An adventure game with retro graphics that frequently breaks the fourth wall. You play as a child named Niko, but you the player are treated as separate from Niko and occasionally addressed directly. Niko (who has no explicit gender but for convenience I shall refer to as male) wakes up in a dying world with no idea how he got there. It’s soon revealed that he is the prophesied savior of this world and that he’ll need the player’s help to fulfill his mission. You then take him on a pilgrimage to restore the sun.

A game in which you play as a boy trying to find his handheld game console each day after his mother has hidden it. Each day is its own short level, which is a room-escape-like puzzle generally solvable in under a minute. They start fairly logical but quickly become totally unhinged, such as blocking your access to the cupboard containing your game with a constant stream of bicyclists. Doing anything that frightens or injures the boy - or being spotted by the mother - is an instant game over requiring you to restart the day but the puzzles are short enough that this isn’t too painful. The game isn’t very challenging and most of the value comes from seeing what bizarre and amusing situation will crop up next.

A game in which you play as a boy trying to find his handheld game console each day after his mother has hidden it. Each day is its own short level, which is a room-escape-like puzzle generally solvable in under a minute. They start fairly logical but quickly become totally unhinged, such as blocking your access to the cupboard containing your game with a constant stream of bicyclists. Doing anything that frightens or injures the boy - or being spotted by the mother - is an instant game over requiring you to restart the day but the puzzles are short enough that this isn’t too painful. The game isn’t very challenging and most of the value comes from seeing what bizarre and amusing situation will crop up next.

A short (one and a half hours or so) adventure game with a time travel gimmick. As a spiritual successor to Cat Poke, the structure and controls are quite similar. Walk left and right and occasionally into a door or up stairs, picking up anything you can because it’ll solve a puzzle later. This game adds dialog options and streamlines inventory management - now, if you walk to a place where you can use one of your items you’ll just get a button prompt to do so. There’s also a place where you can time travel between two eras, effectively doubling the size of the world.

A simple and relaxing card game. Cards are placed into piles on the table with the layout varying between levels and generally becoming more complex as the game goes on. The player can deal cards from the remaining deck one at a time onto their foundation. The top card of a table pile may be moved onto the foundation if it’s one rank higher or lower than the foundation’s current top card, which reveals the next card in the table pile. The goal is to clear as many cards from the table as possible before the deck runs out.

A 2D mining Metroidvania and a direct sequel to SteamWorld Dig. Like before, you dig up and sell ores, find and buy upgrades and new abilities, and periodically have platform challenges and a boss fight or two. But this time everything’s bigger and better. The world is larger and more varied and new powers have a much greater effect on how you traverse it. There’s no longer any need to buy ladders (thanks to the new movement abilities) or teleporters back to the surface (as there’s an extensive fast travel system). While there is some backtracking to get access to new areas with your new powers, the fast travel and the shockingly good map make this painless. You can also decide which upgrades to use based on your current goals - reassigning your “upgrade cogs” to maximize your earning potential, your combat survivability, your mining efficiency, etc. I normally don’t like having to fuss about with loadouts but here I found it an enjoyable part of the gameplay loop because the UI is so painless and you get new abilities to try and more cogs to assign at a good rate.

A 3D platformer in the vein of the original Jak and Daxter or Ratchet & Clank that wouldn’t have been out of place releasing right next to them in the early 2000s. Play as silent cat person Skylar accompanied by chatty owl Plux and platform through diverse areas collecting pickups, fighting enemies, and solving the occasional puzzle.

A short and simple first-person 3D parkour platformer. Run, jump, and climb your way onto a series of platforms to restore life (platforms start as bare concrete but become grassy when you step on them) and activate buttons that raise up more platforms to restore. The visuals are unobtrusively simple and cleanly beautiful and the uplifting electronic soundtrack perfectly matches the calmly energetic gameplay.

A short 3D platformer created by a team of game design grad students and released for free on Steam. The mechanics never get especially complicated - they don’t really have time to. You can run, jump, double-jump, and shoot a burst of wind that activates a few different kinds of things in the environment. There are also some flowers that act as bounce pads, launching you higher than you can jump.

A beautiful game that’s a little difficult to categorize. Each level is the dream of a flower in which you use gyroscope controls to direct the wind and gather petals, bloom flowers, and breathe life and color into various objects or structures, sometimes opening new pathways to follow. There’s no dialog and the abstract story is told atmospherically as you progress through the dreams. A single playthrough of all the levels may take about an hour, but they are intended to be replayed.