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.