Great Downloads: Award-Winning Indie Games

As you creature changes, it gets larger and more complex, a process you can speed up by targeting specific organisms -- you are what you eat. Swimming up translates as "zooming out," while swimming down zooms to deeper and ominously darker planes. In those depths, you'll eventually encounter hostile organisms composed of multiple glowing dots, which must be fully consumed to convert your enemies into benign and edible particulate.

How do you beat it? That's not really the point, but if you manage to swim to the ocean bottom and defeat the final enemy, you'll float to the surface and be reborn a jellyfish-creature, at which point you can run the entire gauntlet again.

Download flOw(Freeware)

Remember Ultima? Tile-built worlds? Isometric view angles? Turn-based combat? Having the option to abandon your computer at will without hitting pause to prevent holy pandemonium from breaking loose?

Miss that? If so, you'll want to give Eschalon: Book One a try. It's a role-playing game (RPG) done up old-style, but rendered in clean, high-res lines and inviting hues that make it visually superior to most of its bygone predecessors. Like stats? It's got 'em. Loot? Scattered everywhere. Pick a class, a name, your attributes, and you're off to wrestle with oodles of enemies, plot twists, and your own missing memories.

Eschalon's world may not quite be Ultima-sized, but it's big enough, with a story that doesn't hold your hand or force you to tackle missions single-file. Give it a look if you miss this sort of thing, and know that it's called "book one" because it's the first in a planned trilogy. Plenty more to come, in other words. And why not? Like bell bottoms, sideburns, and platform shoes, there's no reason old school RPGs like this can't make a comeback.

Download Eschalon: Book One(Price: $27.95; Scope-limited demo)

Racing Pitch

True to its name, Racing Pitch involves getting dragsters to accelerate by half-growling, half-screaming into a microphone. That's right, a microphone, which means you'll need one to play (I used the USB mic that came with my Xbox 360 copy of Rock Band, but any headset will do). Pick a character to match your vox-box -- Stemcell-Bill sounds in the baritone range, while Miss O'Pzekt responds to a nice, screechy alto -- and you're ready to squeal, squawk, and rumble.

"Drag Race" lets you propel a race car with the sound of your voice down a stretch of track on a timer -- keeping the needle buried by maintaining a constant pitch is critical, and pulling that off without cracking or wavering unless you're a trained vocalist is harder than it sounds. "Pro Drag Race" is just "Drag Race" with a requirement to drop your voice at timed intervals to mimic shifting gears.

Download Racing Pitch(Freeware)

Mix a turn-based fighting game with floppy ragdoll physics and out pops Hampus S ö derstr ö m's deceptively simple Toribash. Boil human anatomy down to spheres on the ends of chubby pipe cleaners and you've got a sense for what Toribash's contenders look like. Click joints with your mouse then tap hotkeys to relax, hold, extend, or contract appendages in a contest to see who can inflict the bloodiest damage first. Turns zip by at intervals -- one is roughly equal to raising your arm from hip to head, or kicking a foot forward from flush with the ground to hip level -- and gauge your success by monitoring your "ghost," a translucent projection into the future represeneting what would happen if you ended your turn with your current selections. Tapping the spacebar commits your choices and advances the clock.