While games developers that make big-budget titles often struggle with balancing creative daring and profitability, browser games remain a haven for originality. They mark the point on the medium's creative frontier where the accessible and the unusual intersect, the perfect place to expand the gaming experience beyond the norm.
Soul Brother, for example, at first glance looks like a fairly conventional platform game. However, it soon unveils a consciousness-hopping mechanic where killing oneself – rather than the usual self-preservation encouraged in most games – allows a player to take possession of the soul of a different creature with abilities more suited to each new challenge. A great deal less morbid than it sounds, it's also filled with cheery personality and elegant design flourishes.
Meanwhile, Traal, which like Soul Brother adopts the pixel-art aesthetic of games from the past, offers up a strange and sometimes unnerving survival horror game, taking gamers on a bleak journey through 2D dungeons. Made in just 48 hours, it is a beautifully simple piece of interactive design.
And then there's the remarkably slick International Racing Squirrels, commissioned by Channel 4 Education to raise teenagers' awareness of financial literacy. Essentially a sports management game themed around its titular tree-dwelling rodents, it deftly balances the serious message with a playful spirit and sharp wit, and is something with the potential to entertain way beyond its target audience.
