A weird parallel universe version of Papers, Please with an absurd premise. You must accept or reject animals with no clear guidelines and no explicit explanation of what happens as a result. Characters with believable personalities, stakes that gradually rise, and a story that’s told using the game’s own mechanics all combine to create a surprisingly compelling experience.

A retro RPG heavily influenced by Earthbound and other SNES-era RPGs that deconstructs many of their traditions. Most notably (and apparently most acceptable to spoil) it’s possible to get through the game without making a single kill. Combat is active and engaging, though once you’ve figured out how to spare a particular type of enemy going through it again is just rote. The pacing is a little bit strange, with some extended comic-relief bits placed at times when the player is likely to want answers to serious questions about the game world and backstory, but most of the comedy and other mood-setting works well. There are a lot of secrets, surprises, and developer foresight, but it all feels interesting and valuable in its own right rather than existing solely to fuel an internet scavenger hunt. The soundtrack is standout wonderful, the important characters feel very real and lovable, and the game’s best ending is very satisfying. It’s not hard to see why there’s such a devoted community around this game.

An isometric run-and-gun shooter set in a sci-fi B-movie. The combat and platforming are adequate if a bit unpolished, and while the upgrades and the collectibles that pay for them feel a bit superfluous the exploration to find the collectibles is actually fantastic. The game mostly consists of climbing an incredibly high tower and at any time you can look down over the edge, which gives a great feeling of progress as you look down from higher and higher up. If you see something you want when looking down, you can jump right off which feels surprisingly good due to animation that makes you feel like you’re zooming through the air even though you aren’t actually going that fast (terminal velocity being surprisingly low on this planet) and music that sounds exhilarating and free. The game also has some very exploration-friendly features so you don’t regret jumping off the tower - you can freely teleport to any checkpoint you’ve visited or instantly return to any ledge you’ve just jumped off of.

A retro-styled horizontal scrolling shooter whose action comes in ten-second increments. In between, you have a few seconds to pick one of three random modifiers - there are hats, different weapons, upgrades or downgrades, and various silly cosmetic effects. Everything is presented with tongue held firmly in cheek and the jokey descriptions for the modifiers and their unrelated icons make it hard to suss out what your options actually are in the few seconds available. It may have flowed better to simply apply a modifier at random and not bring the gameplay to a grinding halt every ten seconds. The shooting is fast-paced, but since the game can’t do anything scoped greater than a few seconds, its bite-sized novelty-over-depth gameplay would probably have been more suited to mobile than to PC and PlayStation.

A 2.5D brawler with action RPG elements. You can play alone or via couch co-op, but the game is obviously tuned to favor online co-op - there are six different classes with varying specializations and it’s valuable to have multiple archetypes present, but there’s also a lot of very slow inventory and skill point management that only one local player can do at a time. You can round out your party with AI-controlled members, but they’re mediocre and require their own fiddly management between dungeon runs. There isn’t much depth to the story, characters, or world, but the art is distinctive and gorgeous. Although the 2D art in a 3D space presents some positioning problems, the combat mechanics are otherwise extremely well-tuned, and the boss fights in particular are varied and engaging. That’s good, because you’ll be seeing them over and over - there aren’t that many dungeons, and you’ve got to grind through them repeatedly to progress. The experience has much more longevity when played with friends.

A fast-paced, very precise 2D arena fighter based on shooting arrows and head-stomping. A few simple moves are combined to create a lot of strategic depth and a high skill ceiling. There are also a ton of modifiers and modes available for varied gameplay, such as giving everyone bomb arrows or even taking arrows away completely, and there’s a co-op campaign as well that pits you against a variety of enemy types. The game is perfectly balanced since all characters play identically, though this also means you can’t pick a character to get good at and there aren’t varied matchups. It feels good to play and especially to pull off skilled moves, but it’s hard to enjoy alone, with single-player serving really only to practice the skills you’ll then use in multiplayer, so it’s worth noting that there’s no online play (though there are good reasons).

A game about a man going through a quarter-life crisis and, essentially, choosing between two women who represent commitment and freedom respectively. Gameplay alternates between the player character’s nightmares, which are experienced as block-sliding climbing puzzles, and his waking life, experienced as adventure game-like sections with dialog and time-management choices and a pretty cool texting mechanic where you pick the mood of each sentence to send. The story features themes of maturity, fidelity, conformity, the need to move on and the fear of doing so.

An over-the-top 2D pixel art shoot ’em up that affectionately parodies action movies and the war on terror. It’s very chaotic, with terrain that can be destroyed by gunfire and explosives lying around that can result in screen-clearing chains of explosions at the drop of a hat. A single stray bullet can kill you, which is mostly okay as this just means you switch to the next randomly-selected bro, which adds enjoyably to the chaos since the bros are fun and varied and it’s entertaining to figure out how to be effective with each bro’s particular power set. The problem is that you have limited lives, and it can be frustrating to have to replay a level because of the game’s unpredictable destruction or because you got stuck with a very limited bro who just wasn’t useful for the situation. Regardless, the game is best enjoyed with a friend so you can laugh at the chaos and silliness together.

An idle game in which your stable of heroes kill monsters for gold. As I assume is true of most idle games, its structure is based on a series of concentric gameplay loops. First you’re clicking monsters to kill them and collect gold, which you use to hire and upgrade heroes. The heroes make the monster loop faster, so after a while you stop focusing on individual monsters and instead use the constant flow of gold to manage your heroes, occasionally using their powers (which are on cooldowns of varying length) to make a lot of progress quickly. But despite being in the title, the heroes are just one of several loops - eventually you start “ascending”, sacrificing your heroes to start over but collecting “hero souls” which you use to upgrade “ancients” that give you passive bonuses that make the hero loop faster. Then you start “transcending”, sacrificing your ancients to start over but collecting “ancient souls” which you use to upgrade “outsiders” that give you passive bonuses that make the ancient loop faster. There are a couple of other mechanics, such as relics that are essentially another facet of the ancient loop and mercenaries which grant rewards on timers. And somewhat evilly, there are “guilds” that present a lightweight social obligation factor through daily “raids” that must be collaborated on to make any real progress.

An endless runner with a compelling atmosphere. Deaths are slightly too spectacular and flow-disrupting, but the mission-based unlock system means they are also the only way to get access to new mechanics - despite the game’s continual navel-gazing about the inevitability of failure, failure is the only way to progress. As a result, the pacing feels slow and oddly forced - rather than honing skill on a well-tuned challenge, it feels like running laps in an incomplete game in order to earn the next piece. For example, the first few runs are guaranteed to be cut short by running out of time when the sun sets, because you have to unlock the pickups that extend your time by raising the sun - after unlocking them, I never again lost due to running out of time. Some runs later, I crashed because I went through what was obviously a gateway - but I hadn’t yet unlocked the gateway mechanic. If the game didn’t force you to spend so much time on an incomplete version of itself and if it were a little harder to die, the core gameplay and aesthetics would be great at creating flow.

A falling-block puzzle game where you must group like-colored blocks into rectangles to clear them away. Every so often you switch to a new song and corresponding visual skin, and the speed of the song determines the speed at which blocks are cleared away. Slower songs make it easier to rack up large combos, but also leave more time for the board to overfill and end the game. The puzzle gameplay is fairly straightforward and can actually be solved deterministically - once you know how to play, you can do so indefinitely until the blocks fall too fast for your reflexes to keep up. At that point, all that’s really left is the atmosphere created by the songs and skins, which vary in different Lumines games and may or may not be to your liking.

A falling-block puzzle game where you must group like-colored blocks into rectangles to clear them away. Every so often you switch to a new song and corresponding visual skin, and the speed of the song determines the speed at which blocks are cleared away. Slower songs make it easier to rack up large combos, but also leave more time for the board to overfill and end the game. The puzzle gameplay is fairly straightforward and can actually be solved deterministically - once you know how to play, you can do so indefinitely until the blocks fall too fast for your reflexes to keep up. At that point, all that’s really left is the atmosphere created by the songs and skins, which vary in different Lumines games and may or may not be to your liking.

A falling-block puzzle game where you must group like-colored blocks into rectangles to clear them away. Every so often you switch to a new song and corresponding visual skin, and the speed of the song determines the speed at which blocks are cleared away. Slower songs make it easier to rack up large combos, but also leave more time for the board to overfill and end the game. The puzzle gameplay is fairly straightforward and can actually be solved deterministically - once you know how to play, you can do so indefinitely until the blocks fall too fast for your reflexes to keep up. At that point, all that’s really left is the atmosphere created by the songs and skins, which vary in different Lumines games and may or may not be to your liking.

A satirical game where you burn things to get money to buy more things to burn. It’s a send-up of games that use compulsion loops and energy mechanics to keep players playing and paying, illustrating the unhealthy cyclic nature of the behavior they incentivize. It’s implied that children are rewarded for burning things in order to keep them warm since there’s a bit of an ice age setting in - but that this ice age is due to all the smoke in the atmosphere from everyone burning things. The interactions of the burning objects are entertaining and fire is pretty, but it’s mostly a message game. After a few hours, there are some big surprises when it’s time to deliver the moral, which is that you should break out of these loops and go do constructive things in the real world. For the right audience, this game is a wake-up call. For others, it’s just a diversion.

A short exploration game that playfully deconstructs narrative power-fantasy games by casting them as elaborate stage productions and putting you backstage in one. Both the scale and the humor are magnified by the game leaving a lot to your imagination, keeping up a frantic pace during which a lot goes hilariously wrong, and setting up a few gags that pay off later leading up to an ironic ending. Don’t bother with a second playthrough or with any of the things around the game - the achievements, patch notes, and a lot of things people say about the game online are all lies.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a comedic choose-your-own-adventure. The text is clever and fun to read, as to be expected of writer Ryan North. I really enjoyed my first playthrough, where I chose the Shakespeare-official options to familiarize myself with the normal story. I wasn’t able to stick with the game much longer after that, though, because the UX is inexplicably bad for repeat plays. Most visual novels have this stuff down but for some reason this game’s engine doesn’t use any of the standard assists - it doesn’t mark which options you’ve already chosen and you can’t fast-forward through stuff you’ve already seen. That means too much time spent sitting through boring stuff and not enough time spent reading hilarious and awesome new stuff.

A colorful third-person shooter with a strong and consistent punk aesthetic. The main draw of the game is the online arena-based competitive multiplayer which tasks you with painting the area with your team’s color of ink and only incidentally with shooting up the opposing team members. Since you’re essentially using water guns with fairly short range, combat is kinetic and intimate. There’s a lot of clever and satisfying synergy in the mechanics: your score is determined by how much territory you cover in your own ink, but that ink also allows you to hide, travel faster, and restock your ammo. But there’s an extended progression system that means you’re never playing on a level field and it’s ages before you can customize your outfit and loadout to any significant degree. Plus it features the usual frustrations of online multiplayer - you can get booted if the Wii U decides your connection isn’t good enough, you spend a lot of time in the lobby waiting for enough players, and even when everything works your experience depends on the behavior of random strangers (and it always sucks to lose a match because you had an idler on your team). Bot matches would have gone a long way to rescue it, but are not available. There is a single-player mode, but it’s totally separate - the progression is disconnected, you can’t customize your character, and it’s a much more Mario-like series of levels with four-step design that uses a ton of mechanics not found in the multiplayer. There are a couple of arena levels that are a blast, but they are few and far between. All in all, I love the game’s world, but this is not quite the game I want to play in it. For now, I’m just hoping for spinoff titles.

A narrated exploration game which is also a meditation on a particular type of unhealthy fan/creator relationship, exploring themes of hero worship, difficulties of the creative process, and imposing our own meaning on others’ work that reflects more on us than on them. It’s a message game, aimed at an audience you may or may not be a member of, but either way it’s skillfully done and you’ll likely be thinking about the game long after the hour and a half or so it takes to walk through it.

An exploration game that has you exploring your family home to find out what’s happened in your year abroad and where your mysteriously-absent parents and sister are. The story is told through objects, found messages, and a series of audio logs. The central arc is about your younger sister, but other relatives have stories too and they all revolve around the importance of being true to yourself and of finding people who accept you that way.

A meditative mood piece that for twenty minutes or so simulates the experience of a lonely late-night drive where nothing seems real but everything seems profound. The game is carefully crafted to create the right atmosphere - from the tail lights ahead that you can never quite catch up to, to the simplified and nearly-automatic driving that feels like highway hypnosis, to the dreamy insomniac quality of the radio music and DJ, to the slow heavy blinks of the player character. What really matters, though, are the conversations you have with your surreal passengers. Play at night with the lights off for the best experience.