2004 IGF Independent Game of the Year Winner
2004 IGF Winner, Innovation in Game Design
Game Tunnel's 2005 Independent Game of the Year

What's a "casual game" doing at Manifesto Games? We don't carry them, right?

Not normally. But with Oasis, we couldn't resist.

Oasis is, at its core, a highly original casual game--but with strong crossover appeal to strategy gamers. In some ways, our site is where it belongs, probably more so than at, say, Yahoo! Games.

Guitar Hero? How Crude. But Opera Slinger--Cossì Specializzato!
Student Showcase Winner, 2007 Independent Games Festival

In Opera Slinger, you sing opera--into a microphone. It's a quasi-beat matching game, but your score depends on hitting the right notes as well as singing them at the right times; before you play, you choose the male (tenor) or female (alto) role. Your "opponent" is controlled by the AI, and the game's conceit is that you are competing with him or her for the regard and adoration of the audience--which changes more in your direction the more accurately you sing.

The game transpires in a 3D modelled opera house, and periodically you have to sprint to another location to hit your next mark--and can lose points if your "opponent" does so in time to begin the next number while you're still navigating the space.

You could almost call Orbital Trader a casual game for geeks. It's a space trading game--you start with a small starship, move from one planet to another buying and selling stuff. You're limited to a single star system (no FTL here), and planets move over time, and you're restricted to transfer orbits, so closer planets are a lot easier to get to. Each planet has only a single commodity, and it's easy to find destinations where you can make a profit (mouseover your planet, and you'll see what its commodity fetches everywhere else in the system). And that's--really about all there is to it.

Well, yes, you can upgrade your ship over time; and as time goes on, you can invest in upgrades to the planets, building 'structures' which improve their productivity, demand, and so on. There's fairly a deep tech tree, in fact.

Tycoon Games are Fun Again

Kaloki is a classic sim/tycoon game; here, instead of running a theme park or a railroad, you're running something like Babylon Five, a small trading station in space, with starships showing up and wanting to buy stuff. You build out from your space station core, balancing power and structural needs against the desire to have as many profit-making enterprises as possible.

Along the way, goofy alien characters talk to you, and you're faced with a progression of levels, each with their own challenge, in the classic tycoon-game fashion. But the dialog is fun, the tone light and entertaining, and you never get sunk into the tedium of some tycoon games, where meeting the demands of a particular level requires a lot of grinding labor.