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.

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.