A first-person puzzle exploration game with a stark aesthetic. In this sort of plot-light puzzle game, the motivation to keep playing comes from a desire to see what interesting new mechanics and surprises will come next. Most of Antichamber’s surprises come from subverting expectations about the nature of space and reality, such as by having hallways rearrange themselves when you aren’t looking. To me, the results are largely tedious - it’s not about being clever to solve problems that follow consistent rules, it’s about the game designer feeling clever by deceiving you and often wasting your time.

A runner game inside a puzzle game with some less categorizable bits in between, Pony Island is a lighthearted 2-3 hour experience that pokes fun at shady game monetization techniques. Despite casting developers who use these strategies as literally the devil, it’s much gentler than, say, Little Inferno’s commentary on the same topic. Even Lucifer is shown to care more about whether people like his game than whether they sell their souls to him.

A beautiful but thematically incoherent game where you steer a fish and a crane down a tunnel through targets. Hit enough targets and the animals merge into a dragon which you fly around outside the tunnel for a bit, collecting color which you then use to skywrite briefly before moving on to the next level. The levels have different gimmicks, some of which are better than others - a particularly frustrating level has the tunnel targets move unpredictably while you’re heading toward them. The game seems to want to say things about separation and togetherness, love and longing, but none of the mechanics support those themes all that well. It’s fun enough and pretty enough and has good enough music that it’s enjoyable as long as it lasts, but since it never really adds up to anything it ends up being forgettable.

A puzzle platformer with gorgeous art and a beautiful soundtrack. Your main tool is the ability to rewind time, and several related mechanics are introduced over the course of the game. The various ways they interact force you to stretch your brain through a series of unbelievably clever puzzles, one or two of which will have you reaching for YouTube to understand what must be done. There is no shame in this. The story is ambiguous and usually disconnected from the gameplay - but when they do connect, the emotional punch is quite strong.

This game wants to be atmospheric and moody, and sometimes - briefly - it is. Other times the game supplies unnecessary text narration telling you how to feel. The puzzle platforming nearly always boils down to finding the shiny piece of the environment and hitting the interact button, with the only added complexity being time pressure via instant-death enemies. Mechanics are introduced and then ignored instead of being explored and combined to create interesting situations. (There’s exactly one satisfying puzzle which actually combines elements and has multiple stages, and it happens inside the circus tent.) Bizarrely, the level design features many pointless dead-ends - until you beat the game once, and can then return to those dead-ends to find collectibles that ostensibly add context to the game’s story, but don’t really clarify anything and leave things just as vague and contradictory as before. It’s an uninteresting way to lengthen the few hours of gameplay. (Do you really want to explore the world again, after effectively being punished for it the first time? You do if you want all the trophies!) Still, the premise is cool, the aesthetics are consistent and enjoyable, and the soundtrack is pretty great.

A match-3 dating sim, because why the hell not. The match-3 gameplay is surprisingly deep and compelling, while the dating sim mechanics are serviceable at best and feel rote and shallow by comparison. Their interactions cause some unfortunate implications, such as it being mechanically to your advantage to stop dating a girl once you’ve slept with her. The art is decent, the writing and voice acting give the girls distinct (if one-dimensional) personalities and the soundtrack is entirely forgettable.

A well told and emotionally engaging short (an hour or so) story about a boy and a bird, wrapped in the language and logic of dreams and memories (and told with no dialog). But the sections where the player has control present such limited options and are over so quickly, it’s not often clear why the game bothers with them at all - this might have been better served as a non-interactive experience.

An interactive story wrapped in the style and presentation of a SNES RPG. For folks with the right nostalgia, this is a very effective format and I personally would love to see more like it. The premise is compelling - you play as a pair of technicians who can rewrite the memories of the dying to grant them their life’s wish. The characterization and aesthetic are quite strong and the writing treats the player with a lot of respect. The central mystery is answered fairly explicitly, but there are a lot of related questions and hints that do fit together and make sense but which the player is left to connect on their own.

A rhythm-based roguelike where you maintain a multiplier by keeping your actions on the beat. This structure encourages you to rely on instinct and act quickly and is quite effective at creating flow - at least, it is when you know what you’re doing. To keep your multiplier, you have to make split-second decisions accounting for a decent amount of complexity and variety in monster movement and attack patterns. Memorizing which color slime moves which way and so on presents a fairly steep learning curve. If you can stick with it long enough to internalize the rules, and if you enjoy the soundtrack, you’re in for a good ride.

A text-based idle game from before those were everywhere, and for my money it’s still the best one. Unusually for an idle game, it has an actual story with an actual ending. It presents a very coherent experience - the sparse visuals and writing, the mechanics that make sense on the surface but are really dark if you think through their implications, and the environmental storytelling of the post-apocalyptic setting that you explore in roguelike sections that spice up the gameplay all come together to create a compelling atmosphere.

A 2D space sim featuring procedurally generated weapons. It’s a neat idea, but it doesn’t really deliver - most guns have very pretty effects but are not actually useful in combat. Dodging enemy fire and leading targets in frenetic space battles is always fun, but here it’s wrapped in a generic quest system of the “Kill ten space pirates” variety and an overly complicated yet still shallow upgrade system. I’d rather play either a pure spacefighting game or a space sim where the rest of the experience has more depth and polish.

A match-3 game with endless runner and RPG elements - obstacles and enemies must be overcome by matching the right kinds of tiles, and other tiles grant resources that can be used to purchase upgrades between runs. The game’s best moments are when everything flows smoothly - you’re chaining tile matches, blasting through obstacles, and racking up huge point bonuses. But even when things stop flowing, it’s not frustrating - that’s your chance to spend those resources and make the next run that much better. Notably, 10,000,000 has an actual ending - rather than trying to hook the player for as long as possible until the gameplay becomes dull and the player drifts off, as other games of this sort often do, 10,000,000 lasts just the right length of time to be satisfying throughout.