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.