Format: Flash
Developer: Totem_nee
www.gameshot.org/?id=1020

It's a brave new year, so do tell me: what's your least favourite euphemism for death? As far as I'm concerned, the matter’s too close to call. There's ‘departed’, which always carries with it the rail timetable's suspicion that your much-missed grandmother, colleague or teacup Chihuahua might be due to pull into Paddington in the next few hours with a buffet car attached. Then there’s ‘passed on’, with its faint trace of viral infection and free-floating spiritualism. It's the very vagueness of that spiritualism which really gets to me, actually: a toothless unwillingness to name names. Where have they passed on to exactly? Heaven? Valhalla? Paddington?

It's hard to characterise most videogames' attitudes to death - other than as misleadingly temporary. But you can't fault their commitment to exploring the concept, whether it's the claustrophobic Cask Of Amontillado fate of the Tetris player (sorry, that reference is staggeringly pretentious, but you have to make those school exams count where you can) to the long drops and pained rebounds of Super Mario.

My very favourite, for reasons I have no desire to explore, is the graceless, bone-splintering tangles that Lara ends up in at the bottom of every cliff in Tomb Raider. This is death in all its unexpected awkwardness: an unblinking convergence of gravity and human vulnerability that almost makes you willing to overlook the fact that, nine times out of 10, it was the game’s useless camera that gave you that fatal shove. I've been told, but haven't bothered to Google this, that in Japan, Lara Croft merely shimmers a pale gold and returns to the last checkpoint when she dies, rather than folding up like wrong-headed take on human origami. Their loss.

All of which brings me to Death Game. Regardless of the title, Totem_nee’s slender offering isn’t actually that much of a game, granted, but it puts mortality front and centre, asking you to place yourself before a moving train, and jump out of the way as close to the moment of impact as possible. You can’t see the train coming, due to the top-down perspective, but you sure can hear it getting nearer, and the folksy, ominous chugging that builds towards your potential splattering adds a lot to the otherwise limp presentation.

Needless to say, you'll die often and you’ll die graphically, and although the art is largely lacking in style, the interface looks decidedly placeholder and the fun quotient is rather slim, the sheer charge created by the concept itself is enough to imbue proceedings with a nihilistic thrill. It's still up to the industry's old reincarnation tricks naturally, but that hardly affects Death Game's, um, impact.

Speaking of death and rebirth, the Friday Game will be passing on to emerge in a slightly new form in the weeks ahead, as a kind of weekly overview of the best – or at least most interesting - Flash, iPhone, web, and XNA games around. This is partly to save you from my own tendencies towards over-analysis, but also because there are plenty of fascinating titles swarming and multiplying across various oddball platforms that don't get enough press. For a starter, let me give you a shove towards Leave Home, by Hermitgames, an XNA offering that is far, far better than most of the stuff that ends up on Xbox Live Arcade, and can be yours at a fraction of the cost. Happy new year.