Despite the protests of a certain famous film critic, more and more developers are adopting the medium of video games for artistic expression. Art games, designed to inspire reflection rather than sheer entertainment, keep popping up in the independent sphere. They combine the interactivity and fun of video games with artistic depth, often resulting in strange and beautiful gaming experiences. Tale of Tales, an independent game developer based in Belgium, has been hard at work producing some of the most intriguing titles in the art game world of the past few years. 

The five completed games in the Tale of Tales catalog share an eerie yet gorgeous aesthetic. Most of their titles entertain questions of human mortality. The Path, ToT's flagship release, settles into the horror genre to explore its themes. A retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fable, the game invites you to steer one of six sisters through the woods to her grandmother's house. It's a modest surrealist masterpiece, immersively atmospheric, with a great (and creepy) soundtrack. The opening screen instructs you not to stray from the path, but you lose the game unless you do. Within the woods, you encounter objects that inspire certain reactions from your chosen character. Eventually, of course, you must confront the wolf in the forest--and the story unfolds, in its own way, from there. 

The Graveyard explicitly takes on the theme of death. All you need to do within the game is guide an old woman through a cemetery. Most of the game takes place in the imagination as we speculate on what brings the woman to hobble through the graveyard, and what thoughts she must be having at the end of her life. It's a quietly sad and very short game, but potent in its ability to inspire reflection. 

Vanitas, Tale of Tales's first release for the iPhone, is less of a game and more of a reflective toy. You open a wooden box to find three objects inside it. You close it, open it again, and three new objects are inside. You can rearrange the objects by tilting the phone or by "picking them up" with your fingers. Some will decay or change when you touch them. The more you open and close the box, the more objects are added to the pool of combinations you might see inside. Some of them change over time. Some are genuinely surprising. The deeper you go into the game, the stranger and more poignant the contents of the box become. Vanitas is available at the App store, but there's a free web version you can play as well. 

Tale of Tales also has an MMO of sorts in their catalog called The Endless Forest. Really, it's more of a 3D chat room than a game. You get to be a deer with a human face running through the forest, interacting with other deer. Occasionally the sylvan gods will disrupt your world. The character design is remarkably strange in keeping with the developer's overall surrealist aesthetic. 

If you enjoy a little darkness and weirdness in your art games, the Tale of Tales repertoire ought to be up your alley. Some of the designs, especially in The Path, remind me of American McGee's Alice. The gameplay of these titles might be more subtle than most, but they function as fascinating little works of art. Most are available for download either as demos or in full.