great to support the indie developers!)

Visit the Indie Love Bundle website to watch a trailer and purchase the games.