This is the fifty-first post in our Game of the Day series.
Finding Flash, web, and otherwise browser based games has been mostly fruitless for my palette. My friend Chris mentioned Jay is Games (I misheard as "Jay's Games") and I recently checked it out. Well, I did find an engaging game full of beautiful ambiance, but it won't run in FireFox, and it only works on Windows. I'm speaking of the wonderful world of Knytt Stories.
It's totally free and a mere 30'ish megabytes to download, so I highly recommend you give it a shot if you're on Windows. Anything I can say will be meaningless besides the surreal experience. Something about the simplistic, pixel-draw graphics and soft background music made it impossible to stop playing until I'd beaten it.
The mechanics are 2D platformer and the controls match what you'd expect plus power-ups like double-jump and an umbrella. Obstacles put in your path force you to use all of the different powers you acquire in order to complete the overall goal. None of the level construction is difficult to go beyond mild frustration and the continual progress plus discovery encouraged me to keep going.
The game is also a game-building system for 2D platform / puzzle / exploration types. I only played the included first level. Some people have even used it to express other games they loved:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBx6-X_tkFw]
Now while you check it out, I'll keep searching for a decent browser game ...
