A huge group of indie game developers have come together to start your 2019 off right, and keep it that way for the whole year. The result is a free collection called Meditations which promises a new short game for each day of the year. Project creator Rami Ismail hopes that these games will serve as a chance for people to reflect and become inspired every day.
Ismail, a huge supporter of the independent game scene, was apparently inspired back in 2017 by the game TEMPRES. Even though it took him "no more than five minutes" to beat, he found himself wishing for a similar mini-experience every day. That wish was so strong that he spent 2018 gathering over 300 developers to make a collection of such games.
"What if every day, there was a small message from the past with a small game or toy to play with?" the Mediations website asks. "Meditations is a launcher that, every day, loads a small game and an accompanying text as a meditation, distraction, lesson, or inspiration for that day."
The games themselves will range in genre and topic, with Ismail teasing everything "from curious small puzzle games and challenging little platformers to personal games about life and loss and happiness and love and death and everything."
With the year just starting, I only had one game to go by. The first game happens to be TEMPRES, the very game that inspired the project. With the kind of extremely simplistic art style you'd expect of a game meant to be played in five minutes, it challenges you to solve a puzzle using white lines on a grey background.
Meditations is coded to work on Greenwich Mean Time, meaning that it will deliver a new game based on that clock despite whatever time zone you live in. The second and maybe even the third game will have arrived by the time this article is published. The unfortunate thing is that the launcher only gives one game at a time, with no library function, so if you miss a day you miss a game. Ismail says the only way to catch up on missed games is to wait until that day next year.
Since Mediations is free, Ismail points appreciative players to the left side of the launcher, where the creators of each game played so far are listed. He decided not to include a full credits list until December 31st, 2019 in order to give each day's developer a chance to shine. Should a player want to support a particular game, Ismail encourages them to tweet about it with the hashtag #meditationgames to foster awareness.
Overall it's an interesting experiment, and worth it for the very reasonable price of nothing. It's too early to say if it really will make you rethink your outlook on life or even just that way video games are perceived, but it does make for a positive start to 2019. Download it here.