I like complex games.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I don't really get into to overly complex games, but I am glad that they exist. Gaming as a medium has burst wide open, and developers are finding niches that were previously considered risky business. Seriously, in a world of safe, rushed sequels, how does a game entitled Gratuitous Space Battles exist?

I am glad that there are developers willing to cater to all audiences and that brilliant people are pioneering in all directions, but I am even more glad that some of those brilliant minds have chosen to return to gaming's birthplace: simplicity. The earliest hardware only allowed for simple, unassuming games with basic mechanics, but this era formed the basis for some of the best-selling games of all time (Tetris anyone?).

While making a conscious effort to not degrade more complex games, I'd like to celebrate the Simplicity Renaissance and my favorite games that are leading the way.

First, let me say that "simple" does not mean "shallow". The terms are often confused. The games I'm going to talk about have a wealth of content based on simple mechanics. Truly great mechanics have near endless implementation. Just think about how many great games have come out of the simple platforming mechanics of Mario.



An indie darling by virtually everyone's reckoning, Super Meat Boy is built with masterful level design and painstakingly iterated locomotion controls....and not much more. No really, think about it. Meat Boy can't hold anything, shoot anything, use items, nothing. In fact, it's even more of a Mario redux because Meat Boy can't even jump on anything. He traverses hundreds of amazingly designed levels by running and jumping.

From the amazing music to the hilarious cutscenes, Super Meat Boy is a love letter to the past 3 decades of gaming brilliance and manages to pay its greatest respect by simply improving upon the past.

Overall, this game has brutal difficulty, but an amazing learning curve that never feels unfair or stifling. The amount of amazing content that came out of such a timeless, basic mechanic is mindblowing. Add to that the interesting array of unlockable characters who can mix up mechanics in a variety of the ways, and you have a game that is infinitely replayable.



This game was not one-mechanic simple, but each world in Braid demonstrates masterful progression of a given mechanic. At first glance, each mechanic is pretty self-explanatory, but then the game turns the mechanic on its ear by forcing the player to deconstruct it and apply it in totally different ways.

Braid is notoriously difficult, but like Super Meat Boy, it is not an arbitrary difficulty. Unlike Super Meat Boy, though, Braid is not upfront about its difficulty. Braid is not really a game of skill, it is a game of puzzles with a very basic emphasis on execution. Whereas Super Meat Boy took Mario to its skill-based extreme, Braid took the ideas from Mario and pulled them in the thinking man's direction.



While I very obviously have a penchant for independent developers, I think Nintendo really earned a place on this list with this entry. As a company, they have channeled the accessibility into a roiling juggernaut of hundred dollar bills. While most of their games were developed in this spirit (for better or worse in the case of Smash Bros. fanboys), Kirby's Epic Yarn is the pinnacle of this development.

No recent Nintendo game has achieved such blissful simplicity with such optional tension. At the core of the "hardcore gamer" flareup, anyone who has actually played this game knows that simple completion of the levels is not where the real sense of accomplishment comes from. In Kirby, a single hit can be the difference between a the coveted gold medal in abject failure. The fact the abject failure is totally optional and self-imposed makes for a single game that players from any place in the gaming spectrum can enjoy.



It has been almost a year to the day that the original Angry Birds was first released on mobile platforms. Known to many as the premier toilet game of 2010, Angry birds offers a gaggle* of wickedly smart puzzles disguised as a simple physics game.

Levels in the game are numerous and super-short, making it easy to jump in for a few tries during virtually any downtime. Rooted in the touchscreen revolution, Angry Birds has been the top-selling app on both the iOS and Android platforms for what seems like forever, and with the release of a new expansion, that title doesn't seem like it is going to be going away anytime soon.



I wanted to focus on Beat and Runner individually, but for the sake of brevity I will attempt to condense my unbridled love for this series. Gaijin Games is an incredible developer that has an amazing work ethos and a very obvious passion for the great games of the past. Every Bit.Trip game wears its inspiration on its sleeve while also forging bravely into gaming's previous red-headed stepchild: audio.

While many sound engineers have done amazing work to lay the foundation for gaming's current audio landscape, no developer outside of Harmonix has integrated music with gameplay in such an effective way. Add to that a brilliant grasp of mechanics and level design, and you have the a studio that deserves to be around for a long, long time.



The darling of the Simplicity Renaissance, Splosion Man is a brilliant example of everything that a timeless, classic videogame should be. If Super Meat Boy is the heart of the last 3 decades of gaming, then Splosion Man is its soul. Aside from the technical limitations, Splosion Man is a game born out of a one-button era.

The mechanic is simple: press a button and you "splode". Exploding propels Splosion Man forward and into the air in whichever direction the joystick is currently being pressed. Then, Twisted Pixel takes this simple concept and expands it into one clever scenario after another. The entire length of the game felt fresh and new with "Wow"-inducing setpieces peppering what is a truly supreme game.

It should be noted here that this article was inspired by a recent oversight on my part. I'm not much of a multiplayer kind of guy, so I honestly never even noticed the menu option in Splosion Man. However, if you, like me, did not ever explore Splosion Man's multiplayer, please go rectify that. It gave me some of the most powerfully co-operative experiences that I've had in recent memory. You will feel awesome that you managed to pull off such complicated challenges with two fallible human beings.

Honorable Mentions: NHL Arcade, World of Goo, Katamari Series, Pixeljunk Shooter

*I didn't even notice the pun at first, but it's too good (see:bad) to delete now.