A twin-stick shooter played on the surface of a sphere. The core gameplay is Asteroids-like with large rocks that break down into smaller ones and occasional enemies, but with a few sources of added variety.

This is a cleaned-up port of the PS3 version plus its DLC packs, with some extra streaming-friendly features and new DLC on top. Everything in the other review applies here too. This is the new definitive version - if you haven’t tried Stardust, this is the best one to start with. If you’re sick of it, this won’t change your mind.

A twin-stick shooter played on the surface of a sphere. The core gameplay is Asteroids-like with large rocks that break down into smaller ones and occasional enemies, but with a few sources of added variety.

This game takes the same great formula as its predecessor, but makes some tweaks. Most notably, there are now only two weapon and asteroid types, with the least interesting one of the original three being dropped. The core gameplay - with the frustration-free spherical arena and the large competence zone conferred by the panic buttons - is just as much of a blast as ever. While there are a ton of game modes, since the game is a Vita launch title a lot of new gameplay and features rely on the Vita’s gimmicks (touch screen, rear touch panel, gyroscope) in ways that don’t always work well. As a result, there’s less here for the returning player, but it’s still portable twin-stick Stardust and that’s a good thing.

A twin-stick shooter played on the surface of a sphere (and an enhanced remake of Super Stardust on the Amiga). The core gameplay is Asteroids-like with large rocks that break down into smaller ones and occasional enemies, but with a few sources of added variety.

There are three different weapons to switch between for different playstyles - a spread shot, a focused long-range shot, and a whip-like beam. The behavior of different enemy types (including the periodic boss fight) present varied challenges to respond to, and each asteroid and enemy type is vulnerable to a specific weapon. Enemies and asteroids will occasionally drop pickups that include weapon upgrades, bombs, single-use shields, extra lives, or simple point bonuses.

A space shooter game that puts the player in control of a small ship in an asteroid field. The player can turn the ship clockwise or counterclockwise, fire engines to accelerate forward, or shoot a projectile weapon. The ship broadly follows Newtonian physics - it has inertia and will keep moving in a direction after the player cuts the engines unless they rotate and accelerate in the opposite direction. Additionally, the ship’s own velocity is added to that of the shots it fires.

A mobile adaptation of the long-running Dynasty Warriors series based on the setting, events, and cast of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The sprawling and dynamic Musou gameplay for which the franchise is famous has been scaled down and streamlined to work on mobile - levels are much shorter and simpler and generally have you taking a linear path to fight through waves of mooks until a boss appears. Controls are similarly streamlined - rather than tasking you with alternating strong and weak attacks to execute various combos, you just hold down an attack button and your selected character will take care of that for you. There are also separate buttons for special attacks on cooldowns. You can switch between characters at any time, and this is encouraged by an elemental rock-paper-scissors system where playable characters and non-mook enemies all have an assigned element.

Updated December 17, 2025: The below review is based on a wildly incorrect reading of the source material, which is clearly about coming out as transgender. I guess I just didn’t have those concepts in mind in 2017. I am embarrassed by this review but have chosen to leave it up as an example of how this kind of misunderstanding can happen and a reminder to myself to do better.

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. Each stage also has a number of hidden collectibles and often interactable elements - for example, you can fly into the power button on the daughter’s radio to turn it on, which will cause her to get up and turn it off. This is sometimes necessary to expose your target’s suck points - for some reason, you can only extract blood from specific designated points on your target’s body. Each target also has designated “relax” points you can crash into to calm them down if they’ve seen you and started attacking.

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. This setup is used to provide a varied cast of characters you can choose to romance, but more importantly serves as a backdrop for rich coversations about game design, philosophy of art in general, life and death, love and isolation, and more.

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. 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.