Oddball IGF Winner Tetrageddon Games Released
Games, secrets, weirdness, and wonder!
ARMAGAD (also Tetrageddon Games) [official site], an updated collection of IGF Nuovo Award-winning oddities from Nathalie Lawhead, is now out. It contains games such as Froggy, sure, but Tetrageddon is... so much bigger and weirder. Loading Tetrageddon launches you into a fake desktop, an interface filled with hidden games, desktop companions, animations, chatbots, flirtbots, and... stuff. After a fair bit of fiddling and playing, I suspect I've still not seen half of what's in there. It is playful and delightful - and briefly pay-what-you-want.
ARMAGAD (also Tetrageddon Games) is available for Windows and Mac from Game Jolt. It'll normally cost $6.66, but right now is pay-what-you-want. No, there's no minimum price, you cheeky monkey. The old free version is still online, but it has less stuff and Lawhead may take it down so she can, y'know, sell this to fund her work.
I don't want to say too much, because being surprised by Tetrageddon is a whole heap of fun. It has games. It has computer friends. It has jokes. It has mysteries. It has public service broadcasts. It has puzzles. It has secrets. It maybe even has a central story? And it's all tied up in a wonderful weird package.
Lawhead recently wrote about her uncertainty over releasing Tetrageddon on Steam, a store not overly friendly to the unconventional, and the stresses that might bring into her life. So hey, it's out on Game Jolt's newly-launched store. She explains:
"I feel like both itch and GameJolt have given 'weird games' enough of a place to grow as a legitimate thing... Also as a 'safe space' where you are less likely to be attacked by angry people, because players there generally understand these games (maybe this has become too important to me, but whatever).
"I remember a long time ago posting things on places like Kongregate and New Grounds (out of desire to be part of a community). My stuff was too weird, people got angry, no one 'got it', I left. It’s interesting looking back because I don't think 'weird' was really part of game vocabulary then. It seems more like a recent thing that games are allowed to be more than just games."
Which is great. I'm sad I have less time to poke around Game Jolt and Itch lately, as they are places where hugely exciting and fascinating games appear with very little fanfare.