Bringing in the end of 2011 with a happy little ring, the 22nd Ludum Dare competition challenged participants to make a game based on a given theme within a 48 hour time frame. Over 700 entries were submitted, and after some rounds of user voting, everything has been ranked and categorized according to awesomeness. We've featured a few of our favorites below, each one representing the compo's "alone" theme quite nicely!

Split Party! (Windows, 1.3MB, free) - A great twist on the traditional puzzle set-up, your job in Split Party! is to separate the colored blocks so they're all by themselves. Colors can't touch like colors, but different colors are allowed to be adjacent. Your cursor is a small box that rotates a set of four blocks, sort of like in Bejeweled Twist, making the whole effort a lot trickier than you might have thought.

Stray Whisker (Windows, 1.5MB, free) - Stray Whisker is the story of a kitty. A kitty left alone. While her human companion steps away, this little cat decides to hop up and find her all on her own. She encounters many things in the city and country along the way, including potted plants to break and other kitties to interact with. Simple, supremely charming, and enjoyable right down to the end. Oh, and there's a secret ending to find as well!

One Final Trek (Windows, 2MB, free) - An old hermit lady has one last big adventure in her, so she grabs a lantern and heads out into the caves. A slow, sticky-controlled platform adventure game, you must navigate platforms and enemies using severely limited moves and little more than a lantern for defense. Keep it lit so you can see, and remember you can blast fire from the front to burn things in your way. Other than that, anything can happen on this final trek...

Note: All games have been confirmed to run under Windows 7 and are virus-free. Mac users should try Boot Camp, Parallels, or CrossOver Games to play Windows titles, Linux users can use Wine. If you know of a great game we should feature, use the Submit link above to send it in!