A direct sequel to Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy that is a radical departure in tone, difficulty, and structure. While it does still have a strong sense of humor, it’s much darker than its predecessor, replacing the bucolic setting of the first game with a techno-dystopian walled city and opening with Jak being subject to torturous experiments for two years that leave him with a superpowered “Dark Jak” side. It’s also a great deal more difficult, both because the player is tasked with much more challenging objectives and because the structure has changed such that the player can no longer pick and choose which objectives to complete. The Super Mario 64-like hub-and-spokes framework has been discarded in favor of an open-world mission progression of the sort popularized by Grand Theft Auto III. Sometimes you’ll have multiple plot threads open simultaneously and you can choose which mission chain to tackle first, but you still have to complete all the missions in order to advance the story. The player thus has less freedom, but this also means that the story can be more complex and better integrated with the gameplay, and correspondingly there are far more dialog scenes and more characters who matter to the plot.

A 3D platformer in the mold established by Super Mario 64 (a series of hub areas with multiple non-linear levels each with several objectives that can be tackled in various orders but a certain number of objectives that is fewer than the number available must be completed to gain access to the next part of the hub with the next set of levels) but that evolves the formula to incorporate more story, character development, and world-building. The game takes place in a single continuous world and there are dialog scenes establishing character motives and contextualizing the various objectives along the way.

A top-down action adventure set between seasons one and two of Stranger Things and modeled after classic The Legend of Zelda games, in particular A Link to the Past. (Nevermind that the show is explicitly set eight years and two console generations before the release of that game.) Gameplay consists of a series of dungeons connected by the overworld of Hawkins, Indiana, with combat and puzzle-solving in both environments. Unlike in Zelda, however, you can play as multiple characters. You start with Chief Hopper and unlock other members of the main cast as you go. You can switch freely between them and each has their own special ability.

A budget-priced downloadable Color Picross game. The visuals and soundtrack are a bit unpolished, but they get the job done and you really don’t need more than that for a Picross game. The game comes with 150 puzzles ranging up to 20x20 in size, though the largest of these are a bit awkward on the 3DS with the vertical clues displaced to the top screen. There are also several DLC packs available with puzzles grouped by size, the largest of which go up to 35x25 and are only available on the Wii U and not the 3DS.

An incredibly influential game that popularized the template still followed by many 3D platformers today. Progress through a “hub” area (Peach’s castle) that presents access to several themed “spoke” levels (Bob-omb Battlefield, Whomp’s Fortress, etc.) that each have several different available objectives (defeating specific enemies, reaching specific destinations, collecting eight red coins, etc.) that each reward the game’s main collectible (stars). Get enough of the collectible to open the way to the next part of the hub and gain access to the next set of levels.

A procedurally-generated 2D pixel-art run-and-gun shooter very much like its predecessor. Run to the right, pick up weapon powerups and shoot enemy soldiers, use crates for cover and try not to take too much damage yourself. Blow up a few enemy beacons and get to the chopper to clear the stage and fight a boss at the end of every set of stages before moving on to the next level with a different setting and tougher foes.

A procedurally-generated 2D pixel-art run-and-gun shooter. Run to the right, pick up weapon powerups and shoot enemy soldiers, use crates for cover and try not to take too much damage yourself. Blow up a few enemy beacons and get to the chopper to clear the stage and fight a boss at the end of every set of stages before moving on to the next level with a different setting and tougher foes.

A simple life sim casting you as the manager of a campsite. Collect fruit/bugs/fish/seashells, give them to the humanoid animals camping nearby in exchange for crafting materials, build furniture to decorate your campsite and your camper van to be able to invite more villagers to your campsite and become better friends with them.

A puzzle game in which your mini character automatically moves forward until hitting an interactable part of the environment, such as bouncing high on a springboard or entering a warp pipe. You have partial ability to manipulate the level - some pieces can be removed and replaced elsewhere, such as girders that can create floors, ramps, or walls. Most available characters have one additional power, such as Yoshi’s ability to eat enemies and Mario’s ability to wall-jump. Your goal is to set things up such that your character avoids obstacles and hazards, nabs all collectibles, and finally makes it to the exit door - then it’s on to the next level.

A cooperative puzzle game where each player controls a shape that can ‘snip’ and thus modify the shape of other characters and sometimes parts of the environment. Players must cooperate to create the shapes necessary to solve puzzles such as making scoops to pick up and carry objects or gears to rotate mechanisms. This simple and easy-to-understand gameplay is used in the service of a wide variety of goals - creating a complex specified shape, moving objects with various characteristics through obstacle courses to a goal, redirecting the flow of fluids to fill containers or protect other objects, and more. My personal favorite were the “Princess Power-Up” levels where the players are tasked with creating a course for the “princess” to traverse and collect all the power-ups along the way.

A spiritual followup to Disorient on the Murder Express that takes the logical-connection mystery solving and accusation mechanic and tries to build a fuller and more polished game around it with mixed results.

The game casts you as an investigator sent to a spacecraft that has lost contact with Earth to determine what happened. You find the crew dead and collect evidence in the form of photographs and then work with the shipboard AI to reconstruct the chain of events, using your gathered evidence to support or refute theories as appropriate to determine whether the AI is responsible for the crew’s deaths.

A proof-of-concept born from a game jam. You play a washed-up detective on board a train with a few colorful characters, one of whom is shortly murdered. After inspecting the crime scene and available clues, you gather the suspects to solve the mystery. Here’s where the game’s unique mechanic comes into play - by clicking any two pieces of evidence (including the murder victim and each suspect) your character will explain their logical connection. When you’re done, you then render your accusation, which will vary depending on which logical connections you’ve drawn.

A match-3 game with a lightweight RPG framework. Combat is accomplished through match-3 gameplay, and in betwen battles you spend money and experience to improve your stats and occasionally get new abilities. You play as one of three elemental maidens who have different stat allocations and slightly different special moves, fighting a series of monsters who attack in varying ways - one enemy puts bombs on the board that deal heavy damage if not destroyed before their countdown runs out, while another poisons several tiles that each deal light damage every turn they are not cleared.

A rhythm game tribute to the long-running Final Fantasy series. There are songs and characters from every mainline numbered title from the original Final Fantasy to then-recent Final Fantasy XIII. Songs are grouped into a few different kinds of levels depending on the nature of the music - battle music has you fighting a series of monsters, event music plays over cutscenes, and field music has you journeying through the game world. It’s all layered on top of an RPG system where you build a party of four, level them up, and equip items and abilities.

An exploration game roughly in the vein of Flower or Journey. Play as a diver swimming through underwater caverns and submerged ruins. There’s no dialog and gameplay consists mostly of navigating a beautiful environment against an emotive soundtrack. The star of the show is the sea life - hundreds of real-world species of fish, turtles, whales, and more lovingly rendered with up to several thousand individual creatures on screen at any given time. The game sets up multiple jaw-dropping moments the first time you see certain animals or groups thereof.

A first-person brawler and occasional shooter in a bizarre otherworldly setting. An extensive tutorial eases you into the combat mechanics but you’re dropped into the world itself with essentially no explanation. You get to practice the many attack and defensive options while piecing together clues on what kind of place you’re in and what your role is in it.

A 2D platformer that evolves the textile-based art style from Kirby’s Epic Yarn and matches it with Yoshi’s Island gameplay. Play as a woven Yoshi and make your way through levels, eating enemies and parts of the scenery and turning them not into eggs but balls of yarn which you can then throw as weapons or use to activate various other parts of the scenery. Just reaching the end of a level will allow you to progress to the next, but each level also has many collectibles with varying effects - find all of a level’s yarn skeins to unlock a new Yoshi to play as, collect all the special beads to unlock new Yoshi customization options, and pick up all the flowers in all levels in a world to unlock a bonus level for that world. (For full completion you also need to finish each level with full health.)

A 2D platformer that evolves the textile-based art style from Kirby’s Epic Yarn and matches it with Yoshi’s Island gameplay. Play as a woven Yoshi and make your way through levels, eating enemies and parts of the scenery and turning them not into eggs but balls of yarn which you can then throw as weapons or use to activate various other parts of the scenery. Just reaching the end of a level will allow you to progress to the next, but each level also has many collectibles with varying effects - find all of a level’s yarn skeins to unlock a new Yoshi to play as, collect all the special beads to unlock Miiverse stamps, and pick up all the flowers in all levels in a world to unlock a bonus level for that world. (For full completion you also need to finish each level with full health.)

A short adventure game where you play as male student Willie who plans to confess his love to female classmate Liza. You can technically accomplish this in a matter of seconds, but there are twenty different endings based on exactly what you do and when you do it and all of them must be witnessed before the game is truly complete - and the more endings you see, the more clues you find that things are not as they seem.

A rhythm RPG. Combat is accomplished by playing through a song - your four party members each get a lane of scrolling button prompts similar to games like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero. You can switch from character to character and getting a streak of correctly-timed hits for a given character will activate one of their abilities.