East Side Story is a point-and-click mystery in the Tex Murphy mold (at least until that series got moldy), developed by Mikael and Eleen Nyqvist, a Swedish husband-and-wife team -- their fourth game, in fact, featuring the English sleuth Carol Reed. It's first person, meaning that, like Myst, you never see your protagonist onscreen; and like Myst, screens are static images, with hotpoints you can mouse over, and the ability to turn to either side and move forward or back.

The images, however, are not rendered 3D, but photography -- nicely captured photographs of the town of Norrköping, in Sweden. This has its good side and its bad; the photographs are technically excellent, and many of them very attractive, providing visual quality that would be hard (and expensive) to create with digital assets. On the bad side, well, the real world is full of irrelevant detail, and sometimes it's hard to see what elements of a scene are important and worth remembering, a problem compounded by the fact that the game is designed so that some on-screen elements are not hotspots when you first encounter them, but do become hotspots later, when a puzzle requires you to use some element.

Lemmings Meets The Incredible Machine

In Eets, as in Lemmings or Junkbot, your job isn't to control your character or critters directly, but instead to place items on the screen that affect their behavior, and guide them to the exit point of the level. In the case of Eets, the "exit" is a puzzle piece placed somewhere on the screen, and you have a single "eets" -- a cute little animated guy -- whose abilities are determined by his "emotional state," which you can alter. A scared eets will stop and turn around when he comes to a ledge; a happy eets can jump short distances; and an angry eets can jump big distances. Typically, levels consist of several platforms--and you have to figure out how to guide your eets from one to the next in order to get to the puzzle piece, by placing little powerups that he eats, changing his state to make sure the right jumps happen at the right places.

First Responder Sim

In Emergency 3, you control a city's first responders--EMTs, fire and rescue services, police, and so on--responding to emergencies. In twenty missions, you have to deal with a wide variety of them, from raging fires to explosions, derailed trains carrying dangerous chemicals, etc. There's also a 'sandbox' mode with randomly-generated emergencies, so once you've completed the missions, you can continue to play indefinitely, if you like. It's a real-time strategy game, in a sense, but your objective is saving lives, rather than conquering enemies.

Empires & Dungeons is a simple turn-based fantasy game in which you build armies and conquer the territories of AI-controlled opponents. Unlike most turn-based fantasy games, it includes a Rogue-like "dungeon-crawling" aspect (but with graphics), and exploring the dungeons is important for levelling up your hero and gaining honor points, which are necessary to construct some buildings and build some units. Graphics are somewhat retro 2D tiles, but there's a lot of gameplay here for the price.

nullpointer is a digital artist who experiments with algorithmically generated digital imagery. Playing around with fractals, he decided that rather than simply exposing people to pretty pictures, he wanted them to interact with the imagery. And being a serious fan of old-school shmups, he created this game in which you interact with the images by (what would you expect?) shooting them.

"Diablo Lite"

Evil Invasion is in the mold of fast, frenetic overhead-view third-person shooters like Crimsonland or Robotron, but with a difference: rather than gory combat with futuristic weapons, this game is set in a fantasy world, the "weapons" are magic spells, and there's an RPG-like character advancement system. You can think of it as "Diablo Lite," if you will; more retro graphics, and not as much depth, but a similar aesthetic. Good gory fantasy fun.

Arrgh! Die!

Here's another genre they don't make any more--2D third-person platform shooters, like Duke Nuke'm back before the Duke went 3D. Developed pretty much by one guy (Dusan Stevanovic), it's a damn impressive effort for a one-man shop. If hopping about and blowing crap up sounds good to you, well, pally, that's what the demo is for, eh?