Originally made for the 2015 Now Play This exhibition on experimental game design, OASES is a meditative art piece that imagines what might have happened to the creator’s grandfather when his plane was lost in Algeria in 1960. There isn’t a lot to it - the plane goes through a rainbow portal into one of a few colorfully surreal landscapes, which the player can fly around for a while before going back to the menu.

An action RPG set in the One Piece universe. Play as the nine Straw Hat Pirates in an original story, visiting a number of areas based on their canonical adventures. Fight your way through enemies, catch bugs and go fishing, collect materials and explore hidden areas, and fight the boss at the end of the level. Each of the Straw Hats plays differently and while combat is not as fluid and satisfying as in One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3, Unlimited World Red allows you to take three characters into each mission and switch between them freely, with whoever you aren’t currently controlling left to the AI. Between these excursions, return to the hub town and spend your spoils to help it expand.

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.

A spelling game framed as a simple RPG, with obvious parallels to Bookworm Adventures. Progress through a series of combat encounters, attacking by spelling words from the available pool of fifteen letters that replenish semi-randomly as they are used. Longer words or those with less common letters deal more damage. Enemies have their own attacks which will damage your health and sometimes confer various negative effects - including to the letter grid, such as causing certain tiles to damage the player when used. Victory earns you gems that can be used to buy a wide variety of upgrades. Each level can be played multiple times with different constraints for more rewards.

A spelling game structured like a match-3 game. There’s a hex grid filled with letter tiles; connect adjacent tiles to spell a word and remove those tiles from the grid. New tiles will fall in from the top to replace them. Get more points for spelling longer words or using less common letters - high-value plays will be rewarded with bonus tiles that are worth a lot of points. Periodically “fire tiles” will drop in and will burn through the tiles below them over time - more fire tiles will appear as the game goes on and if you make low-scoring plays. Fire tiles must be used before reaching the bottom or it’s game over. Try to get as high a score as you can before that happens.

A graphically-stylized 2D shooty platformer. Despite the Old West setting, the game is actually more like Mega Man than anything else. Bosses don’t grant new abilities, but you’ll be jumping and shooting your way through deadly enemies and platforming challenges to get to the boss - and don’t be surprised if robots or other anachronistic elements show up. The game is pretty short, though some replayability is added by there being multiple playable characters with slightly different abilities.

A graphically-stylized 2D shooty platformer. Despite the Old West setting, the game is actually more like Mega Man than anything else. Bosses don’t grant new abilities, but you’ll be jumping and shooting your way through deadly enemies and platforming challenges to get to the boss - and don’t be surprised if robots or other anachronistic elements show up. The game is pretty short, though some replayability is added by there being multiple playable characters with slightly different abilities.

A twin-stick shooter that lets you play with your own music and where much of the experience is determined by the music. You play for the duration of the specified song, the field is essentially a visualizer, your weapons fire with more speed and power (but enemies also move faster) when the music is more intense, and enemy patterns (including bosses) are determined by the way the song flows over time. Each song plays differently, but will play the same each time - meaning that every song is its own level that can be practiced and perfected. The game supports music files in a variety of formats and comes with its own set of tracks along with a few forms of internet radio.

An ambitious text adventure that allows you to simulate an entire lifetime of experiences and choices. Start at birth, navigate through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and finally death. Along the way, choose what to do in a series of scenes - how will you react when the bully takes your toy on the playground? Decades later, how will you react when you find that the person you’re dating is married? Your decisions will have consequences that shape your personality and your future.