Panoramical

This musical experience is so, so, so weird but in a very good way. What's key to appreciating it is throwing away any preconceived notion of what a game "should" be and then realizing it's more of a toy you mess with than "make progress on." You're free to pass from one blank screen to the next by holding down the space bar, and from there you begin to tinker with your controls to tweak the music in the background and the visuals on-screen. What emerges is entirely up to you based on the pre-running default images and melodies in the blank screen: By holding down any one of nine keys and moving the mouse around, you bring different visual and audio effects into play. The result is mesmerizing, bewildering, and entrancing. Watching clouds and rain or jagged lines and shapes emerge out of the nothingness, and then finding the perfect visual to complement your current mood or make you laugh, is the sort of experience only a computer or a digital game can offer, and this takes ample advantage of that. As such, it's hard to chart on the "good/bad" binary, but it certainly is memorable and hard to put down.