Friday Free Game: The Road Less Taken Friday, March 16, 2007

I like to recommend games that are more polished than this, but I was surprised at how quickly I became addicted to The Road Less Taken; it's a strange little game. Move a yellow dot towards a green square while avoiding the numbered red squares. There's a pattern to it, and as Raph Koster says in A Theory of Fun, "once we see a pattern we delight in tracing it and in seeing it reoccur" (p. 27). The presentation is low-fi, but it grabs you because you just know you're smarter than it is. You see the patterns and want to master it.

I strongly suggest you try this game and ask yourself after ten or more levels: why is this fun?