A cute and relaxed adventure game casting the player as a young boy in a Tokyo suburb in the 1970s. You mostly run around and interact with the local children and adults. The kids actually act like kids, and it’s easy to get swept up the games and stories that are so important to them. Adults humor the children and while they clearly have their own grown-up concerns, to you and your friends these are inscrutable and unimportant.

A twin-stick shooter roguelike that casts you as a robot shooting up other robots in procedurally-generated caverns with touches of dark comedy.

The moment-to-moment gameplay feels good and there’s an interesting variety of enemies and weapons. The visibility mechanics, which hide enemies if you don’t have line of sight on them, make for exciting surprises. The tension never really lets up except at the end of each level (which I found exhausting) and aspects of the player training are weak (at the end of each level you choose one of three doors to go through, differentiated by icons that are supposed to tell you what to expect from the next level, but I never understood what they all meant).

A free-to-play match-3 RPG. The core of the gameplay is turn-based combat where you queue up as many matches as you can and then execute them simultaneously to power your attacks. Between fights there are a number of complex progression mechanics to become stronger that rely on some deliberate slowdowns, such as the spoils of combat only gradually turning into money and combat itself consuming a slow-recharge stamina meter. You can speed up progress by spending the premium currency, but there’s no way to permanently remove the stamina mechanic or other slowdowns.

A puzzle platformer based around the “switch” mechanic. Each level features blocks that can move between the foreground and the background. By hitting the switch button, the player can toggle the position of all such blocks in the level simultaneously. The player must use this ability - along with standard running, jumping, and shooting - to navigate the level, avoid hazards, and defeat enemies. In each level, the player character must round up five endangered civilians and then reach the exit.

A puzzle platformer based around the “switch” mechanic. Each level features blocks that can move between the foreground and the background. By hitting the switch button, the player can toggle the position of all such blocks in the level simultaneously. The player must use this ability - along with standard running, jumping, and shooting - to navigate the level, avoid hazards, and defeat enemies. In each level, the player character must round up five escaped convicts and then reach the exit.

The third of three games using a puzzle system somewhere between Minesweeper and Picross. Puzzles are presented on a hex grid with numeric clues that allow the player to deduce which cells must be colored in and which must be blanked out. The clues are a mix of Picross-like ones giving information about the cells in a row or column and Minesweeper-like ones giving information about the cells near another cell, but in both cases there’s some extra variation and complexity mixed in.

The second of three games using a puzzle system somewhere between Minesweeper and Picross. Puzzles are presented on a hex grid with numeric clues that allow the player to deduce which cells must be colored in and which must be blanked out. The clues are a mix of Picross-like ones giving information about the cells in a row or column and Minesweeper-like ones giving information about the cells near another cell, but in both cases there’s some extra variation and complexity mixed in.

The first of three games using a puzzle system somewhere between Minesweeper and Picross. Puzzles are presented on a hex grid with numeric clues that allow the player to deduce which cells must be colored in and which must be blanked out. The clues are a mix of Picross-like ones giving information about the cells in a row or column and Minesweeper-like ones giving information about the cells near another cell, but in both cases there’s some extra variation and complexity mixed in.

A game featuring a modified three-dimensional variant of Picross. Instead of a grid made of squares to selectively fill in to reveal an image, the player is presented with a rectangular prism made of cubes to selectively chip away to reveal an object. The clues work differently as well - not every row or column has clues, and the ones that do have a single number indicating how many cubes should be left in that row or column. The number is presented alone if the cubes are contiguous, circled if they are in exactly two contiguous groups, or in a square if they are in three or more contiguous groups.

A Color Picross game. The pictures are more interesting than in standard Picross, but at least in this case some puzzles feature colors that are very similar and difficult to tell apart, which is needlessly frustrating. It’s also not always easy to paint the right blocks with your finger on a phone’s touchscreen, which is probably why the puzzles are kept so small. Unfortunately, the result is puzzles that are not very engaging and only take a couple of minutes to finish. After each puzzle you’re given a score of one, two, or three stars based on your completion time - which is a bad idea, since it encourages immediate replay of levels if you don’t hit the goal time on your first play.