Foggy Times at Pastel Games

A new flash game called "The Fog Fall" was recently released by Mateusz Skutnik of Pastel Games. Skutnik, as some of you know, is the incredibly prolific creator of numerous flash-based point-and-click adventure-style games, such as the Covert Front series that earned the #2 spot on indiegames.com's Best Freeware Adventure Games of 2007. The Fog Fall would appear to represent the start of a new series, although other series (including Covert Front and DaymareTown) are still being produced.

The game has the same haunting look and feel as the Covert Front series, although The Fog Fall takes place later in time, in an alternate post-nuclear history around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The overall series objective is not entirely clear, but the graphics style and the sound effects make for a very typically enjoyable experience. These are simple games, and often it distills down to just hotspot searching and keypad puzzles, but they are also undeniably engaging and entertaining. There was one particular puzzle in this one that left me scratching my head and reaching for the walkthrough, and I'm convinced I never would have figured it out otherwise. But despite that, I found it to be a nice short diversion. Over time this particular type of gameplay or visual style may lose its appeal, but for now I know I'm still enjoying it and I hope Skutnik keeps putting these out for some time to come.

You can play the free game online or download it at ArcadeTown.com. Go on. You know you want to.

On a related note, Skutnik also just came out with the fourth installment of the "10 Gnomes" series, this one called "Foggy Flat". For those of you unfamiliar with this series, they are short games all with the same one goal: find the 10 gnomes hidden in the pictures in less than 10 minutes, with a simple point-and-click interface. Very simple, and entirely a hotspot search, but disturbingly addicting.

Enjoy.