Yep, it’s Catamites (or catmitts) at the wheel again. His offbeat RPG Space Funeral was of the most unusual and incredibly awesome indie games I’ve played this year, but Catamites has most certainly been a busy guy since then, cooking up a bunch of newer titles to make anyone who downloads them appreciate his take on familiar game genres and gameplay conventions. Goblet Grotto is a strange, addictive third-person exploration adventure game where you… collect goblets. Well, there’s a lot more going on under the hood, but revealing it would spoil the fun. Hell, you SHOULDN’T even watch that speed run video above (too late, huh? Oh, OK…) as it’s a fast way through the game and you need to really boogie around the game world to see and interact with as much as possible. What’s cool here is there’s a very functional game world and characters here and all those bizarre sounds and strange hieroglyphs onscreen have some meaning as does every action button on the console.

The fun part in all this (next to collecting goblets) is interacting with characters and objects in the environment. Just going around jamming on the spacebar (which makes a “KILL!” sound each time you tap it) isn’t the best solution (but it does get rid of wolves and other creatures that attack) and yes, you’ll die a lot (unless you cheated by watching that video above). However, the game grabs you, sucks you in and has you hooked in because of the offbeat visuals and eccentric sound design. Anyway, blah and blah and blah – go get this NOW, I say. It runs on PC and Macs, so you Apple-heads don’t need to sit there pouting about not being able to play a decent game. No matter what you play it on, you’ll get a few laughs, scratch your head and maybe even say “WTF???” a few times. I think that’s what Catamites wants, so please do oblige him. Oh yeah, check out his other games as well at Harmony Zone – all are worth trying out (and hell, they’re all **FREE**, so there’s no commitment other than the time it takes to download and play them).