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.

A sort of inverted crossword puzzle where you are given several clumps of letters that must be arranged on a grid to spell intersecting words that all match the specified clue. Clues might be cateories (“Winter Sports”), incomplete phrases that each word completes (“Eye of the…”), or themes (“Christmas Day”).

A free ten-minute experiment in player motivations, trust, and violence. It’s an interesting idea, but not much else, and the quality of the experience can vary widely from person to person. There’s also perhaps a bit too much exploratory freedom; it’s possible to miss the path to the game’s most important content without realizing you’ve done so. But the mechanic being explored is decently thought-provoking and the setup creates a strong enough atmosphere to have a decent chance at distracting you from overthinking things before the veil is lifted.

A weird little puzzle game where you play as a… monster… bag… thing and try to catch up to the girl who is your friend and/or owner. You do this by hopping from person to person while remaining undetected - get seen and you fail and are kicked back to your last “checkpoint” hop. The checkpoints feel arbitrary, as do the people who can see you, and some folks have arbitrary barriers as well - for example, for some reason you apparently can’t hop to someone who’s really into the music they’re listening to. You get past these barriers by using the touchscreen to have weird arbitrary effects on the environment or throw objects at people. Apparently you’re telekinetic? At least for certain arbitrary objects. The puzzles felt contrived and constrained, such that they weren’t satisfying to complete and I didn’t feel like I was solving them so much as finding the hoop the game wanted me to jump through. There also wasn’t enough characterization of either the bag or the girl for me to care enough about reuniting them to motivate me to slog through the puzzles, so I put the game down pretty quickly.

A 3D platformer strongly influenced by Super Mario 64. Play as a boy or a girl with a moveset nearly identical to Mario’s and explore levels and complete objectives to collect stars Explorer Medallions that unlock more levels. There are a handful of large-ish nonlinear levels that each contain several objectives, a bunch of smaller linear challenge levels that reward you for reaching the end, and a variety of collectibles/discoverables that can be turned in for medallions as well. There’s a lot to do and you have pretty broad freedom in the order in which you tackle it, though the harder levels don’t become available until you’ve gathered some medallions in the easier ones. A full playthrough, collecting all medallions, took me almost exactly ten hours.

A short (half an hour or so, depending on how quickly you figure out some of the more obtuse puzzles) and simple point-and-click adventure masquerading as a puzzle platformer. You must use all the tools at your disposal - various kinds of movement and light platforming as well as inventory-based puzzles - to poke each of the nine cats in the house. The control scheme is awkward and some of the puzzles require major intuitive leaps, but it’s quick and cute.

A short (half an hour or so, depending on how quickly you figure out some of the more obtuse puzzles) and simple point-and-click adventure masquerading as a puzzle platformer. You must use all the tools at your disposal - various kinds of movement and light platforming as well as inventory-based puzzles - to poke each of the nine cats in the house. The control scheme is awkward and some of the puzzles require major intuitive leaps, but it’s quick and cute.

A barely interactive game where you spend about twenty minutes directing the idle glances and hand movements of a 27-year-old man being stood up for a date. The story is mainly experienced by listening to his thoughts as he tries to figure out where his lovelife and career are going. His struggles are plausible but pretty typical and he’s not especially likable or interesting, so it’s hard to get invested - especially since the player’s actions have no real effect on the game’s events or on the character’s mood. They mostly just provide window dressing while the character narrates, so the uniqueness of the premise and mechanics is not put to good use.

A visual novel in which you are a high school teacher in a not-too-far future where your students have never known a world without social networks. There’s a lot of reading as you spend most of your time talking to your students or snooping on their online conversations, though unlike some of Christine Love’s other work every character has portraits accompanying their dialog so it’s easy to keep them straight.

A collection of six classic NES titles (DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers, Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Darkwing Duck, and TaleSpin) bundled together. Most of these games are platformers - DuckTales emphasizes treasure-hunting in non-linear levels, Rescue Rangers features frantic two-player action, Darkwing Duck has almost Mega Man-like combat and bosses, and the lone non-platformer is TaleSpin which is instead a side-scrolling aerial shooter. Each game has received a handful of new features: boss rush and time attack modes, a single saved state slot per game, and a rewind ability to undo mistakes.

A 2D retro-styled Metroid homage. Your spaceship is damaged and you must explore areas on four planets to repair it. Along the way, you navigate levels, defeat enemies, and acquire new abilities. The game seems to be trying pretty hard to set a specific mood to make the player feel like a lonely, vulnerable human exploring an unknown and hostile world - there’s no instruction on where to go in what order and (at least early on) the enemies tend to need a lot of hits to take down while the player character doesn’t.

A classic 2D Mario platformer. Progress through a series of themed levels by moving to the right, collecting coins and powerups, and avoiding or defeating enemies.

Mario platformers in general aren’t my cup of tea. Their powerup system, wherein you get extra abilities and lose them when you lose health, means the game gets easier as the player gets better. This regressive difficulty creates a bizarre difficulty curve with a fragile balance where challenges can often be either too hard or too easy. Additionally, the worlds and characters tend to be implausible and shallow and I find it difficult to engage with them. I’m pretty confident this is the only Mario platformer I’ve actually finished, and that’s due to its short length (it is a Game Boy launch title, after all) and the fact that I played it on the 3DS Virtual Console and was able to make use of a save state.

A small, simple game with a one-note joke: you are speed-dating pugs with no explanation provided. You can choose from a list of stock questions that are filled in mad-libs style and your date’s responses have a similar format, chosen apparently at random with no consistency to suggest an underlying personality or any consequences to your own choices. It doesn’t add up to anything, either - the game just presents a series of semi-random but fundamentally samey dates. Once the novelty wears off (which happens fast thanks to the wires showing very quickly) there’s nothing else left.

A brawler with level-up mechanics starring the Justice League. Take control of characters such as Superman, Batman, and several others to explore levels, find collectibles, and defeat enemies and bosses. In each mission, you have two heroes and can switch control at any time, with the other left to the AI. The game can also be played in co-op with each player controlling one hero. Level up and spend your accumulated collectibles to improve your heroes and unlock new abilities, characters, and costumes.

A brief and fairly pointless first person game where you play the last ten minutes or so in the life of a deeply and cartoonishly disturbed person. You can piece together the rough outline of what’s going on through environmental clues and then decide whether it ends with a suicide or a murder suicide, but there’s so little context that the game doesn’t really seem to be saying anything - it’s just putting you in a disturbing situation for the sake of doing so, and not a particularly realistic one.

A charming collectathon platformer in a papercraft world. There’s a light tone, a strong sense of adventure, and an emphasis on creativity and self-expression resulting in a very similar mood to its creator’s previous work, Little Big Planet. You’re occasionally tasked with designing aspects of characters or the environment and can create your own decorations to place on the player character. Progressing through the game also unlocks downloadable papercraft PDFs so you can build game characters in real life.

A 3D brawler with light RPG elements and precision-demanding combat. You play as a samurai in feudal Japan, rendered with a distinctive cartoony style. The story is pretty light - you are literally tasked with rescuing the princess - and most of your time is spent fighting through various enemy arenas. To succeed, you do not strike first - you wait, sword sheathed, until your foe unleashes their attack which you swiftly dodge and counter. The core here is great - it makes you feel like a noble badass. It can get repetetive as you fight many of the same type of enemy and the light RPG systems require a lot of grinding to aquire currency to spend on upgrades.

A sidescrolling platformer a boy (Kick) and his robot buddy (Fennick). You play as the boy using a large gun both to shoot enemy robots and to navigate levels by throwing yourself around with the gun’s recoil. This central mechanic is promising but doesn’t seem to go anywhere interesting (and was almost certainly done better in No Time to Explain). The visuals and sound are fine but the game feels oddly unpolished - expository scenes are short and lifeless, the original Vita version has unnecessary reliance on the touchscreen that made me think the game was adapted from mobile, and the difficulty curve is nonsensical. The first hour is so simple and easy that I concluded the game was aimed at children (a conclusion supported by the bright colors, sparse story, child protagonist, and cute robot buddy) and then suddenly things got much, much harder, with incredibly precise jump arcs required in deadly areas. This would still be manageable, since there’s a teleport-you-back-to-solid-ground-when-you-would-die mechanic, but it has limited use and when it runs out you’re ejected from the level and have to restart. The game was no longer easy enough to be mellow but still not interesting enough to make it worth putting up with the punishment, so I put it down.

Made for a game jam, this is a short and unpolished 3D puzzle platformer in which you must control several robots with different abilities and use them together to progress. The title references the game’s signature mechanic - any robot you have line of sight on can be taken over by right-clicking on it, so you must position the robots and use their abilities in turn. The game does an impressive job telegraphing what each robot can do and implying a personality through its design - visually, mechanically, and musically. As a result, while the puzzles don’t feel especially new or innovative the robots are a lot of fun to use. I’d love to see this concept expanded and polished.