GAMES ARE ART
50 shades of play
We’re all for adding a little colour to our lives, but there remains something ineffably cool about brilliant design that sticks to black, white and every shade of grey.
Despite true early classics such as Pong and Asteroids, colour has generally ruled the roost in gaming, but here are some wonderful monochrome offerings that bring all the impact you could ask for, without needing most of the spectrum.
Oh, and make no mistake, these games might be in black and white, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing red as you try to meet the challenge.
Rogueish role-playing
1-Bit Rogue is a grayscale RPG that stays true to its name. Revelling in pixelated graphics and a lo-fi soundtrack it’s a classic dungeon crawler with all the fixings: evade enemies, collect treasure and avoid traps as you descend deeper.
Brilliantly, the dungeons are randomly generated as are the plentiful enemies and items level up along with you, making for a classic RPG experience that never gets old.
Fiendish fraternal fun
Freeze! 2 – Brothers is a search and rescue mission where a plucky little brother travels to the stars to save his older sibling from the clutches of evil aliens. This sequel is a physics-based puzzle game with cool mechanics that means you progress through levels by rotating the environment.
The black and white game art gives it an eerie, other-worldly ambience, and while trying to wrap your brain around things don’t forget to take in the scenery because each level has a unique background that’s all about the details.
Tangrams with a twist
Voi is a puzzler offering up numerous levels of tangrams with a twist. Each involves a group of black shapes that players overlap to create designs. As you progress, the designs become increasingly complex.
To really bend your mind, black that overlaps black becomes white so the knack of the game is figuring out how to create the white shapes in the target design.