Solar2 –

This game was recommended to us by Nathan during our critique. It’s a very interesting game with a really unique mechanic. You play as an asteroid that gains mass over time, although no specific instructions are ever given to you. The idea of learning through playing and acting really appeals to me and I hope that it’s something we can pull off in Small Bones. While our game will certainly not be as elegant as Solar2, I hope that we can emulate the same learning techniques that it employs so well.

LIMBO –

Along the same vein of instructionless games, LIMBO is a very unique puzzle game with simple mechanics used in interesting ways. The game only allows for movement and an all-purpose interaction button. Done entirely in monochrome silhouettes, LIMBO is a very dark game that does a very good job of making you feel alone. While I don’t necessarily want Small Bones to reflect the same darkness that LIMBO does, I’d very much like to emulate its wordless teaching and ingenious use of a simple mechanic for extremely varied gameplay.

Canabalt –

This was one of the games mentioned in the comments during our critique. While it’s similar to Small Bones in that it’s a runner, it’s quite fast-paced and much more reaction based than I think Small Bones will ever be. However, I really liked the two-player aspect to this game, and how it became somewhat of a race between the players. It seems like the terrain is randomly generated so that the track is infinite, and I wonder if someday we could implement two-player in Small Bones. We’d have to work on the mechanic a bit, since right now it definitely wouldn’t work for two players, but I think having to race/cooperate with only a finite number of skeletons could be really interesting.