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.