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. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but you’d be better off playing Jetpack Joyride or something.

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. Thankfully it’s executed well, with the vertical acceleration making very satisfying curves as you weave between obstacles that come faster and faster.

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. This is the core on which countless successors have built their gameplay, but here it is pure and simple - and at the time, it was revolutionary.

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.

A puzzle platformer with a charming minimalist aesthetic. You play as a box with the ability to extrude, retract, and detach a few more boxes of the same size which can be used in a variety of ways - making platforms or bridges, shielding against hazards, or snaking through gaps or onto high ledges. Your goal is to use these boxes to proceed through a series of puzzle levels.

A Musou game set in the One Piece universe. The adventure-filled and semi-fantastical setting is a great fit for the gameplay, as are the over-the-top super-powered characters. The game’s story mode presents a hyper-condensed take on the nearly twenty years’ worth of One Piece plot arcs and thus serves as a solid primer on the world, its characters, and their relationships, although for any real depth or detail you’ll have to refer to the source material. There’s also a “dream” mode that remixes the maps/characters/factions/objectives for an endless but plot-light series of semi-random levels.

A sort of 2D dogfighting shooter by way of infinite runners. Pick a combination from available engines, weapons, and hulls with different properties and then fly around shooting down other planes and completing missions to unlock more parts. Once your plane is shot down, you can pick a new combination and try again.

A visual novel puzzle game with a player character who dies under mysterious circumstances at the very beginning. As a ghost, you’ve lost your memories but gained the ability to possess and manipulate objects - and also to rewind time and observe the death of the recently deceased. Your main goal is to solve the mystery of who you are and why you died, and you get caught up in a web of intrigue along the way.

An extremely short game where you play as a preteen girl trying to figure out sex by bumping her Barbie and Ken dolls together in the minute or two before her mother gets home. You control - loosely - the position of the dolls, and then you’re given a tally of how many times you “might have done sex” and are either caught by mom or put the dolls away just in time to avoid this fate. Either way, the game ends.

The best competitive spelling game I’ve ever played. Two players compete for territory on a hex grid; each player starts with one hex of territory that is designated their “Capital.” Hexes next to active territory have random letters displayed and can be used to spell words. Players take turns spelling words to take territory - any hex you use that is next to your territory (or chains back to your territory through other letters you’re using this turn) becomes your territory, and any enemy territory adjacent to territory you take reverts to neutral and becomes letters for the next turn. Capturing an enemy Capital grants an extra turn and causes another of their hexes to be assigned their new Capital. The game ends when one player has no territory left.