Overlord II is an improvement over the first game in every way. Gameplay is more varied, the writing is consistently funny, and decorating your dark Fortress has never been manlier. The improvements diminish the challenge somewhat, but who subjugates the strong, anyway?

It is an internet-verifiable fact that robots make everything better. You can therefore imagine awesome it must be to play a robot in a robot city as he tries to save his robot girlfriend from robot terrorists. Machinarium is an adventure game that lives up to those expectations in almost every way.

Like an infatuated zombie pirate, The Monkey Island series has returned from parts unknown to perform unspeakable acts on your brains. It’s pushing eight years since the last installment, which was less well received than its three predecessors, so you may be wondering if this is a revival or betrayal of the brand.

Fans of graphic novels will have heard about the infinite canvas—the idea that comics on the web needn’t be saddled with the limitations of their paper counterparts. And Yet It Moves is the proof of concept that the same principle applies to video games, although in this case it’s more about the simulation of natural laws than simple space. It’s a game that capitalizes on the freedom inherent in simulated spaces, and the result is smart, lean, and topsy-turvy.

Geneforge came out in late 2001, so it might seem a little early to be doing a retro review. However, it offers a portal into state of the art RPG design circa 1988, so it’s fair game. Although fascinating as an historical artifact, the brutal difficulty, tremendous time investment, and spartan graphics and sound mean that Geneforge will appeal to a very narrow audience. That audience will probably fetishize it, though—it’s not like they make ‘em like this anymore.

Left 4 Dead is more exciting on paper than it is in practice, but the actual game is undiminished for it. It promises an endlessly replayable cooperative multiplayer experience with roguelike procedurally generated content and delivers a brief, intense, FPS game that stays intense even as you become familiar with it. Perhaps not exactly as advertised, but good stuff nonetheless.

Strange Attractors 2 is a top-down game about navigating an avatar from place to place using attraction and repulsion mechanics. It wasn’t the only game in the PAX 10 to use the environment to pull and push the player around, but it was the only one to use gravity to model those forces. So instead of using specially designated objects, everything in the environment pulls and pushes everything else. Controlling the game is like controlling the gravitational constant. It defaults to 0, but you can turn it up high, or flip it into negative numbers using the two mouse buttons.

We talked to Christoper McGarry of Ominous Development about how Strange Attractors 2 grew out of the first game, their distribution model, and the charmingly tortured cries of the game’s enemies. Hit the jump for all that and then check out the demo.

Take a few steps into Polarity and the game looks like a typical platformer; run and jump to navigate from one end of a 2-D level to the other. Soon, however, you’ll discover that your avatar’s suit is magnetic, and so are most of the surfaces in the game’s four levels. From there, it’s all about manipulating your suit’s polarity and the strength of your magnetism to fight gravity and manipulate objects in the environment. It looks and plays like a platformer, but it’s a puzzle game at heart.

The game was actually developed by a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University. We talked to Daniel Bryner, Howard Braham, and Przemyslaw Iwanowski how a game development education can be handy, how playtesting molds accessibility, and the game’s future. Hit the jump to read on and then go play the game.

While Project Aftermath might appear at a glance to be a typical Real Time Strategy game, it’s not. Get your hands on it and you’ll realize it isn’t just about winning and losing—it’s about points. The idea sounds weird, but it’s really a self-correcting difficulty selector that makes room in the genre for neophytes and experts a like. Starting armaments cost points, and good performance earns them. There’s no cap on the special abilities that units can use, but they cost you a bit of score with each use. Neophytes can play armed to the teeth (and in deep point debt), actually winning games and having fun, while experts who win with little more than sticks and harsh language score big on the leaderboards.

Lee Hickey stopped by from England and told us all about this and other ways that Project Aftermath makes the RTS genre more accessible. Read on for that, Lee’s thoughts on explosions and their importance to design, and what you can do to bring skilled players and new players together without a one-sided bloodbath. Check out the demo too.

Andrew Williams and Andy Ray took a few minutes to talk about their team’s entry to the PAX 10: Impulse. It’s a physics game in the same vein as Strange Attractors 2 where the player navigates a magnetic avatar from point to point in complex levels loaded with positive and negative surfaces. Adding a wrinkle to the play model, players can give their avatars a little explosive boost to circumvent the tyranny of magnetism. It’s somewhere between playing with magnets and rocket jumping.

In addition to their game, click on the jump to hear about the design challenges of attraction and repulsion, and how to use a game’s camera to focus exploration gameplay and avoid tedious meandering.