A puzzle platformer where you simultaneously control two brothers who must work together to navigate the environment and achieve goals. It isn’t perfect - there are some learn-by-dying portions and the achievement design is awful - but it’s really interesting and there isn’t anything else quite like it. It’s got dialog-free characterization, beautiful scenery and music, powerful atmosphere, and unique mechanics, some of which are actually used to convey story. It’s worth your time, clocking in around three hours, but be warned that this is not a happy game. Death surrounds you and not everyone can be saved.

A rhythm platformer like its predecessor. Your character runs automatically, you avoid obstacles and collect gold by jumping, sliding, kicking or blocking at the right time, and your actions affect the music. It expands on the original in several ways - the game is much prettier and has a bunch of characters and skins to unlock, there are more levels and many of them have branching paths, and most importantly there are now optional mid-level checkpoints. This greatly mitigates the frustration of restarting a longer level because of a single mistake near the end, while still allowing players the option of the original hardcore challenge. There are a few misfires - for example, a new post-level “bonus chance” mechanic that makes pursuing 100% completion much more tedious than it needs to be - but overall it’s a bigger and better BIT.TRIP RUNNER, and still a great way to zen out as long as your reflexes are up to it and you can groove on chiptunes.

A rhythm platformer with an Atari 2600-inspired aesthetic. Your character runs automatically, you avoid obstacles and collect gold by jumping, sliding, kicking or blocking at the right time, and your actions affect the music. It’s really good at creating flow, and to avoid breaking that flow, messing up causes the level to immediately restart. This works great for short levels, but the levels get longer and longer, meaning that it’s increasingly the case that when practicing a difficult challenge, each attempt is preceded by a minute or so of platforming you’ve already mastered, which can get quite frustrating. Aside from that, it’s a great way to zen out as long as your reflexes are up to it and you can groove on chiptunes.

A 2D platformer that’s a remake of the NES original. It’s lovingly-rendered nostalgia that holds up pretty well, with gorgeous character animation, beautiful soundtrack, and tight gameplay as you explore levels looking for treasure. A single play-through is two to three hours or so. The intro and finale levels, which were added for the remake, aren’t as well-designed as the original levels, but those are all still there and quite fun. The difficulty settings are a bit odd and for most players I’d recommend playing on Easy.

A 2D mining and platform game with Metroidvania elements and a lightweight plot. You dig up ores to sell, find and buy upgrades and new abilities, and periodically have platform challenges and a boss fight or two. There’s maybe a smidgen too much resource management, as your flashlight has a limited timer that resets when you exit the mine, and buying ladders or teleporters back to the surface uses the same finite resources used for upgrades, though there’s enough that it’s not really a problem. The game is superbly paced - new abilities, challenges, and environments come up just when you’ve mastered the old, such that nothing wears out its welcome.

A visual novel about investigating a disaster that occurred on a generation ship drifting through space. There’s a lot of reading as you dig through text logs and interact with AI NPCs to uncover the truth. The game is notable for presenting an incredibly fair and even-handed examination of moral relativism. It depicts a society that is horrifying and deplorable by modern standards, but at the same time is clearly made up of people who are just trying to do what they believe is right. There are a lot of characters and some pretty complicated family trees - more visuals would have helped keep them straight, but the writing is strong enough that it’s still very easy to believe in these characters and to care about them.

A precision platformer with incredibly tight controls and jump physics. It feels really good to play - especially since the devs focused on stripping away frustration while still presenting a high level of challenge. There’s no limited lives (outside of a few bonus levels), respawn is instant, and the levels are small enough that the goal is always visible. At least, that’s how it starts. The levels get longer and longer and have multiple different kinds of challenges, but you still always respawn at the start of the level - meaning that the punishment and therefore frustration increase as you go. If the devs had stuck to their design goals, the game would be just about perfect. As it is, it’s merely very good.

A 2D puzzle platformer with strong characterization that creates a lot of empathy, despite the cast consisting entirely of colored rectangles. This feat is accomplished through quite good narration of pretty decent writing, paired with evocative visuals and an incredible soundtrack. Some of the mechanics support the narration, though they never really reveal anything beyond it, and mostly just present competent puzzle platforming. Creator’s commentary is also included and quite interesting, justifying playing the game a second time to hear it in context. Though be advised: the DLC is worth neither your money nor your time.

Like its predecessor 10,000,000, a match-3 game with endless runner and RPG elements, where obstacles and enemies must be overcome by matching the right kinds of tiles, and other tiles grant resources that can be used to purchase upgrades between runs. But there’s a lot more spectacle and complexity going on between runs - you’re expanding your boat, recruiting allies and monsters, traveling between different areas with different enemies and different bonuses and penalties active in the dungeons. It’s better balanced and more engaging than 10,000,000 but still has the same design philosophy, where each run makes you better off for the next, and eventually you reach a satisfying end. If you only play one of them, play this one.

An intriguing puzzle platformer that captures the feel of a Metroidvania but without mandatory backtracking, since every puzzle is solvable when you first encounter it. You don’t gain new powers - you learn new applications, though the game doesn’t provide much scaffolding to help you figure them out. The trophy design is terrible (there’s one each for ten impossibly-hidden text logs that add basically nothing to the story) and the game would have been far less frustrating with an undo or brief rewind function. The story is less coherent than the mechanics, contradicts them in places, and isn’t nearly as interesting as what the gameplay would suggest - many puzzles involve strategically killing your clones, which has great dramatic and thematic potential that goes ignored. But the atmosphere is very compelling and the puzzle design is excellent.

A first-person puzzle exploration game with a stark aesthetic. In this sort of plot-light puzzle game, the motivation to keep playing comes from a desire to see what interesting new mechanics and surprises will come next. Most of Antichamber’s surprises come from subverting expectations about the nature of space and reality, such as by having hallways rearrange themselves when you aren’t looking. To me, the results are largely tedious - it’s not about being clever to solve problems that follow consistent rules, it’s about the game designer feeling clever by deceiving you and often wasting your time.

A runner game inside a puzzle game with some less categorizable bits in between, Pony Island is a lighthearted 2-3 hour experience that pokes fun at shady game monetization techniques. Despite casting developers who use these strategies as literally the devil, it’s much gentler than, say, Little Inferno’s commentary on the same topic. Even Lucifer is shown to care more about whether people like his game than whether they sell their souls to him.

A beautiful but thematically incoherent game where you steer a fish and a crane down a tunnel through targets. Hit enough targets and the animals merge into a dragon which you fly around outside the tunnel for a bit, collecting color which you then use to skywrite briefly before moving on to the next level. The levels have different gimmicks, some of which are better than others - a particularly frustrating level has the tunnel targets move unpredictably while you’re heading toward them. The game seems to want to say things about separation and togetherness, love and longing, but none of the mechanics support those themes all that well. It’s fun enough and pretty enough and has good enough music that it’s enjoyable as long as it lasts, but since it never really adds up to anything it ends up being forgettable.

A puzzle platformer with gorgeous art and a beautiful soundtrack. Your main tool is the ability to rewind time, and several related mechanics are introduced over the course of the game. The various ways they interact force you to stretch your brain through a series of unbelievably clever puzzles, one or two of which will have you reaching for YouTube to understand what must be done. There is no shame in this. The story is ambiguous and usually disconnected from the gameplay - but when they do connect, the emotional punch is quite strong.

This game wants to be atmospheric and moody, and sometimes - briefly - it is. Other times the game supplies unnecessary text narration telling you how to feel. The puzzle platforming nearly always boils down to finding the shiny piece of the environment and hitting the interact button, with the only added complexity being time pressure via instant-death enemies. Mechanics are introduced and then ignored instead of being explored and combined to create interesting situations. (There’s exactly one satisfying puzzle which actually combines elements and has multiple stages, and it happens inside the circus tent.) Bizarrely, the level design features many pointless dead-ends - until you beat the game once, and can then return to those dead-ends to find collectibles that ostensibly add context to the game’s story, but don’t really clarify anything and leave things just as vague and contradictory as before. It’s an uninteresting way to lengthen the few hours of gameplay. (Do you really want to explore the world again, after effectively being punished for it the first time? You do if you want all the trophies!) Still, the premise is cool, the aesthetics are consistent and enjoyable, and the soundtrack is pretty great.

A match-3 dating sim, because why the hell not. The match-3 gameplay is surprisingly deep and compelling, while the dating sim mechanics are serviceable at best and feel rote and shallow by comparison. Their interactions cause some unfortunate implications, such as it being mechanically to your advantage to stop dating a girl once you’ve slept with her. The art is decent, the writing and voice acting give the girls distinct (if one-dimensional) personalities and the soundtrack is entirely forgettable.

A well told and emotionally engaging short (an hour or so) story about a boy and a bird, wrapped in the language and logic of dreams and memories (and told with no dialog). But the sections where the player has control present such limited options and are over so quickly, it’s not often clear why the game bothers with them at all - this might have been better served as a non-interactive experience.

An interactive story wrapped in the style and presentation of a SNES RPG. For folks with the right nostalgia, this is a very effective format and I personally would love to see more like it. The premise is compelling - you play as a pair of technicians who can rewrite the memories of the dying to grant them their life’s wish. The characterization and aesthetic are quite strong and the writing treats the player with a lot of respect. The central mystery is answered fairly explicitly, but there are a lot of related questions and hints that do fit together and make sense but which the player is left to connect on their own.

A rhythm-based roguelike where you maintain a multiplier by keeping your actions on the beat. This structure encourages you to rely on instinct and act quickly and is quite effective at creating flow - at least, it is when you know what you’re doing. To keep your multiplier, you have to make split-second decisions accounting for a decent amount of complexity and variety in monster movement and attack patterns. Memorizing which color slime moves which way and so on presents a fairly steep learning curve. If you can stick with it long enough to internalize the rules, and if you enjoy the soundtrack, you’re in for a good ride.

A text-based idle game from before those were everywhere, and for my money it’s still the best one. Unusually for an idle game, it has an actual story with an actual ending. It presents a very coherent experience - the sparse visuals and writing, the mechanics that make sense on the surface but are really dark if you think through their implications, and the environmental storytelling of the post-apocalyptic setting that you explore in roguelike sections that spice up the gameplay all come together to create a compelling atmosphere.