The Central Committee's Choice:

East Side Story is a point-and-click mystery in the Tex Murphy mold (at least until that series got moldy), developed by Mikael and Eleen Nyqvist, a Swedish husband-and-wife team -- their fourth game, in fact, featuring the English sleuth Carol Reed. It's first person, meaning that, like Myst, you never see your protagonist onscreen; and like Myst, screens are static images, with hotpoints you can mouse over, and the ability to turn to either side and move forward or back.

The images, however, are not rendered 3D, but photography -- nicely captured photographs of the town of Norrköping, in Sweden. This has its good side and its bad; the photographs are technically excellent, and many of them very attractive, providing visual quality that would be hard (and expensive) to create with digital assets. On the bad side, well, the real world is full of irrelevant detail, and sometimes it's hard to see what elements of a scene are important and worth remembering, a problem compounded by the fact that the game is designed so that some on-screen elements are not hotspots when you first encounter them, but do become hotspots later, when a puzzle requires you to use some element.

Nefarious Plans, 1920’s Glam, and Teenage Flimflam

Dangerous High School Girls is a highly unusual game; set in a rather forbidding girl's high school in the 1920s, you lead a team of girls investigating a series of accidents, and surviving the often-nasty hazing you get from other girls. It is, thus, a story-driven game, but the actual gameplay is almost boardgame like; indeed, the graphics are purposefully designed to look like a vintage game board, and overcoming opponents doesn't rely on combat, but instead on a series of minigames that represent, in some sense, fibbing, taunting, exposing secrets, and making power plays.

Amoeba Shmup

Singularis is a sort of shmup for amoebas. You play Proto, a protozoan with the unlikely ambition of becoming the most powerful being in the universe. Initially, you can do nothing more than move (which, in the default control scheme, you do by choosing direction with the mouse and pressing the Up arrow to move forward, or the Back arrow to move back). Later on, you gain additional abilities, including cilia to let you row yourself forward more quickly, and -- I did call it a shmup -- a gun. Or if you prefer, the ability to shoot destructive viruses at enemies.

Make New Friends and Learn Their Secrets

Georgina Okerson specializes in light adventure games with anime-style graphics that are designed to appeal primarily to a young adult female audience (but that are perfectly enjoyable by those of us with a Y chromosome). In Summer Schoolgirls, you play a recent high school graduate going to an orientation program at an women's college, where you meet your roommate and the other girls in your dorm.

Interactive Novel with Puzzles

Georgina Okerson, creator of Cute Knight returns with Fatal Hearts, a charmingly quirky adventure game, of a sort, featuring a teen girl protagonist and a chilling set of murders. Featuring anime-inspired art and teenage angst in a horror story, Fatal Hearts has several different endings -- different enough that you'll want to play more than once to explore the different outcomes -- along with puzzle mini-games and a well-written story.

It's not a point-and-click adventure game in the usual style; indeed, it's more of an interactive graphic novel with puzzle-game aspects. As such, it's very accessible even to adventure game novices.

The "What Ifs" of World War II

Making History is more than a wargame; it's a grand strategic military, economic, and diplomatic simulation of the entire globe, starting in 1934, and going on until the end of the Second World War. If that happens, of course.

As such, it addresses one of the central failings of most WWII games; it doesn't lock you into a historical straightjacket, with Russia inevitably coming into the war even if the Nazis don't attack, and with the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor on inevitable schedule. Instead, you can play with all sorts of what-ifs: What if France had resisted the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1934? Or if Italy had gotten pissy about the Anschluss? Or if the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had stood firm behind Czechoslovakia in 1938?