In August of 2010, a 21-year old Australian dude by the name of Jay Watts (henceforth known by his mysterious pseudonym "Murudai") released through Xbox Live a game he'd developed and designed all by his lonesome. It was called "Unplugged," an odd affair in which you play the role of a plug in a sink. That's right – a plug. In a sink. In other games, you can be the ruler of the universe, the finest football player who ever lived, or a rampaging maniac. In Murudai's slightly warped world, you try your darnedest to thwart wayward vegetable peelings and be the best damn plug to ever plug a sink.
I tell you this because even before Murudai serenaded us with Unplugged, he designed and released an Xbox Indie game by the name of Solar. In Solar, you weren't a plug at all. Instead, you were an asteroid. A hunk of rock. In space. Your mission, if you chose to accept it, was to mosey about the inky blackness – and it was inky blackness – in search of other asteroids to smack into.
Sound weird? I thought so too until taking Solar's just-released successor for a long test drive and realized there's a lot more to both it and the original than a celestial bump and grind.
>> <<
