I'd never heard of Michael Brough when I downloaded his iPhone game Corrypt, and my first impression of it wasn't entirely positive. It had stark, surrealist pixel graphics and very little animation. After solving the first couple of simplistic puzzles, I found myself hopelessly stuck on an early challenge involving lots of boxes in a cramped room. Frustrated, I quit the game and quickly forgot about it.

But Corrypt refused to go away. IndieGames.com hailed the PC version as the best free puzzle game of 2012, and another of Brough's games, VESPER.5, was nominated for the 2013 Independent Games Festival's prestigious Nuovo award for innovation.

What finally snared me was a glowing review of Corrypt penned by Frank Lantz, creator of Drop7 and the director of New York University's Game Center. "This small game, with its rough edges and its cryptic, self-consuming topography," Lantz wrote, "will repay the attention you give it a thousandfold."

I decided to take another look. Corrypt, upon proper exploration, revealed itself to be a brilliantly designed puzzle game, unforgiving and unwilling to accommodate players who refuse to give it their full attention. Peel back one layer, and it reveals another more surprising one. Then it does that again, and again, then it flips itself inside out and laughs at your expectations.

"The way [it] works, you're not sure if it's something wrong with the game, or if it's something intentional," Brough says. His smile fills my Skype window. "I've had people e-mail me saying 'there's a bug in your game,' and then describing it exactly as it's meant to work."

Brough, a 27-year-old New Zealand native, makes games that confound players' expectations. Brough has grabbed numerous awards and captured the attention of the indie gaming community, but many respected developers say his games are too ugly to catch on with a mainstream audience. His games might be too weird, his style too divisive, for him to make any money in the ruthless games business.

Around the time Brough turned 11, his family bought a Tandy computer with BASIC installed. Brough spent countless hours of his childhood mucking about with the programming language, making text adventures and other simple games that he'd share with his parents.

You won't have an easy time solving Corrypt's killer puzzles, but surprises await those who do. Image courtesy Michael Brough

While he tinkered with BASIC, Brough often encountered bugs. He'd make a small change in the code, and a game would break in an interesting way. But instead of immediately fixing the error, Brough became fascinated with the bugs themselves.

"The idea that a bug could produce strange and interesting effects," he says, "is a mythology that I like."

"If, when something goes wrong, it just crashes, that tells you nothing," Brough explains. "If something goes wrong and it keeps going, that reveals something to you about how it works, and how the computer thinks."

With modern hardware like the iPad, Brough complains that the fun of toying around with computers, "that feeling of being at a low level, feeling close to the way computers work," is gone. For him, the oft-touted "magical" consumer-friendliness of Apple's devices is a restriction on learning opportunities.

"Now you have an iPad, and you don't know what's going on under the screen," he says. "It's basically a piece of magic."

After completing a degree in math and computer science at the University of Auckland, Brough moved to London and began working towards a Ph.D. He earned a reasonable amount while working on scholarship at his university, but continued making games, including the beautiful, abstract strategy game Vertex Dispenser, which even Brough admits may have been too esoteric. It combined elements of shooters and real-time strategy games with a complex puzzle system, and many players felt overwhelmed. "I just could not get my head around those concepts at the same time," said one.

Halfway through the Ph.D., Brough burned out. He quit academic life, becoming a full-time game developer. He followed his wife, now the family's principal breadwinner, to Scotland, and has for the previous year worked tirelessly on his games, producing a diverse portfolio of Technicolor puzzlers, roguelikes and multiplayer games.

Take for example Helix, another Independent Games Festival nominee. It's a space shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, but without any shooting. Instead, players defeat enemies by carefully flying around them in circles.

Glitch Tank, an iPad game for two players, is an obvious manifestation of Brough's lifelong appreciation of glitches. Its fat, stark pixel art pops and crackles on the screen, always seemingly on the verge of falling apart completely. Each player's controls, a panel of four buttons, is unreliable, with new buttons shuffling in and out with use. It plays like a Game Boy cartridge that's been dropped in a puddle and trampled by schoolchildren, but it's all carefully, intentionally designed.

Even the game's marketing seems glitchy. Brough uses the App Store product description space to describe it as "A digital board %ame⚡⌁ Competitive retro action/strate%* for two pla*ers░."

Zaga-33, a roguelike with permadeath, is much more subdued, although it does its best to confuse players. Each time the game is played, the effects of all its items are randomized. What was once a teleport skill in one game becomes a deadly laser in the next, and a result each playthrough inspires the same sense of careful curiosity that an entirely new game would.

In Zaga-33, it's not just the levels that are randomized. Image courtesy Michael Brough

These are only a few of Brough's most recent, best fleshed-out works, though. His portfolio includes dozens of bizarre titles: Babletron 2010, an abstract typing visualizer; Kompendium an entire "album" of tiny two-player games; and Reverse Passage 2: Mother's Edition, a sort of faux art game that encourages players to "hold Z to feel emotions."

For years, Brough produced these games in obscurity, but the recent IGF nomination of Vesper.5 exposed an entirely new audience to his work. Brough's games have earned the attention of some of the most influential people in the indie games scene, and now a horde of accomplished game designers, writers and artists have played Brough's games.

Brough's new audience has plenty of praise for his work, but they also have no shortage of criticisms. Some Brough fans think that the aesthetic elements of the games he makes are, simply put, really ugly.

"If Corrypt had more-polished graphics and sound, and were a bit longer," more people would play it, wrote Braid designer Jonathan Blow on Twitter, who said he found the game's color palette "hard to deal with" but loved it just the same.

In an otherwise positive review of Zaga-33, Modojo.com writer John Bedford described the soundtrack as sounding like "a drunk man with a synthesizer [rolling] his face slowly back and forth across the keys." Greg Wohlwend, one of the creators of the beautiful puzzle game Hundreds, advised Brough that if he "worked on the visuals, the game would then be more accessible to outsiders."

Many indie game makers collaborate with other programmers, artists or musicians to handle those parts of videogame creation, but Brough does everything himself. One of the main appeals of making videogames for him is that they can be a synthesis of all other media.

"I get to do a bit of everything," he says. "Some design, then programming, draw a few pictures, try composing some music for a bit, yell into a microphone, write."

Brough feels that his work gains a personal element by having every aspect made by one pair of hands, even if he's not the greatest artist or musician.

"Sometimes it hurts a little, because I do put quite a bit of thought into this," he admits of the criticisms of his art and sound design. His main defense of his aesthetic style: "It appeals to me."

Even so, most of the other developers criticizing Brough's games are simply arguing that his style is in need of greater mainstream appeal, and they might be right. Despite increasing critical success and a loyal base of fans, Brough has had little commercial success: He's only sold about 700 copies of Corrypt, he says. His most successful title, Zaga 33, has sold 2,000 copies.

At only $0.99 for each download, that comes nowhere close to generating a livable income.

Still, he has his fans, and not everyone is put off by his glitchy, severe style. As one critic put it, "there is something undeniably elegant about Brough’s brand of ugliness, an ugliness that is somehow pleasing to look at."

Brough says he spent "far too long" (six years, on and off) working on Vertex Dispenser, but it may be his most inventive game. Image courtesy Michael Brough

Some give less backhanded praise to the signature Brough look. "Love the tactical movement, and the graphics are perfect," one fan wrote on the release page for Zaga-33.

Tell Brough about your experience with his games, and his face splits into a smile that reveals the genuine joy he gets out of his work. Brough isn't trying to maximize his profits, he's trying to create something with value for himself and for those who play it.

Well-designed games, he believes, can teach people how to do some things better. By simulating challenging situations, games can teach us about "managing unexpected situations... making good decisions, thinking about the costs of our actions and dealing with the consequences," he says.

Brough lists the card game Race for the Galaxy, designed by an economist named Thomas Lehmann, as a perfect example of a game that teaches a concept with a useful real-world application: opportunity cost, which refers to the idea that the cost of any action isn't just the material cost you pay to do it, but also the value of the other actions that you could've chosen instead.

Race for the Galaxy, Brough explains, has an exaggerated sense of opportunity cost. In the game, players have a hand of cards, and there are planets which they can settle. The number of cards you can play in a phase is limited. The catch: To play one card, you have to sacrifice another without using it, potentially losing access to it forever.

"I think having played that game helps me when I'm making decisions with opportunity costs in life," Brough told me.

"Well then," I respond, "what do you think the opportunity cost of making these games is?"

Brough sat quietly for a moment. "Massive," he said, finally, with a grin. "From some people's perspective it's a terrible decision, but..." Brough shrugged his shoulders. "I think it's already worth it."

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the nature of Brough's work history. During college, he had a part-time tutoring job, not a programming job.