An open-world action adventure with an emphasis on stealth. It’s set in the world of The Lord of the Rings, taking place before The Fellowship of the Ring and after The Hobbit. The player takes the role of Talion, a ranger stationed at the Black Gate of Mordor. His family is killed by Sauron’s troops and he teams up with an elven wraith to seek revenge.
A stealth/flight game where you play as a mosquito. Your goal is to stockpile blood from a typical Japanese family without being noticed and swatted. Each stage features a member of the family as they go about their day - the daughter as she relaxes in her room, the mother as she makes dinner, the father as he tends to his flowers, and so on.
A ChoiceScript game set in a near future in which you play as a tour guide on the moon. Your character’s job is lonely and dull and so they pass the time with video games, their favorite being a sci-fi action game with zombies and ghosts. Then your next tour group turns out to be the designers of that game on a work offsite.
A short comedic Twine game that ostensibly has you play as an explorer seeking the eponymous temple but mostly just makes fun of Twine as a platform. Not in an affectionate or even fair way, but in a way that makes the creators seem willfully ignorant and uncreative. It’s a Twine game for people who don’t like Twine games and have no desire to broaden their horizons but would rather mock that which they do not understand.
A short Twine game in which you play as a straight young woman at a dance club looking to get safely and responsibly laid. There are four men you can pursue with different personalities and while the story broadly takes the same path regardless of your choices certain events will occur differently based on what you do and in what order you do it.
A short visual novel that appears to be about going on a date, is soon revealed to be about keeping your date alive (hence the title), but then is actually about the collaborative nature of storytelling. Not much will be new to you if you’ve played other games that get meta on this theme, but the game is a well-executed and skillfully-written take with some surprisingly emotionally affecting dialog.
An auto-runner with ten discrete levels rather than endless procedural generation. You avoid bad things and collect good things by moving up, down, left, or right within a small area on one side of the screen and try to get a high score. That’s about it. Although the surprisingly strong art is suggestive of much more, there’s very little on offer here.
A one-button endless runner. Move to the right, gradually picking up speed, while holding the button/touchscreen to fire your jetpack and move up or releasing it to move down. Pick up coins and avoid a variety of hazards to keep flying as long as you can. That’s the core, and the game wouldn’t work if that didn’t feel good by itself.
The game that defined the modern Auto-Runner genre. You play as an anonymous runner in a grayscale pixel-art cityscape fleeing some kind of invasion. Avoid procedurally-generated obstacles and pitfalls by jumping and survive as long as you can.
That’s about it, and the game would be considered a very minimal endless runner (albeit one with a distinctive and enjoyable aesthetic) if released today.
A short first-person story with some shooty bits and some not-so-shooty bits. It’s a darkly comic commentary on the limited interaction and worldview present in most first-person shooters - or maybe it’s an unsubtle but effective metaphor for PTSD? It depends how much you think authorial intent matters in defining the meaning of a game.