Orphan Feast is a delightfully strange game, inspired by a combination of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Dickens’ Oliver Twist — with a little Dr. Seuss and Tim Burton thrown into the mix. In Orphan Feast you play Creeky Tom, a ghoulish rogue whose goal is to prowl the dark alleys and rundown streets of old London and capture the homeless street urchins you’ll find everywhere there, gathering them in a sack, while avoiding a cast of crazy characters out to foil you in bizarre ways. The orphans — if you make it back to your lair — are destined for the oven, to be baked into pies (and Tom himself often snacks on the little kiddies when he’s not doing anything else). It’s a despicable premise, but the artwork is so well-done that you’ll keep playing to see what they come up with next.

Brought to you by [adult swim] games, so you know that it’s weird. In fact, they’ve got a LOT of crazy games even weirder and more deplorable than this one. Like 5 Minutes to Kill Yourself, a classic favorite.

Getting hungry? Time to partake in the Orphan Feast!

Happy Holidays!

The first Zoomquilt, back in 2005, was an amazing feat of online collaborative art. It took me five years to break out of its infinite loop. Little did I know that in 2007, it returned in a sequel that’s even darker and more addictively hypnotic than the first. Are you ready for…

ZOOMQUILT II

Let’s play a scavenger hunt together, shall we? See if you can spot the following on your never-ending journey into madness:

+ a pirate flag
+ a “warning dynamic killa” flag
+ “the end is nigh” flag
+ a “no Mickies” flag
+ a “hell” sign
+ a “fresh fish” sign

Remember to blink…

[Thanks, Boing Boing!]

Scuttlebuggery is a stylishly steampunk online promotional game for the goth band Johnny Hollow, brought to you by the geniuses at My Pet Skeleton Productions (maker of “A Murder of Scarecrows” featured here awhile back).

In this game you play a scuttlebug — a round beetle who must figure out how to push bubbles of absinthe toward a drain, dodging beetles and fluttering moths along the way. It’s like soccer for scarabs. And though it sounds like child’s play, it is a Sisyphean challenge that will likely make you appreciate the vast labor of the insect world, scuttling all around us when we’re not paying much attention. Happy Halloween!

http://www.scuttlebuggery.com/

[Thanks to Blue Tea for calling attention to this game in their 4th annual Halloween Roundup.]

“Monster Evolution” is a clever online game from Nob Studio, in which you terrorize a city eating humans — and if you eat enough of them, you can “evolve” into creatures with special powers and take out the shooters and tanks that come after you.

It’s like Cloverfield meets John Carpenter’s The Thing. Almost.

Try “Monster Evolution” for yourself, and play God(zilla) for awhile: http://www.nobstudio.com/games.html?fid=&gid=18

Remember Telephone — the “pass it down” game of crazy miscommunication from your youth? Well you no longer have to get uncomfortably close to your neighbor to whisper into their ear. Broken Picture Telephone is an ingenious game of text and stick figure drawing that will have you laughing for hours. It involves responding to obscure messages by drawing what they say — and vice versa — until you get a very bizarre story reminiscent of David Lynch’s surrealism. For example, my first test of the game gave me the sticky note above (“a smiling bowl of meatballs with feet says hi to a tumble dryer”). This scenario is a description of a drawing I haven’t seen (using drawing tools conveniently available on the site). In response to the above, I had to depict said meatballs and dryer having a conversation using my lame pictionary-esque skills.  I’m waiting to see how this gets misinterpreted, but I’m sure the resulting series will be HILARIOUS. Virtually every randomly visited game I’ve seen is pretty darned funny.

I’m signed up as ‘gorelets’ and already issued a note of my own: “A zombie falls in love with a brain.” I’ll post an update when the final storyboard is complete! In the mean time, come join the weirdness at Broken Picture Telephone.

– Discovered via Download Squad.
Update:  Horror often results.  Here’s a snippet from one I participated in today:

I should be working, but how can I when there are maniac clowns on the loose?

The new “MySpace for Horror Fans Only” website, The Haunt, hosts a bounty of online “flash” games you can play online for free in their macabre Arcade section. I’m not too old to admit I thoroughly enjoyed the silly survivalist massacre known as Clown Killer 2.   After a ten minute session, I became the champion player of CK2 with a new high score…which will surely be defeated soon by some John Wayne Gacy wannabe who has more time on his or her plastic-gloved hands.

I’m haunting the site under the name gorelets. The Haunt is sponsored by the commendable horror bookseller (and more), Horror-Mall.com, who also sells a number of Arnzen titles.

But if you’re afraid of The Haunt, you can also play this game on the original programmer’s website at 2DPlay.com.

JOIN THE HAUNT.

 

Happy holidays!

Ring in the season with the Creepy Christmas Film Festival — a series a short holiday-themed horror films posted all month long at Glass Eye Pix!

[The Little Stocking Stuffer image in this post is from the Creepy Advent Calendar by animator Beck Underwood, which helped inspire the Festival project.]

For my masochistic writer friends doing the NaNoWriMo: Dr. Wicked has posted WRITE OR DIE — an online tool that will annoy you or eat your text if you start slacking!

 

[Comments closed.]

Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Arnzen’s Disorder
Cause:	cursed Japanese video
Symptoms:	itching, thirst for human blood, redness of nose, polka-dot saliva
Cure:	expensive biofeedback devices
Enter your name, for your own diagnosis:

If shooting a frail little kittie out of a high-powered cannon is your idea of fun, then just wait until you try Dan Fleming’s “Kitten Cannon” game — where the aim is not only to watch the fuzzball fly, but to make that feline soar as far as possible by ricocheting its body off of trampolines, bombs, and TNT stockpiles…but look out for the Venus Fly Traps and metal spike pits!

I’m a cat lover and I can’t seem to stop playing this game long enough to finish my letter to the ASPCA.  Ah well, maybe it isn’t so bad: this tortured tabby has wayyyy more than nine lives.

My best distance to date:  1182 ft.

http://www.burststudio.com/kitten.html