Clever game design

[Gors]

I wouldn't call those "clever" in its own conception, but rather "alternative".

This is not to make the game sound bad, though. Anything that exists borrow concepts from other things that already exist. This referencing and mutation of said concepts is how creativity works.

Given your example, you said that Yume Penguin Monogatari is clever (and it is), but that does not make Kirby less clever. Which in turn doesn't make Mario less clever, and so on. Those are simply derivative of already existing concepts - alternative concepts, if I may call them that.

Breaking the mold can be usually seen as clever, but it's worthy to note that even if the game or any work follow a solid premise even if it's not totally groundbreaking, that would be clever too.

An example of cleverness without regarding alternative gameplay is Atari 2600's Pacman. It was poorly received at launch and is widely regarded as one of the games that buried (lol) Atari's reputation in the gaming scene, but it was a programming feat with many interesting features.

The game was sereverly downgraded from the arcade version, but the game had its own spots of brilliance:

1- The game's orientation was changed from vertical to horizontal screen to better accomodate in the TV screens;
2- The pellets were changed to brown wafer biscuits - so that they could also be used to make the wall bricks in the maze;
3- The limitation of the console cut down on the number of the ghosts on-screen and only one could be displayed at a time, causing them to flicker. However this exploited the humans' persistence of vision and the poor quality of the CRT monitors, so since they flickered fast and the screen didn't refresh as fast, the ghosts appeared to be transparent.

Again, this game was a flop, but in retrospect, the game had a great deal of cleverness within its development..