Winterbells

Orisinal is always the place to go for very simple, well put together games. Almost every one is just played by moving your mouse and clicking, but they manage to grab you so much stronger than many games with a lot more going on in them. The fantastic quality of art probably doesn't hurt, nor does the calm, soothing music that's always playing.

And they've provided us with another hit with Winterbells. You control a cute little bunny rabbit by moving your mouse left and right - that's it. Okay, you have to click to make the first jump. You'll figure it out - one of the best parts about these games is that the instructions are usually completely unnecessary because it's so obvious what to do. Anyways, you just need to keep bouncing on the bells and make sure that you don't fall. Good luck! I spent way more time than I'm comfortable admitting on this one!

On the topic of Orisinal, I have no idea how this site manages to win me over every time. All the games are cute, and often have fuzzy little animals. But I hate cute games. AND I ESPECIALLY HATE GAMES THAT FEATURE FUZZY LITTLE FREAKING ANIMALS! AAAARGH! Yet when I visit this site, my cold heart thaws just a little bit every time (though this is easily fixed with a quick round of Kitten Cannon, or better - Pingu Baseball). It's utterly confusing, but oh well...

Lastly, I wanted to mention that Winterbells definitely reminds me of SnakeJump, the subject of this blog's first post. Two completely different implementations (three if you count PapiJump, which is actually closer to Winterbells) of the exact same gameplay idea. Each one still has its own charm, though - this is what I love about casual games, even the same idea ends up expressed in seriously different ways depending who's doing the expressing. I'm not going to go as far as calling game-making as a whole an art (Madden Football #47, anyone?), but in some cases, it certainly seems to edge closer than one would expect.