The premise sounds like a gimmick and turns out to be an engine. You are Simon P. Jones, fourteen years old, and your great-uncle has left you a house called Mount Holly on one condition: find Room 46. The estate has forty-five rooms. The floor plan is a grid, five wide and nine deep, with the entrance hall at the bottom and a sealed antechamber at the top. Forty-five rooms, forty-six needed. That’s the whole hook, delivered in the first sixty seconds, and it takes most players a very long time to work out what kind of question it actually is.

Blue Prince arrived in April 2025 from Dogubomb — essentially Tonda Ros — published by Raw Fury, on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. It has been described as a puzzle game, a roguelike, a deduction game and a walking sim, and the reason nobody can settle on a label is that its central mechanic belongs to a genre that doesn’t have a name yet. You don’t explore Mount Holly. Youdraft it.

Drafting as level design

Here’s the loop. Open a door, and rather than a room, you get three blueprints: pick one, and it becomes the room behind that door, permanently for this run. Each blueprint shows its footprint — how many doors it has, and which walls they’re on — plus its cost and any rules attached. Some rooms only place in dead ends. Some cost gems. Some can only appear in the outer columns, or in the back half of the estate. Some are rank-limited, appearing once and never again.

Then you walk in, and the room does something. It might contain a key. It might contain a lever, a note, a shop, a security terminal, a slot for a coin. It might contain nothing except three more doors and three more decisions.

The resource that governs all of it issteps. You start each day with a step budget, every room you enter spends one, and when the steps run out the day ends, the house empties, and tomorrow’s Mount Holly is a fresh sheet of paper. Everything you built is gone.

Set that beside how roguelikes normally work and the difference is sharp. InDead Cells orHades, the run generates a level and you react to it. InBlue Prince the run generatesoptions and you author the level from them, which makes every door a small architectural argument with yourself. Do I take the room with four exits because I need the reach, or the room with one exit because it has a chest in it and I’m nearly out of steps? Do I place the Boiler Room now, knowing it’s cheap and useless, because placing anything else here costs gems I don’t have?

The genius is that the drafting rules are themselves the puzzle. A room that only spawns in dead ends means dead ends have value. A room that must sit on the west wall means the west wall is a resource. Within a few hours you stop seeing a floor plan and start seeing a constraint satisfaction problem with wallpaper. I can think of no other game where the act ofbuilding the dungeon is the intellectual content and the act of walking through it is the reward.

The step economy is the difficulty curve

The elegance of steps as a currency is that it prices everything at once. Curiosity costs steps. Backtracking costs steps. A room that turns out to be a dead end with a locked door costs a step going in and, if you routed badly, several more getting back out. There is no health bar and nothing kills you; the only enemy is the walk itself.

That makesBlue Prince one of the very few games wherelayout efficiency is the skill. Good players don’t have faster reflexes. They have a better sense of the grid — they know that placing a corridor at row three buys them lateral movement for the rest of the day, that a room with doors on three sides at the bottom of the map is worth more than the same room at the top, that spending eight steps on a detour to a shop is only correct if you already have the coins. The difficulty curve is invisible because it’s inside your own planning, and it flattens the moment you get better at reading the grid, which is the most honest kind of progression there is.

The genuine cruelty is that Mount Holly is stingy with the thing you need most, which is reach. Room 46 sits at the top of the grid. Getting there requires an unbroken chain of drafted rooms from the entrance hall to the antechamber, which requires door alignment, which requires luck, which requires that you spend your entire day building a corridor rather than looting one. The house is constantly offering you interesting rooms that lead nowhere and boring rooms that lead north, and choosing correctly means choosing boredom over and over. That’s a real design risk, and the game takes it deliberately.

What actually persists

If the house resets every day, what carries? Two things, and the split is the reason the game works.

The first is a modest layer of permanent unlocks — keys, codes, tools, changes to what can appear in the drafting pool. It’s real, it’s slow, and it’s the least interesting part.

The second isyou. What actually persists across days is the notebook in your head. The house is stuffed with documents: letters, ledgers, memos, a newspaper, plaques, timetables, a set of family records that don’t agree with each other. Read them and a second game emerges underneath the drafting one, made of numbers you can’t use yet, names that mean nothing yet, and rules that turn out to be literal. The most powerful thing you can take out of a run is a fact.

This is the same trickReturn of the Obra Dinn andLorelei and the Laser Eyes run: the gate is knowledge, and knowledge doesn’t reset.Blue Prince welds that to a roguelike’s structural churn, so the randomness that would ruin a fixed puzzle game becomes the delivery mechanism for the clues. A run that ends four rooms short of the antechamber still hands you three documents, and the documents are the actual progress. Once you understand that, the failed days stop feeling like failures. You aren’t trying to reach Room 46 today. You’re trying to learn something today, and Room 46 falls out of enough somethings.

I’d argue the real ancestor is the old cassette-era adventure: the games I typed into a C64 in the eighties where you kept the map on graph paper because the machine wasn’t going to keep it for you, and the memory the game relied on was yours.Blue Prince is that idea rebuilt with a modern designer’s understanding of variance. The graph paper is back. Get a real notebook — the in-game journal does some of the filing, and it doesn’t do the thinking.

Where it fights itself

Two things chafe, and both come from the same source.

Variance can hand you a genuinely dead day. Not a hard day — anothing day, where the drafts come up cheap and doorless, you’re out of gems by row three, and you walk the corridor already knowing there’s no route north. Ten minutes of a game that has no combat and no failure state is ten minutes of walking. The design’s answer is that documents still drop, and the answer holds most of the time. It doesn’t hold all of the time.

And the late game asks a lot. Once you’ve cracked the surface,Blue Prince keeps going — considerably further than most players expect — into puzzles that assume you’ve been transcribing details for thirty hours and cross-referencing them off-screen. That’s not a flaw so much as a filter, and the game is admirably unbothered about who it filters out. It won’t tell you when you’re done. It won’t tell you that you missed something. It just leaves it there.

The verdict

Blue Prince is the rarest thing in games: a mechanic nobody has done before, executed by someone who understood exactly what it was for. The drafting isn’t a delivery system for the puzzle box; the draftingis the puzzle box, and the manor is the physical form of a decision tree. It is also gentle, funny, beautifully lit, and quietly sad about the family it’s describing — a game that could have been a pure abstraction and chose to be a house instead.

The step economy will frustrate anyone who wants a puzzle game to sit still and be solved. Everyone else gets forty hours of the specific, disreputable joy of realising that a note you skimmed on day six was an instruction. Play it on PC if you want the notebook open on a second screen; the console versions play identically and you’ll just want paper instead.

If it lands, go toLorelei and the Laser Eyes next for the same respect for your attention, orAnimal Well for the same conviction that the real progression happens in your head.

Spoilers below

The moment the game shows its hand is when you realise the forty-five-room count was never the constraint. Mount Holly’s grid has edges, and the game spends its opening hours training you to treat those edges as walls. They are not. Once the estate proves it can extend past its own footprint, the drafting rules you’d internalised as physics turn out to be conventions, and every “impossible” placement you’d written off becomes a question again.

That’s the structural rhyme with the story. The house is a document about a family that lied about its own shape — an inheritance built on a boundary that was drawn wrong on purpose. Simon is handed a floor plan and a puzzle, and the puzzle is that the floor plan is a claim, not a fact. Learning to distrust the grid and learning to distrust the paperwork are the same act, arriving at the same time, which is about as tight as a game and its theme ever get.

There’s a moment inUmurangi Generation where you’re on a rooftop in Tauranga composing a shot of some graffiti, and you notice — properly notice, for the first time — the thing standing on the horizon behind it. The game hasn’t cut to it. No camera swing, no stinger, no character pointing. It’s been there since you loaded the level. You just hadn’t looked, because you were doing your job, which was photographing graffiti for money.

That’s the whole design, delivered in one gesture.Umurangi Generation is a game about the difference between looking and seeing, and it teaches that difference by paying you to look.

The setup

Released in May 2020 on PC by ORIGAME DIGITAL — essentially Naphtali Faulkner, a Māori developer working out of Australia — with a Special Edition arriving on Switch in 2021 via Playism and consoles following in 2022. The title is te reo Māori:umu rangi, red sky. It won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival in 2021, which is the closest the indie scene has to a Best Picture, and it beat a field with far more money in it.

You’re a courier with a camera. Each level drops you in a location in a near-future Tauranga, hands you a bounty list — photograph this, photograph that, photograph three of these in one frame — and a time limit. Complete the list, earn gear: new lenses, new film stock, filters, a tripod. Then the next level, which is worse.

Why the bounty list is the mechanic

The obvious ancestor isPokémon Snap, and it’s a real lineage: a game where the verb is framing and the scoring is composition. ButSnap is on rails and its subjects perform for you. Faulkner took the framing verb and put it in a space you walk, climb and clamber through, which changes what a photograph is. InSnap you receive a subject. Here you go and find one, and finding is the gameplay.

Now the trick. The bounty list is a checklist of banal nouns. Bins. A skateboard. Someone’s mate. A pigeon. It is deliberately, aggressively mundane, and it directs your attention like a lead in the nose. You are scanning the level for a bin.

Meanwhile the level is telling you a story. There are UN soldiers in the street. There are refugee tents in the car park. There’s a mural somebody painted about what happened to their neighbourhood. There’s the thing on the horizon. None of this is on your list, and none of this is required, and the game will never acknowledge that you saw it.

So the design does something almost no political game manages. It doesn’t lecture you. It gives you an errand, surrounds the errand with a catastrophe, and lets you be the person who chose what mattered. If you photographed only the bins, that’s information about you. The critique isn’t in the text. It’s in what your own attention did in a room.

That’s a much older trick than it looks, and it’s an environmental-storytelling one. The real ancestor is the wayHypnospace Outlaw makes you an enforcer clicking through webpages for copyright violations while somebody’s life falls apart in the sidebar. Both games weaponise a job description. You’re compliant, you’re being paid, and the compliance is what stops you looking up.

The gear is the point of view

Photography games usually treat lenses as stats.Umurangi treats them as positions. A long lens compresses a scene and flattens distance, which makes a crowd look like a mass. A wide lens exaggerates space, which makes a soldier standing over a civilian look like architecture. Faulkner clearly knows this, and the levels are built so that the same subject reads differently depending on the glass you brought.

There’s also a photo mode that’s an actual photo mode: exposure, colour grade, depth of field. And critically, the game lets you take pictures that have nothing to do with the bounty. You can spend the entire timer photographing a wall. The timer is generous enough that this is viable and tight enough that it costs you.

This is the freedom that makes the politics land rather than nag. A game that forced you to photograph the atrocity would be a game telling you the atrocity is important. A game that pays you for bins while the atrocity is available in the background is a game asking what you’d do with a camera and a wage.

The soundtrack, and the anger

ThorHighHeels did the music, and it’s a genuinely great record — jazzy, warm, loose — and it does the same work the bounty list does. It’s too pleasant for what you’re seeing. It’s the sound of a Tuesday. The dissonance between the mood of the audio and the content of the frame is where a lot of the game’s discomfort actually lives.

Faulkner has been direct in interviews about the origins: the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, the spectacle of institutions responding to a catastrophe with press conferences, and a specifically colonial reading of who gets protected when the sky turns red. The game inherits that anger without inheriting a thesis statement. Nobody in it makes a speech. The UN presence just gets more numerous, level over level, and the tents get more numerous, and eventually you’re photographing something that used to be a town.

The frame as a lie

One more thing this game knows that most photography games don’t: a photograph is an edit.

Every shot you take excludes almost everything. Step left and the soldier leaves the frame. Crouch and the tents disappear behind a wall. Zoom and the context evaporates.Umurangi never says any of this out loud, and it doesn’t have to, because it made you do it several hundred times. You have personally cropped a crisis out of a picture in order to get a clean shot of a bin, and you did it for a small amount of money, quite quickly, without thinking about it.

That’s the argument. Photography chooses, and choosing is a political act performed by somebody’s hands, and in this case the hands were yours. Games have spent decades trying to make the player complicit through plot twists. This one does it with a viewfinder and a shopping list.

Where it strains

It’s rough. The movement is loose, the clambering is inelegant, the collision occasionally embarrassing, and there’s a level or two where finding the last bounty item is genuinely tedious rather than observant. This was made by essentially one person and it plays like it in the seams.

It’s also short — two to three hours for the base game, a bit more with theMacro DLC, which is the best content in the package and considerably angrier than the main campaign. Short is the right shape. It’s still worth knowing.

And the bounty design occasionally fights the looking. When a list item is fiddly — get four of these in one frame from a spot that barely exists — you stop being a photographer and start being a checklist operator, which is the exact mental state the game is critiquing, achieved by accident rather than design.

The verdict

Umurangi Generation is the most efficient political game I know, and the efficiency is the achievement. Three hours. One verb. No dialogue trees, no morality meter, no branch where you choose to Be Good. It just hands you a camera, gives you a reason to point it at something trivial, and puts the end of the world in the depth of field.

The medium keeps trying to do politics through writing — a character explaining the system, a choice menu about the system — and keeps producing homework. Faulkner did it through attention, which is the one resource games actually control. He made noticing optional and then measured nothing, and that’s why it works. The game never tells you that you missed it. You just find out later that it was there.

Play it on PC if you can; the mouse is the camera and the camera is the game. The Switch version is a competent port and the right size for a couch, though the photo-mode fiddling is happier with a pointer.

Where next:Hypnospace Outlaw for the other great game about doing a small job inside a large disaster.NORCO for a place that has already had its red sky and learned to live under it.

Spoilers below

The escalation is the structure, and it’s brutal once you see it laid out. Early levels are a skate park and a hangout — you photograph mates, you photograph a crew. By the middle, the same locations have soldiers in them. By the end you are photographing the aftermath of something that killed people you’d previously been asked to photograph having a nice time, and the bounty list is still asking for bins.

The list never changes tone. That’s the knife. The game could have had your employer stop, or apologise, or pivot to documenting the crisis, and instead the errands continue at the exact register they started at, because the institution issuing them does not have a mechanism for noticing. The horizon fills up and the paperwork stays the same shape.

And the final level’s use of the camera — where the only thing left to photograph is what happened — works because you’ve spent three hours with the shutter making a small pleasant sound. Two hundred photographs of bins have taught your hand a reflex, and the game finishes by pointing that reflex at the thing it was always in the way of.

About four hours intoParadise Killer I worked out what it had done to me and had to put the pad down for a minute.

I was standing on a beach on a dead island, holding evidence that pointed at somebody. Not conclusively. It pointed. And the game’s interface was telling me, as it had been telling me since minute twenty, that I could go to trial with it right now. No gate. No “you need more clues before you can proceed”. The Judge would convene, I would present exactly what I had, and something would happen.

Detective games do not do this. Detective games check your work.

What it is

Paradise Killer came out in September 2020 for PC and Switch, from the small British studio Kaizen Game Works, published by Fellow Traveller, with PlayStation and Xbox versions following in 2022. It’s a first-person open-world investigation set on Island Sequence 24, the twenty-fourth in a series of artificial islands built by a cult to resurrect dead gods, each one eventually corrupted and abandoned so the next can be built.

The entire ruling Council has been murdered on the eve of the island’s retirement. You are Lady Love Dies, an “investigation freak” who has been in exile for three million days and gets recalled to solve it. You have a computer companion called Starlight, a currency of blood crystals, and total freedom of movement across a vertical vaporwave ruin you’re expected to climb by finding a fast-travel network and a set of movement upgrades.

The soundtrack, by Barry “Epoch” Topping, is city-pop and lounge and it is the best argument the game makes for itself in the first ten minutes.

Why removing the right answer works

Every detective game before this one has a correct solution and a verification step.Ace Attorney will not let you present the wrong evidence — you get a penalty and a retry.Obra Dinn confirms in threes.Golden Idol tells you flatly that your sentence is wrong. All three are excellent, and all three share an assumption: the game knows, and your job is to converge on what the game knows.

Kaizen removed the verification. There is a truth — the game has a real answer to what happened — and the trial does not require you to have found it. You accuse who you accuse, with what you’ve got, and the trial resolves accordingly. People are sentenced. Possibly the wrong people.

The effect of this is not chaos. The effect isresponsibility, and it changes what investigating feels like at a physiological level. When a game verifies you, evidence is a key: does it fit, yes or no. When a game won’t verify you, evidence becomes an argument you are choosing to make about a person, and you feel the weight of the choice while you’re making it. I found myself doing something I have never done in a detective game: going back out for corroboration I didn’t need to progress, because I wasn’t sure enough to say it out loud.

That’s the design win. The freedom to be wrong converts a puzzle into a judgement, and judgement is the thing the fiction of detective work is actually about.

The island as an evidence board

The other half of the design is spatial, and it’s the half that gets undersold.

This is an open world with no combat, no enemies and no icons dumped on a map. It’s a large vertical space with clues embedded in geometry — on rooftops, under walkways, at the end of climbs the game never signposts. Movement upgrades are purchased from a vendor with blood crystals you find by exploring. So the loop is: explore to afford mobility, use mobility to explore.

That’s a Metroid economy wearing a detective’s coat, and it’s why the island reads as a crime scene rather than a hub. The knowledge you accumulate isn’t only propositional — “the Marshal was seen here at this hour” — it’s geographic. You learn that two locations are closer than the suspects claimed because you climbed between them. Testimony collides with architecture. When a character’s alibi depends on a distance, you have legs and you can check.

Compare whatAnimal Well does with a world that has to be understood before it can be traversed. Same instinct, different genre coat: the map is the puzzle and the puzzle is the map.

Where it fights itself

The dialogue is a lot. Kaizen have committed hard to a register — cult jargon, proper nouns with capital letters, characters named Doctor Doom Jazz and Crimson Acid — and the game’s density of invented vocabulary in the first hour is a real barrier. Some players bounce off before the systems get a chance to show what they’re for. That’s a legitimate cost of the aesthetic and worth naming rather than excusing. The world-building is coherent, and coherent is not the same as welcoming.

The interrogations are also structurally repetitive. You visit a suspect, you fan out your evidence, you tick topics off. There’s no pressure mechanic, no lie detection, no risk in the room. Given how bold the trial is, the conversations leading to it are conventional in a way that mildly undercuts the whole.

And the trial itself is more presentation than combat. You lay out your case and the Judge processes it. It is dramatically flat compared with what precedes it — though I’ve come around on this. A theatrical trial would have suggested the game was scoring you, and the game’s entire thesis is that it isn’t.

The thing it understands about detective fiction

Worth putting plainly, because it’s the insight the rest of the genre keeps missing.

A detective story has two engines. One is the puzzle — the impossible room, the alibi that doesn’t hold, the timetable. The other is the detective’s authority: somebody decides what happened, and their deciding is what converts a mess of facts into a public truth. Christie runs on the first. Chandler runs on the second. Games have, almost without exception, only ever built the first, because the first is a lock and games know how to make locks.

Kaizen built the second. The puzzle inParadise Killer is honestly middling — the clues are findable, the chains aren’t fiendish, and a careful player will get there. What’s exceptional is that the game models theact of concluding as a thing with consequences that belong to you. That’s why an average mystery produces an above-average detective game. The mystery was never the interesting part; the deciding was.

You can watch other designs circle this.Immortality hands you footage and no verification and gets somewhere adjacent by making interpretation the mechanic.Paradise Killer is the version where interpretation has a defendant.

The verdict

Paradise Killer is a tiny-team game with an idea that a hundred-person studio would have focus-tested into the ground. It found the load-bearing convention of its genre — the correct answer — pulled it out, and demonstrated that the building stands up better without it.

The island helps. Vaporwave is a style that has aged into wallpaper over the last decade, and this is one of the few games that had a reason for it: an artificial paradise built by a cult, dressed in the aesthetic of a future that never happened, on its twenty-fourth attempt. The pastel decay is an argument about the setting rather than a mood board. Ruins with palm trees and a synth bass are exactly what a failed utopia would leave behind.

Twelve to fifteen hours if you’re thorough, and thoroughness is the mode it wants. It’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. PC with a mouse suits the reading; the Switch version is the one I’d hand to somebody who wants to sit with it, and the soundtrack is worth a decent pair of headphones either way.

Where next: if you want the same evidence-assembly rigour with a stricter marker,Return of the Obra Dinn remains the high-water mark. If it’s the interrogation-as-character-study you want,Disco Elysium does what Paradise Killer’s conversations gesture at and don’t reach.

Spoilers below

The reveal that Lady Love Dies was exiled for a reason — and what that reason turns out to be — reframes the freedom to accuse anyone into something considerably darker. The game hands you unlimited prosecutorial power and then discloses that your character has previously used judgement badly enough to be removed from the world for three million days. You are the least qualified person on the island to be doing this, and the Council appointed you anyway, because the Council needed somebody who would deliver a verdict rather than the truth.

Which is what makes the ending options land. You can convict the wrong person knowingly. Not by accident, not by failing a check — you can look at the real answer, decide the island is better served by a different one, and file it. The game permits it and then makes you watch the sentence carried out. There’s no punishment screen. There’s no correction. The island simply continues on the version of events you signed.

Doctor Doom Jazz, Crimson Acid, the Marshal, every suspect I spent hours picking apart — the game’s real position is that the Syndicate was always going to build Island Sequence 25 regardless of who I named, and my investigation was a procedural formality performed to make a machine feel legitimate. That’s a hell of an argument to smuggle in under the vaporwave.

The detective genre in games has spent thirty years trying to make deduction happen and mostly producing its opposite. You know the pattern: you walk into a room, press the button on every glowing object, and once the counter reads 6/6 the detective announces the solution he worked out without consulting you. The game calls this an investigation. What it actually is is a search-and-collect with a lecture at the end.

The Case of the Golden Idol, released in October 2022 by the small Latvian studio Color Gray Games and published by Playstack, does the obvious thing that almost nobody does. It gives you the evidence and then makes you say what it means. If you’re wrong, it says no. It does not say why.

That “it does not say why” is the entire product.

The mechanism

Each of the eleven scenes is a single tableau: a frozen moment, hand-drawn in a style somewhere between Hogarth and a bad dream, populated by grotesques mid-crime. Somebody is falling off a cliff. Somebody is being poisoned. You click around the scene — pockets, letters, ledgers, signage, faces — and every clickable thing yieldswords. Names. Occupations. Verbs.

The words go into a bank. Then you open the thinking panel, which is a page of sentences with holes in them, and you drag words into holes until the sentences describe what happened. Who is who. Who did what to whom, and with what, and why.

That’s it. There’s no dialogue. There’s no interrogation, no timeline scrubber, no notebook that fills itself in. Two verbs: look, and assert.

Why the word bank is smarter than a dialogue tree

Here’s the design problem every detective game hits. Deduction is internal. It happens in a head. To make it a mechanic, you have to externalise it, and the moment you externalise it you risk turning “I worked it out” into “I picked the right option from three”.

The word bank solves this by making the answer spacecombinatorial and hostile. When a puzzle has forty available nouns and eleven slots, brute force isn’t a strategy — it’s a punishment. You can’t guess your way through, because the possibility space is too wide to walk and too narrow to fluke. So you’re pushed back into the only remaining approach: actually thinking about it.

And the game refuses to grade partially in a way that would let you triangulate. This is where it separates from its most obvious relative.Return of the Obra Dinn confirms your fates in batches of three, which is a genuinely brilliant compromise — it stops the game being unwinnable while making you commit to trios. It also means a canny player can farm it: lock two you’re sure of, cycle the third.Golden Idol declines the compromise. Submit an imperfect answer and you learn that it’s imperfect, and you go back to the tableau with your ego intact and your theory in pieces.

The result is that the moment of solving is undiluted. Nothing helped you. The game withheld everything except the facts, and the facts were sufficient, and you found them sufficient. I can’t think of a cleaner delivery of that feeling in the medium.

The other trick: the story is in the ledger

The eleven cases run across decades, and the plot — a cursed golden idol, an inheritance, a family, a great deal of murder — is never narrated to you. It’s assembled from the same nouns you’re using as puzzle pieces. You learn the dynasty’s shape because you keep filling in surnames. You work out the political situation because a scene requires you to identify who signed a document.

This is a genuinely rare thing: exposition that costs the player effort and therefore sticks. Nobody remembers a cutscene. Everybody remembers a name they had to earn. It’s the same economicsTunic runs when it makes the manual pages both the lore and the solution, and it’s why both games feel dense at a fraction of the word count of a proper RPG.

The art carries more of this than it gets credit for. The figures are ugly on purpose — pop-eyed, jowly, caught mid-gesture — and the ugliness is functional, because you need to distinguish nine strangers at a glance across ten scenes with no name tags. A realistic style would have made them a soup. Caricature is a legibility tool that happens to also be a tone.

Where it fights itself

Two honest complaints.

The scenes are static, which means the tableau has to carry both the puzzle and the drama, and occasionally the drama loses. A frozen frame is a fantastic puzzle substrate and a limited storytelling one, and a couple of the mid-game cases feel like admin — identify eight people at a party — rather than a crime you care about.

And the difficulty is uneven in the way hand-built puzzle games always are. Most of the eleven land beautifully. One or two hinge on a single obscure noun in a corner, and if you don’t click that corner you’re not stuck on logic, you’re stuck on pixel hunting, which is a different and worse kind of stuck. The game has a hint system for exactly this, and using it feels like a small defeat, which is arguably correct and definitely annoying.

The 2023 DLC chapters — The Spider of Lanka and The Lemurian Vampire — are tighter than the base game on both counts, which is a good sign about what the studio learned. The 2024 sequel,The Rise of the Golden Idol, moves the whole apparatus forward a couple of centuries and adds quality-of-life the original lacked.

The bit about being wrong

I want to dwell on failure, because it’s the least discussed part of this design and the most radical.

Modern games treat a wrong answer as a UX problem. Something must happen: a hint surfaces, a difficulty slider quietly nudges, an NPC wanders over to helpfully observe that the lever looks operable. The industry spent twenty years engineering frustration out, and in the process engineered out the state that precedes insight. You can’t have the click if nothing was stuck.

Golden Idol lets you be stuck. Properly, unproductively, for a quarter of an hour, staring at a picture of a man in a wig. And the reason this is tolerable rather than infuriating is a quiet piece of craft: the scene is always complete. Everything you need is on screen. There’s no second location, no locked area, no character who’ll say the missing thing on Tuesday. So when you’re stuck, you know with certainty that the failure is comprehension. That certainty is what makes persistence rational.

This is the oldest lesson in the medium and it keeps getting mislaid. The C64 adventures I grew up on were frequently stuck-forever affairs, and the good ones differed from the bad ones on precisely this axis: whether the puzzle was closed. A closed puzzle you can’t solve is a challenge. An open one is a guess. Color Gray have simply remembered which is which.

The verdict

Golden Idol is the rare game that respects you by ignoring you. It won’t encourage you. It won’t nudge. It has no interest in your session length or your completion funnel. It puts a horrible little painting in front of you and waits.

The genre lesson underneath it is worth naming: detective games have been adding features — timelines, reconstructions, deduction boards with animated string — when the missing ingredient was always subtraction. Take away the confirmation and the thinking arrives on its own. Every mechanic Color Graydidn’t build is why the one they did build works.

It’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and phones. The phone version is better than it has any right to be — the whole game is clicking and dragging, and a tableau sits fine on a tablet. Play it in single-case sittings with a real pen if you’re that way inclined. Most people won’t be. Most people will find they need to be by case seven.

Where next:Obra Dinn is the sibling and the better game overall, though not the purer one. If you want deduction with an actual world to walk around in, and a game that will happily let you be catastrophically wrong,Paradise Killer is the other end of the same argument.

Spoilers below

The idol itself is the best-kept structural joke in the game. For eleven scenes you’re doing forensic work on a series of murders, and the object motivating all of them has a power that is never explained by any mechanism and never needs to be, because the game has correctly identified that its supernatural MacGuffin is doing zero puzzle work. The idol is a reason for people to be greedy. Greed is legible. Curses are furniture.

The dynasty structure — the way the same family line keeps regenerating the same crime across generations — pays off because you built the family tree yourself, one dragged surname at a time. When the last case asks you to name a relationship you established four scenes ago, it’s checking whether you were investigating or just solving. Those turn out to be different activities, and it’s the only game I know that can tell the difference.

The pitch forDredge sells it short in both directions. “Lovecraftian fishing game” makes it sound like a novelty — a cosy loop with tentacles glued on for the trailer. What Black Salt Games actually shipped in March 2023 is a compact resource-management design where the horror isn’t a layer on top of the fishing. The horror is what the fishing is made of.

Four people made it, out of New Zealand, published by Team17. It came out on PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox on the same day, which for a team that size is its own small achievement. It runs about twelve hours if you’re thorough. It has no combat. It has one of the tightest pressure systems of its year.

The loop, plainly

You have a boat. You sail to a shoal, play a short timing minigame, and a fish comes aboard. The fish occupies a shape in your hold — a grid, Tetris-style. You sail to a dock, sell the fish, buy an upgrade: bigger hold, better rod, a dredge for pulling scrap off the seabed, an engine. You take on requests from the people in the archipelago’s five regions, and the requests pull you into the story.

Read as a list, that’s a chore simulator. Played, it’s a vice. The reason is that every one of those verbs is competing for the same two scarce things: space and daylight.

Why the grid is the whole design

The hold is a grid, and everything lives in it. Fish take up squares. So do your rods. So does the dredge. So does the crab pot, the research parts, the cargo you promised somebody. This single decision does about four jobs at once.

It makes gear a cost. In most games, equipping a better rod is a strict upgrade — you press a button, the number goes up. Here the better rod is a bigger rectangle, and a bigger rectangle is fish you can’t carry. You are constantly asked whether capability is worth capacity, and the answer changes by the trip.

It makes fish individual. A cod is a shape. An aberration — a mutated fish, the kind you pull up at night — is an awkward shape, and it’s worth more, and it sometimes rots and infects its neighbours. So the hold becomes a small hostile puzzle you are packing under time pressure, and the horror gets to live in your inventory screen rather than in a cutscene.

And it makes the return trip a decision. Full hold, three hours of light left, a good shoal one leg further out. Do you push?

The real ancestor of this is the attaché case inResident Evil 4 — the 2005 one — which took the most boring screen in games and made it a place you’d voluntarily spend time. Capcom understood that if arrangement is a skill, storage becomes content.Dredge takes that insight and pushes it further by making the case the scoreboard. The RE4 case rewarded neatness; theDredge hold decides what your day was worth. If you want the full argument about how the 2023 remake handled that legacy, that’sits own piece.

The deeper ancestor isSunless Sea, which established the modern template: a small boat, a dark map, a hunger meter and a fatal curiosity about the next island.Dredge is the arcade edit of that game. It cuts the prose, keeps the dread, and replaces the slow-burn attrition with a clock.

The clock is the horror

Here is the mechanism, and it’s elegant enough to admire in isolation.

Sail at night and a panic meter fills. As it fills, things appear: rocks that weren’t in that water at noon, shapes at the edge of the light, something with a wake. Push far enough and you take damage from things the game has never formally introduced to you.

What makes this work is that the game never forbids it. Night sailing is permitted, and it is profitable — aberrations are night fish, and aberrations pay. The horror is therefore always somethingyou elected to do for money. That’s a substantially different feeling from a monster that arrives on a schedule. You are not being ambushed; you are being tempted, and the game is politely keeping a tally.

This is the same trickPacific Drive runs with the storm timer: the danger is a resource you spend against a reward, so every scary moment is retroactively your own fault. Fault is a much stickier emotion than fright.

The panic meter also solves the cosy-game problem. A cosy loop wants you to settle in. A horror game wants you unsettled.Dredge resolves the contradiction by putting them on the same axis — daylight is cosy, and darkness is the same activity with the safety off — so you get the calm and the terror out of one set of rules, and the transition is a slider rather than a door.

The small cruelty of the timing minigame

One more piece deserves credit, because it’s the bit reviewers skip. Catching a fish is a timing test: a marker travels, you stop it in a zone, repeat a few times. It’s slight. It is also deliberatelyfast, and it takes real seconds, and those seconds are daylight.

That’s the trick. In a game where light is the scarce resource, a minigame is no longer a diversion — it’s a meter running. Fumble the rhythm on a big fish and you’ve spent twenty minutes of in-world afternoon on a failure. So the minigame being trivial is the design working: it’s not there to be hard, it’s there to convert your attention into time, so that the sun going down is something you did rather than something the clock did.

Most games would have made the fishing test harder and the fish more valuable. Black Salt made it cheap and made it cost, which is why an eight-second interaction you’ll perform hundreds of times never quite becomes furniture.

Where it strains

Traversal. The archipelago is generous at first and repetitive by hour eight, because sailing is a constant-speed activity with nothing to do during it, and once you know the map you’re mostly holding a stick forward. Engine upgrades help. They don’t fix it. The Iron Rig expansion in 2024 loaded the mid-game with more to do, and The Pale Reach in late 2023 added an ice region with genuinely new fishing rules, but the base game’s middle hour has a slack patch and it’s honest to say so.

The story is thinner than the atmosphere. The Collector wants things; you fetch them; the fetching is meaningful and the character isn’t. This is a game with an extraordinary sense of place and a serviceable plot, and if you arrive expecting the writing to match the systems you’ll be a little cold on it. CompareSignalis, which inverts the ratio.

The verdict

Dredge is a design worth studying and a game worth finishing, and those are different compliments that it happens to earn together. Four people identified that a fishing game and a survival-horror game have the same skeleton — go out, gather, weigh the risk of one more, come home — and built one object that is both. The grid hold and the panic clock are the entire achievement. Everything else is decoration on a very good machine.

There’s a lesson in here for bigger studios that won’t take it.Dredge has one idea about space and one idea about time, and it spends its entire runtime compounding them against each other. No skill tree padding the middle, no crafting web, no map littered with icons to justify the map’s existence. Twelve hours, two mechanics, and the fact that I can still describe the whole thing in a paragraph is a feature of the design rather than a limit of it.

It’s on everything. Switch handheld suits it — this is a game for a chair — but the timing minigame is marginally kinder with a mouse or a decent stick, and the PC version is the one to pick if you’re chasing the expansions.

Where next: for the survival loop with better prose, takeMouthwashing; for the fuller inventory-as-anxiety experience, go back toCrow Country and watch the same instincts get applied to a mansion instead of an ocean.

Spoilers below

The Collector’s endgame — assembling the pieces of the artefact, and the choice the game offers once you have them — is whereDredge declines to be as smart as its systems. The dual ending is a lever pull. Having spent twelve hours teaching you that decisions are shaped like rectangles and priced in daylight, it resolves on a binary menu, which is the one moment where the fiction and the mechanics stop talking to each other.

The better ending — the one where you understand what the fisherman has been doing and what the pieces are for — lands emotionally because the aberrations have been telling you the whole time. The mutated fish aren’t set dressing. They’re the same process that’s happening to you, applied to something with fins, and the game has been putting the evidence in your hold and charging you money for it since hour one. You sold the symptom. That’s the joke, and it’s a good one.

What stays with me is that the horror had a price list. Every dreadful thing in this game arrived with a market value attached, and I kept taking the trade.

Norco is a real place. It sits in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, about twenty miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans, and its name is an acronym: the New Orleans Refining Company, which built the town around the plant in the 1910s. The refinery is still there. Shell owns it. The town is named after the thing that poisons it, which is the sort of detail a fiction writer would be told to cut for being too on the nose, and it is simply the address.

That’s the first thing to understand aboutNORCO, the 2022 point-and-click adventure by Geography of Robots, published by Raw Fury. It didn’t invent its setting. It reported one. The developer grew up down there, and the game carries the specificity of somebody describing a place they can’t stop describing — petrochemical flare stacks, drainage canals, the particular light of a swamp that has industry sitting in the middle of it.

The shape of the thing

You play Kay, returning home after her mother Catherine has died of cancer. Her brother Blake is missing. That’s the engine: find the brother, settle the estate, leave. Nobody leaves.

Mechanically this is an adventure game of a very old school — pixel art, cursor, inventory, conversation trees, the whole 1990s apparatus, rendered with the muddy colour palette of a machine that had a limited number of colours and made a personality out of it. Kay is accompanied by Million, an android her mother owned, who narrates and comments and is funnier than the situation deserves. There are minigames. There is a mind map.

The mind map is the piece worth stopping on, because it’s the design decision that makes the game work.

Why the mind map works

Most adventure games track state in an inventory and a journal.NORCO tracks it in a diagram of Kay’s head: characters, places, ideas, connected by lines you can click to have Kay tell you what she thinks about the connection. It looks like a convenience feature. It is doing something much more specific.

An inventory tells you what you’re carrying. A mind map tells you what you’rethinking about, which in a game where the actual puzzle is “why is my family like this” is the only inventory that matters. Consulting it isn’t a lookup; it’s Kay worrying at something. The design is telling you that the obstacles here are not locked doors — they’re the things she hasn’t understood yet about her mother.

The real ancestor of this isDisco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet, which turned ideas into equipment, but the lineage runs further back than that. Anyone who played adventure games in the Amiga years remembers the topic-list dialogue system, where you’d hoover up keywords and try them on every NPC like keys on a ring.NORCO looked at that mechanism — the game’s memory of what you’d learned — and asked what happens if you make it the interface rather than the plumbing. It’s the same moveTunic makes with its manual: promote the paratext to the text.

The other thing the mind map buys is pacing control without gating. The game rarely stops you. It lets you carry confusion around, and it gives you a place to put the confusion down, which is why a story this dense doesn’t feel like homework.

The refinery is the antagonist

There’s no villain here in the sense a game usually means it. There’s a company, a security apparatus, some men with a lot of money and a religious streak, and an economy that has already decided what the town is for. The plot involves all of them. The pressure comes from something more diffuse: a place where the largest employer is also the reason the air tastes like that, and where leaving is expensive and staying is expensive and both bills arrive.

NORCO is very good at the texture of this. The Shell plant looms over dialogue the way weather does. Characters talk about work, and about who’s sick, and the two conversations are the same conversation. The game never delivers a thesis paragraph about extraction; it just keeps showing you the drainage ditch.

There’s a formal trick underneath it.NORCO keeps handing narration duties around — Kay, Million, Catherine’s recollections, the occasional block of text that belongs to nobody in particular — and the effect is that the town accumulates description faster than any single character could supply. Adventure games usually fix the camera to one consciousness because the cursor implies a hand. This one lets the perspective drift, and the drift is the point: a place gets described by everyone who’s stuck in it.

This is where the Southern Gothic label earns itself. The genre’s actual content — Faulkner, O’Connor, the decayed grandeur and the inherited guilt — is about a place where the past won’t decompose.NORCO relocates that to a landscape where the past is literally in the groundwater, and lets the mode do the work. There are visions. There are prophets. There’s a bird. None of it is played as fantasy; it’s played as what a stressed brain does in a stressed place.

Yuts, the developer behind Geography of Robots, brought in a soundtrack from Gewgawly I, with Houston rapper Fat Tony featuring, and the music does something a lot of atmospheric indies fail at: it has a region. It sounds like it came from somewhere specific rather than from the drone-and-piano supply cupboard.

Where it fights itself

The minigames are the weak seam.NORCO periodically hands you a small mechanical diversion — a bit of combat-ish, puzzle-ish business — and these are fine, and they are also the least interesting five minutes on either side of them. They exist partly for rhythm and partly, I suspect, because an adventure game feels obliged to have verbs. The game is strongest when it trusts the cursor and the conversation. Compare whatHypnospace Outlaw does with the same problem: it never bolts on a verb, because it made its interface the verb, and it never has to change gear.NORCO changes gear, and you feel the clutch.

The bigger risk is legibility. This is a story that withholds, layers timelines, and expects you to assemble intent from fragments. Played across a few short sittings, whole threads can go slack. It rewards a couple of long evenings, and punishes the twenty-minutes-before-bed schedule that most of us actually have. That’s a real cost and worth knowing before you start, in the same wayPentiment is worth knowing about before you commit.

And the ending will annoy a certain kind of player. Fair warning. It’s an ending that resolves the emotional question and declines several of the plot ones.

The verdict

NORCO won the Tribeca Games Award in 2021, before release, off a slice — the first game to take that prize — and the festival juries were reacting to the right thing. It’s a genuinely literary game, in the narrow sense that its achievements are the achievements of prose: a sentence that lands, an image that won’t leave, an observation about people you recognise as true and hadn’t articulated.

What it does that a hundred other narrative indies don’t is refuse the easy consolation of resolution. Kay doesn’t solve Norco. Norco isn’t a mystery; it’s a condition. The game gives you a mind map for holding contradictions and then asks you to hold some.

It runs about five to six hours, which is the correct length, and it is short in the way a good novella is short. Play it on PC if you can — the cursor wants a mouse — though the 2023 console ports work fine and the Switch version is a decent bedside machine for it, schedule caveat notwithstanding.

Where next: if the mind map is what grabbed you,Disco Elysium is the fuller expression of the same idea. If it’s the place-as-character, takeCitizen Sleeper, which does economic precarity with dice instead of drainage canals and gets somewhere similar.

Spoilers below

The Superduck sequence is the moment the game shows its whole hand. Kay’s descent into a corporate-security theme-park apparatus, and the pivot from Southern Gothic to something closer to cyberpunk satire, is a swerve that shouldn’t hold and does — because the game has spent hours establishing that this town’s institutions are already absurd, so an absurd one arriving on schedule reads as continuity.

Catherine’s playable flashbacks are the structural masterstroke. Putting you inside the mother’s perspective, after hours of Kay assembling a picture of her from objects and other people’s accounts, means the game gets to do the thing prose does well and games usually can’t: show you that the picture was wrong in a way that isn’t a twist, just the ordinary gap between a parent and a child. You don’t learn Catherine had a secret. You learn she had a life.

And Blake. The search for Blake is the quest hook, and by the end the game has quietly demonstrated that finding him was never available, because what happened to Blake is what happened to the town — a slow dissolve into the machinery — and you cannot recover a person from an economy. That’s why the ending withholds. A resolution would have been a lie about how this works.

You wake on Erlin’s Eye, a half-derelict station built out of a scavenged shipyard, and you are legally a machine. Your mind is an emulation of a person who signed a contract; your body is a rented shell owned by a corporation called Essen-Arp, and it is decaying on schedule because the maintenance drug is a subscription you skipped by running away. That is the setup of Citizen Sleeper, made largely by Gareth Damian Martin as Jump Over the Age, published by Fellow Traveller, released 31 May 2022 on PC, Switch and Xbox, with a PlayStation port the following year.

The whole thing runs on five dice, and the dice are the best piece of design anyone has done with precarity.

What the pool actually models

Each cycle — the game’s word for a day — you roll a pool of dice. You spend them on actions: work a shift at the scrapyard, cook at the noodle stall, talk to someone, chase a lead. The number on the die sets the odds band for the action: a high die is likely to go well, a low die is likely to go badly, and a middling die sits in between. You allocate, you resolve, the cycle ends, you roll again.

The size of your pool is your Condition — the state of the body. Healthy, you get five dice. As the shell degrades you get four, then three, then two. Energy sits alongside it: eat and you function; go hungry and every die you roll is worse.

Read that back as a machine and see what it does.

It converts your health bar into yourscope of action. In almost every other game, low health means you might die. Here, low health means you can do fewer things per day. That is a different and considerably more accurate model of what being unwell actually costs a person: you do not lose a life bar, you lose Tuesday.

It makes randomness feel like circumstance rather than luck. A bad roll in a tactics game is a slap. A bad roll here is a morning where the work was there but your hands would not cooperate, and the game has already told you why — you are a Sleeper, the shell is failing, and this is what failing feels like from the inside. Same maths. Completely different meaning, because the fiction pre-explains the variance.

And it forces triage as the primary verb. Five dice, seven things worth doing. The station always has more work than you have hands, and every cycle you are deciding which relationship goes unattended so you can afford Stabiliser. Citizen Sleeper punishes you for having a finite number of hours, which is the only punishment the working poor ever actually receive.

Clocks, and why they hurt

The other half of the system is the clocks: circular progress trackers that fill as you commit dice, lifted openly from Blades in the Dark’s design vocabulary. Martin has never been coy about the tabletop debt.

The reason clocks work better here than a quest log would is that a clock isvisible partial progress on something you might abandon. A quest log says: this task exists. A clock says: this task is 60% done and it will still be 60% done in a month if you stop feeding it. Some clocks run backwards. Some are counting down towards you rather than towards a reward, and the sensation of watching a bounty-hunter clock fill while you cannot spare a die to deal with it is the single most stressful thing in the game.

That is what converts the dice from a puzzle into a life. A puzzle has a solution. A life has a set of clocks, all filling at different rates, and a fixed number of dice per day to distribute among them.

The nearest ancestor in games isPersona 5 Royal, which does the same thing with a calendar — a fixed number of afternoons and more people who deserve one than you have. But Persona’s scarcity is a scheduling optimisation you can solve with a spreadsheet, and the internet duly solved it. Citizen Sleeper’s scarcity has variance in it, which means it cannot be solved in advance and has to bemanaged in the moment. That is closer to how it feels.

The other ancestor is the board-game shelf. Dice allocation as a mechanism has been thoroughly worked out around kitchen tables — you roll, the number is your constraint, you place. Martin took a tabletop mechanism at the point where it was mature and asked what it would mean if the dice were a body. It is one of the few genuinely successful transplants of a board-game idea into a video game, and it works because the transplant carried thefeeling across rather than the rules.

The writing earns the frame

The prose is good enough to survive the amount of it there is, which is the minimum bar for a game where the dice mostly buy you paragraphs.

The station is a bureaucratic ruin: corporate remnants, a functioning market, an ecosystem of people who arrived for one reason and stayed for a worse one. The supporting cast are drawn with a restraint the genre rarely manages — a technician, a chef, a hauler, a kid, an AI — and none of them is a quest dispenser wearing a face. They have their own timetables. They leave.

Guillaume Singelin’s art gives the whole thing a warmth that argues productively with the material; the station is a nightmare of labour precarity rendered in soft, likeable lines, and that tension is deliberate. Amos Roddy’s score does the rest. The three free episodes — Flux, Purge and Refuge — that Jump Over the Age released across 2022 extend the story into the station’s refugee crisis and its politics, and they are the rare free DLC that changes what the base game was about.

Where it fights itself

The dice stop biting. By the late game, if you have played reasonably, you have solved your maintenance problem, your Condition is stable, and the pool is comfortably large. The precarity that made the first eight hours extraordinary becomes a formality, and the last stretch is a visual novel with a dice-rolling animation attached.

This is arguably thematic — the game is about escaping precarity, and escaping it should feel like something. I do not fully buy that defence. The best hours are the frightened ones, and a design that systematically dismantles its own central tension by hour twelve has traded its strongest hand for a narrative beat.

The second charge is smaller: the odds bands mean a low die is often simply wasted, and there are cycles where the correct play is to burn a die on nothing. A design that lets youdo something with your bad hours would have been truer.

The verdict

Citizen Sleeper does the thing I most want from a small game: it finds one mechanism, understands exactly what that mechanism means, and builds everything else in the frame to point at it. The dice are a body, a working week and a bank balance expressed as five cubes on a table, and for the first half of this game the sensation of placing them is as close as the medium has come to modelling what it is like to be short of everything at once.

It is on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation, it takes ten to fifteen hours, and a sequel is on the way. Play the base game first and let the early cycles frighten you before you optimise them away.

For the other end of the same conversation — a game where the numbers on your character sheet are also the argument — readDisco Elysium, andNorco if what draws you here is a place that has already been ruined by capital and is still, somehow, inhabited.

Spoilers below

The endings are where the design’s honesty shows.

Citizen Sleeper offers several ways off the Eye and several ways to stay, and the game refuses to rank them. The route that gets you a body of your own, the route that puts you on a ship, the route that dissolves you into the station’s network, the route where you simply keep going — each is reached by having spent your dice on one set of clocks instead of another, over dozens of cycles, mostly without realising you were choosing.

That retroactive quality is the point. You discover, around cycle sixty, that the person you had been buying noodles for and the clock you had been quietly feeding had become the shape of your life, because those were the days you could afford. The endings are a summary of your scarcity.

The Essen-Arp material is handled with real discipline. The corporation never becomes a villain with a face. It is a legal position — you are property, you are in breach, and there is a hunter with a clock because that is what the contract provides for. When the game finally lets you address your status, the resolution is administrative, and it lands harder for it. A boss fight would have been a lie about how any of this works.

And the last thing, which I think is the game’s best line of thought: whatever ending you take, the station carries on. The market opens. The scrapyard needs hands. Someone else wakes up in a rented body with five dice and a subscription they cannot pay. Erlin’s Eye does not need you to have been there. It just needed a Sleeper.

Marissa Marcel made three films and none of them came out. Ambrosio in 1968, a Gothic thing about a monk, adapted from the Matthew Lewis novel that scandalised 1796. Minsky in 1970, a lurid detective picture. Two of Everything in 1999, a pop-star doppelgänger story after a thirty-year silence. She was the lead in all three. She vanished. The films were shelved.

None of this happened. Immortality, from Sam Barlow’s Half Mermaid, released on 30 August 2022 for PC and Xbox, hands you the surviving footage — clips, rehearsals, screen tests, behind-the-scenes offcuts, several hundred fragments in total — and gives you no index, no chapter list, no search box. It gives you one verb, and the verb is the whole game.

The match cut is a search query

Here is the mechanic. You are watching a clip. You click on something in the frame — a face, a lamp, a crucifix, a hand, a cigarette — and the game cuts you to a different clip, from a different film, a different decade, containing that thing. Then you do it again. That is the entire interface.

Consider what this actually is. It is a search engine whose query language isobjects in shot, and whose index you cannot see. You cannot ask for “1970, scene 14”. You can only ask for “somewhere else with a mirror in it”, and the game answers by throwing you thirty-one years across an archive that does not believe in chronology.

The system does three things at once, and this is why it is the best idea Barlow has had.

It makes browsing impossible, which forces attention. In search-box design — Barlow’s own Her Story, from 2015 — you are typing words you already suspect. Here you have tolook at the picture to find your next move, which means you are watching cinema the way a film editor watches cinema: scanning the frame for the object that will carry the cut. The game has trained a viewing habit into you within twenty minutes, and it did it by taking your index away.

It puts the connections in your head rather than the database. Two clips linked by a wine glass have no relationship the game has asserted. The relationship is one you built, because you clicked the glass. Every player’s Immortality is a different graph, and the game never has to author a single one of them.

And it makes the archive feelfound. An index implies a librarian. The absence of one implies the reels turned up in a lockup and nobody has catalogued them, which is exactly the fiction the game needs you to accept.

The films have to be good, and they are

This is the part that gets undersold. Immortality only works if three fake films, from three distinct decades, are individually convincing enough that you would watch them straight.

They are. Ambrosio is shot as a late-60s European art-horror piece, all shadow and religious hysteria, with the specific stiffness of a 1968 production that thinks it is being daring. Minsky has the greasy 1970 grain of a picture with a lower budget and a higher opinion of itself. Two of Everything is a 1999 slick thing, and the period detail extends to how the actors are beingdirected, which is a nuance almost nobody bothers with. The fictional directors — John Durick on the first and last, Arthur Fischer on Minsky — have distinguishable authorial tics, and you can tell whose set you are on before anybody speaks.

Manon Gage, as Marcel, is carrying a genuinely absurd load: she has to play a 21-year-old ingenue in 1968, the same woman hardening in 1970, and the same woman returning in 1999, across footage that you will encounter in random order and compare directly. She is superb. So is Charlotta Mohlin, whose work I will not describe above this line.

The production discipline behind this is what impresses me most as a piece of craft. Every clip has to be watchable cold, meaningful in context, and contain enough clickable objects to route you onward. That is three constraints on every frame of a feature-length shoot, times three films, and they were shot as real productions with period-appropriate technique.

The ancestor is Shattered Memories

Barlow’s obvious lineage is his own: Her Story (2015), Telling Lies (2019), a career built on giving players a pile of video and a way to interrogate it. Both of those games are search-box games, and Immortality is usually filed as the third one.

I think the real ancestor is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which Barlow wrote for Climax in 2009. That game’s actual idea was that it watched you back — the world reconfigured itself according to what you looked at and how you answered, and the horror was the implication of being profiled. Immortality is that idea with the profiling removed and the responsibility handed over. You are still being characterised by what you choose to look at. There is just nobody keeping the file.

The other ancestor is the CD-ROM crash of the mid-90s, and I say this as someone who watched it happen in real time. FMV died because the industry decided the videowas the game — press the right button, receive the next cutscene, and the interactivity was a toll booth on a film you were being shown. Barlow’s whole career is the correction: the video is thematerial, and the game is the apparatus you use on it. The scrub bar is the toy. Once you understand that, the entire genre reopens.

Where it fights itself

The randomness is a genuine cost. Clicking a recurring object gives you a clip from the pool of clips containing it, and the pool does not care about your progress. You will hit the same three fragments repeatedly while the one you need sits somewhere you have not thought to click. The game’s defenders call this serendipity. Some of it is; a fair chunk of it is churn, and the last stretch of a completionist run turns into pixel-hunting a frame for the object you missed.

The rewind mechanic — and I will keep this vague — is a second layer that a sizeable number of players never discovered unaided in 2022. The discovery rate on your central twist should probably not depend on whether the player idly held a button. It is a magnificent thing to find. It is also a design that has decided some of its audience will simply never see the game.

The verdict

Immortality is the most interesting thing anybody has done with video in a game, and it earns that by refusing the two easy versions: the interactive film where you press buttons, and the puzzle box where the video is a skin over a lock. The footage is the mechanism. You are the search algorithm. Every connection in your head was assembled by you out of raw material that was never sequenced.

It is on PC and Xbox, and it went to phones later, where it works better than you would expect because scrubbing is a touch verb. Give it a long evening with headphones and no walkthrough open. The moment when the archive starts answering back is worth protecting.

If the appeal is being handed a database and no instructions, readReturn of the Obra Dinn next, andLorelei and the Laser Eyes for the version where the archive is a building.

Spoilers below

The rewind is the game.

Holding the scrub backwards through certain frames peels the clip open and reveals another one underneath — footage that was never part of any production, in which two figures address the camera directly. The One and the Other One. An entity that has been inside Marissa Marcel, and the woman it displaced, both speaking from somewhere behind the film stock.

What makes this land is that the mechanic and the fiction are the same act. You have spent hours performing an intrusion — pulling apart other people’s work, watching rehearsals nobody meant you to see, freezing frames on faces between takes. The game’s answer is that something else has been doing exactly that, for much longer, and considerably better. The predatory viewer is the game’s actual subject, and it waited until you had become one before it told you.

The Ambrosio material is where the whole design justifies itself. A 1968 film about a monk destroyed by his own appetite, containing a hidden layer about a thing that consumes people to keep living, discovered by a player whose only verb islook closer. Three levels of the same idea stacked on one reel. The archive was built to carry that, and every other pleasure in the game is downstream of it.

The uncomfortable part, and the reason I keep going back to it, is Marcel herself. Every route through this game treats her as an object to be examined. That is what the interface permits. Barlow builds two hundred pieces of evidence that the film industry looked at this woman rather than at her work, hands you the tools to do the same thing, and then reveals that the looking was the horror. It is the neatest trap I have walked into in a decade.

The Tulpar is a freight ship crewed by five people, and its cargo is mouthwash. Pallets of it, being hauled across a lot of empty space by a haulage company called Pony Express, because a logistics decision somewhere required it. The ship crashes in the opening minutes. Nobody is coming.

Mouthwashing, from the small team at Wrong Organ and published by Critical Reflex, came out on PC on 26 September 2024 and takes about three hours. It is the most efficient horror game I have played in years, and the efficiency is the whole design rather than an accident of budget.

Three hours is a structural decision

Horror has a well-documented decay curve. The first hour of any horror game is the good one, because you do not yet know the rules; by hour six you have learned the monster’s aggro radius and you are playing a stealth game with a costume on. Alien: Isolation, which I admire enormously, spends its last third fighting this and losing. The dread converts into competence, and competence is the opposite of fear.

Wrong Organ’s answer is to finish before the conversion happens. Three hours is long enough to learn the Tulpar’s geography and short enough that you never master it. You are kept permanently in the first act’s emotional register — the one where you are still working out what kind of thing this is — and then the game ends while you are still in it.

That decision cascades through everything else. There is no combat, no inventory management worth the name, no crafting, none of the systems that games reach for when they need to fill hours they have already sold. Mouthwashing has almost no verbs. You walk, you look, you interact when the game lets you. The absence is load-bearing: a game with no way to fight back has no route to competence, and therefore no route out of dread.

The ship is the timeline

The Tulpar is small. You will walk its length dozens of times, and this is where the design does its cleverest work.

The game cuts between before the crash and after it, and it uses thesame corridors for both. The bridge you crossed as a functioning workplace is the bridge you cross as a tomb. Because you have physically walked it in both states, the comparison is stored in your legs rather than your head. Wrong Organ never has to tell you what has been lost, because you have the muscle memory of the version where it was fine.

This is spatial storytelling of a very old-fashioned kind, and it is enormously more effective than the audio-log approach that swallowed the genre after BioShock. A log is a thing a designer hands you. A corridor you have walked eighty times is a thing you own.

The crew are drawn with the same economy. Curly is the captain, wrapped in bandages after the crash and unable to speak. Jimmy is the co-pilot who is now in charge. Anya is the nurse. Swansea is the engineer, older than the rest, with the tired competence of a man who has watched several companies do this before. Daisuke is the intern, young and cheerful and the only person on board who seems to like his job. Five people, three hours, and every one of them lands. The writing gets there by giving each of them one thing they want and no way to ask for it.

The low-poly is an argument

Mouthwashing renders in a deliberately PS1-ish register: chunky polygons, texture warp, faces built from about nine triangles. The lazy version of this in 2024 is a nostalgia filter slapped over modern geometry, and there is a lot of it about.

Here it is doing something specific. Low-poly faces cannot emote precisely, which means the game must convey a state of mind through framing, sound and behaviour instead — and the player’s brain, given a face that will not resolve, fills in the worst available reading. Horror has known this since the Nostromo’s corridors were dark because the lighting rig was cheap. Ambiguity is free fuel.

It also solves the gore problem. A high-fidelity rendering of what has happened to Curly would be an endurance test and a certification headache. At this resolution it is a suggestion you cannot look away from, which is worse.Crow Country uses the same era for warmth and toyishness; Mouthwashing uses it to withhold.

What it is actually about

The horror here is administrative.

The mouthwash is the thesis. Five human lives are on that ship because a company decided the mouthwash needed to be somewhere else. When the crash happens, the cargo is revealed to be as worthless as it sounds, and the crew are left with a finite larder and a rescue that has no commercial reason to be dispatched. Swansea eventually drinks the stuff, because it contains alcohol, and that image — a man drinking the cargo that killed him — is the whole game in a frame.

What Wrong Organ understand, and what most workplace horror misses, is that the company never appears. There is no evil executive, no memo from the villain, no boss fight with a CEO. There is a haulage contract and five people inside it. The pressure comes from the shape of the situation, and the situation is entirely ordinary. This is where the real ancestor lives: the Nostromo of Alien (1979) was a working ship with a crew arguing about bonuses, and the reason that film has outlived a thousand monster pictures is that the monster was the second-worst thing on board. Mouthwashing skips the first monster entirely and keeps the bonuses.

The other ancestor is closer to home. This is a game about being trapped in a small space with people whose jobs are collapsing around them, and it belongs alongsideStill Wakes the Deep as evidence that the current wave of horror has worked out that labour is scarier than ghosts.

Where it fights itself

Two honest charges.

The non-linear structure is doing heavy lifting, and the cuts between timelines occasionally land as authorial rather than motivated — you can feel the writer choosing the moment to withhold. Most of the time this is fine, because the withholding is the point. Once or twice it reads as a magic trick rather than a choice.

And the interactivity is thin enough that a certain kind of player will reasonably ask what the game is doing that a short film would not. The answer is the corridors, and I think the answer holds — but it is a real question and it deserves a real answer rather than a shrug about “walking simulators”.

The verdict

Mouthwashing is three hours long, costs less than a takeaway, and will sit in your head for a fortnight. It works because every element of it is subordinated to one idea: keep the player in the state of not-yet-knowing, and then stop. There is no padding to defend, because there is nothing here that is not the point.

Play it on PC, in one sitting, at night, without reading anything else about it first — the discourse around this game gives away more than it realises. Then readSignalis for the other end of the same argument, where the low-poly frame is used for grief rather than dread.

Spoilers below

Jimmy is the reason to play this twice.

The game is narrated, structurally, by the crew member with the strongest possible motive to shape what you see. Jimmy caused the crash deliberately. Jimmy assaulted Anya. Curly, the captain, knew about the second thing and handled it by doing nothing at all — which is why the game’s most disturbing image is a man swaddled in bandages who cannot speak, being kept alive by the person he failed to stop. Curly is punished with a fate the game presents as unbearable, and it is unbearable precisely because you are asked to hold his complicity and his suffering at once.

The birthday sequence is what everyone remembers, and it is doing more than shocking you. Jimmy has spent the entire game constructing a version of events in which he is a man coping heroically with someone else’s disaster, and the cake is that fiction reaching its logical end: care and consumption performed as the same gesture. He is looking after Curly. He is also eating him.

On a second run, the earlier timeline stops reading as a workplace and starts reading as evidence. Every cheerful exchange has a second meaning. Daisuke’s enthusiasm becomes almost unwatchable, because you know what the ship is going to do with a person who is easy to like. And Anya’s scenes acquire a fury that the first playthrough has no way to register, because she is the only person on board who knows exactly what is happening and has already learned that saying so achieves nothing.

That is the trick, and it is a genuine one. The reveal does not rewrite the game. It rewrites you.

I loaded games off cassette on a C64 for most of my childhood, which means I spent a meaningful fraction of the 1980s listening to a tape deck screech at me for four minutes to find out whether the thing on the inlay card was any good. It usually was not. That is the part everybody forgets when they say the old games were better. The old games were a lottery, played at £1.99 a ticket, and the thrill was structurally inseparable from the odds.

UFO 50, released on PC on 18 September 2024 by Derek Yu’s Mossmouth, is a box of fifty tickets. It is presented as the complete catalogue of UFO Soft, a fictional developer who made games for a fictional 1980s machine called the LX System between 1982 and 1989. None of the games are real. All of the games are real. The distinction stops mattering about twenty minutes in, which is the trick.

The fiction is the design document

The team — Yu with Eirik Suhrke, Jon Perry, Paul Hubans, Ojiro Fumoto of Downwell fame, Tyriq Plummer and others — built the constraint before they built the games. One palette. One notional machine. One studio’s imagined career arc. Then they made fifty complete games inside it and dated them.

That constraint is doing three separate jobs, and only one of them is nostalgia.

The first job is coherence. Fifty unrelated minigames would be a Wario Ware. Fifty games from one imaginary studio have ahouse style — recurring mascots, sound palettes you recognise across a decade, ideas a designer clearly tried in 1983 and got right in 1987. Barbuta, dated first, is a deliberately obtuse thing that withholds almost everything and expects you to map it on paper. It is also the worst-reviewed game in the box by consensus, and it is placed first on purpose, because a studio’s first game is supposed to be the one where they had not worked it out yet.

The second job is permission. The fiction lets these designers ship a game that isrude. Real 1980s games did not explain themselves, did not respect your time, and frequently did not tell you the rules. Modern design has spent thirty years correcting that, mostly correctly. But a modern game that withholds is read as broken, whereas a 1984 game that withholds is read as a 1984 game. The frame buys the team the right to be genuinely unhelpful, and several of the best things in the box only work because of it.

The third job is the argument, which I will come to.

The good ones are properly good

The line that gets thrown around is that UFO 50 is “twelve great games and thirty-eight demos”. That is lazy. The distribution is real — there are entries here I bounced off inside five minutes and would not defend — but the hit rate is far better than any compilation cassette I ever owned, and the ceiling is higher than the pitch implies.

Mortol is the standout structural idea: a platformer where your stock of lives is the level’s building material, because each corpse becomes a step, a bridge, a switch held down. Dying is the verb. It is a genuinely publishable idea that would carry a full-price indie release on its own, and it is sitting in a box with forty-nine others.

Party House is a deckbuilder about hosting parties where the guests you want are the guests who might ruin it — a push-your-luck engine with a social skin that has no business being this tight. Grimstone is a full Western tactics RPG, hours long, with a party and a job system. Campanella is a physics flying game about momentum and patience. Velgress is a vertical climber built on the anxiety of rising death. Vainger is a Metroid-shaped thing with modular power slots. Golfaria is golf that grew a metroidvania. Night Manor is a point-and-click horror game with real dread in it.

Any one of those, polished up and released alone with a trailer, would have picked up coverage. That is the density we are talking about.

What holds them together is that the team understood which 1980s conventions wereload-bearing and which were merely damage. The obtuseness is kept, because obtuseness is what made a 1984 game a place you inhabited for a month rather than a thing you consumed in an evening. The genuinely broken parts are quietly fixed: the collision is honest, the inputs read on the frame you pressed them, the difficulty is hard in ways you can learn from. Anyone who has actually gone back to a beloved C64 title in the last decade knows how much of the misery was technical rather than intentional. UFO 50 keeps the intent and throws out the misery, and that editorial judgement — exercised fifty separate times — is the real labour in the box.

The cherry is the real design

The meta-layer is the part I keep thinking about. Finish a game and you get a Gift. Meet a harder, game-specific condition — a score, a challenge, a deeper completion — and you get a Cherry. The Gift says you saw it. The Cherry says you understood it.

This is a superb piece of engineering because it solves the compilation’s oldest problem. Every collection I owned as a kid had the same failure state: you play each thing for ninety seconds, decide, and never return. The Gift/Cherry split gives you two distinct reasons to stay, calibrated to two distinct kinds of player, and it puts the decisioninside each game rather than in a menu. You are never being asked to like all fifty. You are being asked to find out which three are yours.

The design ancestor is the high-score table on a machine in a chip shop, where the point was that someone else had already proved the number was reachable. UFO 50 rebuilds that pressure without a leaderboard, purely through the implied competence of a fictional studio.

The argument

Here is what the fifty fake games are actually arguing, and it is a better argument than the packaging suggests.

The claim is that the 1980s constraint producedvariety as a by-product of poverty, and that the variety was the good part. Nobody knew what a game was yet. A team of three had a machine with sixty-four kilobytes and no genre conventions to obey, so what came out was strange — golf with a map, a platformer made of corpses, a party sim, a mech game, a fishing thing — because nobody had yet worked out which of those were supposed to be commercially viable. The market answered that question in the 1990s and the answer narrowed everything.

UFO 50 stages a counterfactual: what if that decade had been run by people who already knew how to design? Same hardware ceiling, same palette, same absence of tutorials — with thirty years of accumulated design literacy behind the keyboard. The result is fifty games that feel period-accurate and are quietly smarter than anything the period actually produced, and the gap between those two facts is the thesis.

The honest ancestor of this whole object is the covertape and the budget label — Mastertronic, Codemasters, the magazine cassette blu-tacked to the front of Zzap! that I fed into a Datassette before I had read the review. Those tapes were the delivery mechanism for exactly this experience: a dozen unlabelled things, most of them bad, one of them yours forever. UFO 50 is that tape with the failure rate tuned down and the ambition tuned up.

Where it fights itself

The fifty-game shape has a fifty-game cost. There is no way to sample this efficiently, and the entries are not sorted by quality — deliberately, since the fiction requires a career arc rather than a greatest-hits. You will spend hours on things you do not like to reach things you love, and the game is perfectly comfortable with that. If your gaming time comes in ninety-minute slots after the kids are down, that friction is a real charge against it.

The other cost is that the deepest games here — Grimstone especially — are asking for the commitment of a standalone release while sitting behind a menu that implies a snack. Several of the best things in the box are structurally disadvantaged by their own container.

The verdict

UFO 50 is the most generous thing released in 2024 and one of the few games I would describe as an act of scholarship. It understands the 1980s as adesign condition rather than an aesthetic, which is why it earns the pixels in a way that a thousand pixel-art indies with a CRT filter never do. Buy it on PC. Understand that you are buying an argument with fifty pieces of evidence attached, that you will hate some of the evidence, and that at least two of the fifty will end up in your permanent rotation.

If the appeal here is the density of ideas per hour, the other 2024 indie worth your time isAnimal Well, andBalatro is the piece to read on what happens when one of these small, strange systems escapes the box and eats a year of everybody’s life.

Spoilers below

The catalogue has an internal continuity, and finding it is a genuine pleasure that the marketing sensibly left alone. Entries reference one another across the imagined decade. Mortol gets a Mortol II further down the timeline that takes the corpse-as-scaffolding idea and complicates it rather than merely enlarging it, which is exactly the move a real studio makes with a surprise hit. Mascots and sprites recur. Sound motifs carry between games years apart in the fiction.

The effect of that is stranger than a straightforward Easter-egg hunt. By the time you have played twenty of these, you have opinions about UFO Soft as acompany — which of their designers you rate, when they lost the plot, which 1986 experiment obviously came from the same person who made the 1983 oddity you disliked. You are doing criticism on a body of work that does not exist. That is an absurd thing for fifty games in a Steam release to achieve, and it is the clearest evidence that the fiction was the point rather than the wrapper.

Red Candle Games spent six years being known for two horror games and one international incident. Detention (2017) put White Terror-era Taiwan into a 2D side-scroller and got a Netflix series out of it. Devotion (2019) put a Taipei flat into first person, shipped with a piece of art mocking a head of state buried in a prop, and was pulled from Steam inside a week; the studio eventually re-released it through its own storefront in 2022. That is the reputation Nine Sols arrives against — a small Taipei team known for atmosphere, dread, and being difficult to buy.

Nine Sols, which came to PC on 29 May 2024 after a Kickstarter, is a 2D action game about deflecting. It is the least likely third act imaginable, and it is the best thing they have made.

The deflect is an investment, not attrition

Everyone will tell you Nine Sols is Sekiro in 2D, and everyone is right enough to be unhelpful. The comparison is worth making precisely, because the place where the two designs diverge is where Nine Sols becomes its own thing.

FromSoftware’s deflect inSekiro is attrition. Every parry you land pushes an enemy’s posture bar up and holds it there; the fight is a slow crowbar applied to a gauge, and the reward for perfect play is that the gauge stops draining. Deflecting is how yousurvive. Damage is the by-product of surviving well enough for long enough.

Nine Sols hands you a different contract. Your protagonist Yi carries the Foo Talisman: land a deflect, and you stick a charge to the enemy. The charge sits there. It does nothing on its own. You detonate it with a separate input, and that is where the damage lives. The parry is a deposit. The detonation is the withdrawal.

That single split changes the emotional texture of every encounter. In Sekiro you are pressing forward through defence. In Nine Sols you areaccruing — and the moment you notice you have three charges banked on a boss who is about to wind up something you cannot afford to interrupt, you have the specific, delicious anxiety of a man holding a full hand of chips at a table that might close. Greed becomes a mechanic. Do you cash out for a guaranteed chunk, or hold for one more deflect and risk eating the hit that wipes the ledger?

Then there is the Unbounded Counter, the charged answer to attacks marked in red that a normal deflect will not touch. It costs charge, it demands you hold the input through a window where you are committed, and it converts an unblockable into an opening. The red attacks are, in effect, the game asking whether you have been paying attention to the rhythm or merely surviving it.

Every one of those systems is a way of asking the same question: are you willing to standcloser than is comfortable? Nine Sols has no dodge worth the name in the FromSoftware sense; retreat is a losing strategy, and the game teaches this by making the rewards for proximity structural rather than cosmetic. It is generous with the lesson and merciless if you refuse it.

Why 2D is the right plane for this

There is a genuine engineering argument buried in Nine Sols, and it is the reason the Sekiro comparison flatters it.

Sekiro’s hardest problem is the camera. A deflect window measured in a handful of frames is a contract between the game and your eyes, and a 3D camera can break that contract without either party being at fault — a pillar intervenes, a boss steps behind you, the lock-on swings and you have lost the tell you needed. Every player who has bounced off a From game has a story that is really a camera story.

A 2D plane makes the contract enforceable. The tell is always legible. When Nine Sols kills you — and it will, repeatedly, and the second half is a step up that some players will find unreasonable — you know exactly which frame you got wrong. That legibility is worth more than any amount of tuning. It is the same reasonPrince of Persia: The Lost Crown felt so clean in the same year: constraining the axis is a feature.

The older ancestor here is not any Soulslike at all. It is the 8-bit fighting game. I spent a genuinely stupid portion of 1987 on International Karate + on a C64, and the thing IK+ understood — the thing Barbarian and its stablemates understood — is that a fight staged on a flat plane at a fixed distance is a conversation aboutspacing and timing, with no third dimension to hide the information in. Nine Sols is that conversation with thirty-seven years of animation budget attached. Yi’s sword has weight because you can always see the gap.

The frame, and the word “taopunk”

Red Candle coined “taopunk” for this, and the marketing instinct is a bit groan-worthy until you actually look at the place. New Kunlun is a Solarian colony rendered in hand-drawn art that puts Taoist cosmology on top of decayed industrial infrastructure, and thecombination is doing work rather than decorating. Cyberpunk’s usual grammar is Western corporate rot with a neon overlay. Nine Sols swaps the underlying philosophy out and the aesthetic reorganises itself around a different idea of what decline means.

Yi is one of the Nine Sols, awake after a long absence, hunting the other eight. The humans of New Kunlun are called Apemen and are treated roughly as you would expect a species to be treated when the people running the place regard them as raw material. The story is delivered in the Red Candle manner: patient, mostly environmental, unhurried about handing you the shape of it.

The build layer is jades — equippable modifiers you slot to shape Yi around your own bad habits. It is a light system by the standards of the genre, and I mean that as praise. The jades tune; they do not rescue. You cannot build your way out of failing to deflect, which is the correct decision for a game whose entire argument is that you should learn to deflect.

Where it fights itself

Two things.

The first is the difficulty step in the back half. Nine Sols is a game with a teaching curve of real elegance for its first stretch and a spike in its last that reads as the developers designing for the players who survived the first stretch. That is a defensible choice and a real cost, and anyone telling you the game is “fair throughout” is grading on the curve of having finished it.

The second is length. This is a fifteen-to-twenty-five-hour game with a platforming layer that is competent rather than inspired, and there are stretches of traversal between the combat set-pieces that exist because metroidvanias have traversal. The fights are where the design is thinking. The corridors between them are where it is filling.

Neither is fatal. Both are the kind of thing worth knowing before you commit twenty hours of your life, which is the only reason I raise them.

The verdict

Nine Sols is the rare homage that has an argument with its source. It took Sekiro’s central verb, worked out that the verb could be a currency rather than a gauge, and built a whole economy of greed on top of it — then staged that economy on a plane where you can actually see what you are doing. The result is a combat system that does something Sekiro does not: it makes you complicit in your own deaths. You did not fail to react. You held for one more charge.

That Red Candle got here from two horror games, via a delisting that would have ended a lesser studio, is the sort of career arc you do not get to see very often. Play it on PC. Give the first three hours the patience they ask for; the game is teaching you a verb, and it will not start speaking properly until you have it.

If you want the other end of the same year’s indie spectrum, the fifty-game argument of UFO 50 is worth your time next, andSignalis is the piece to read if what draws you here is Red Candle’s other register.

Spoilers below

Yi’s hunt has a shape you can see coming from a distance, and Nine Sols is comfortable with that. The revenge frame is a delivery mechanism for a question about what New Kunlun wasfor, and the answer — that the colony’s survival was engineered on top of the Apemen as a resource, with the Sols as the architects and Yi among them — recasts every fight you have had up to that point. You have been killing your colleagues over a decision you helped make.

The design consequence is the interesting part. The late bosses are the ones with the most personal claim on Yi, and the combat system’s greed loop lands hardest there, because the game has spent twenty hours training you to hold charges for one more deflect and the last fights are the ones where you most want it over quickly. The mechanic and the fiction end up asking the same thing: can you stand close to this a moment longer than is comfortable?

The Shuanshuan material — the small human boy Yi ends up responsible for — is the counterweight, and it is the reason the ending has any weight at all. Red Candle have always been better at the domestic scale than the cosmic one. Detention was a school. Devotion was a flat. Nine Sols is a colony, and the bit that works is still a kid asking for a story.

The control scheme ofThank Goodness You’re Here! is a stick, a jump, and a slap. That’s the lot. There’s no inventory, no dialogue tree, no cursor, no verb list, no wheel of contextual options. You walk, you hop, and you smack things with an open hand.

Two hours later I put the pad down with my face aching, having laughed at a plumbing fixture, and I spent the walk to the kettle trying to work out how a game with one interaction had out-written every comedy script the medium shipped that year. The answer is a design answer, and it’s a good one, and it has a surprising amount to do with a British 8-bit tradition that everybody forgot about.

Barnsworth, spoiler-free

Coal Supper’s game came out on 1 August 2024 for PC, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation, published by Panic — the outfit behindUntitled Goose Game andFirewatch, which tells you roughly which shelf they think this belongs on.

You are a small yellow travelling salesman. You have an appointment with the Mayor of Barnsworth, a Northern English town rendered in hand-drawn 2D as a kind of warped seaside postcard: bulging brickwork, drooping guttering, faces built out of jowl and grievance. You’re early. So you wander.

And every few minutes somebody sees you, brightens, and says the title.Thank goodness you’re here! — and then hands you a job. Fetch this. Fix that. Get up there. Nobody asks who you are. Nobody ever will.

It runs about two hours. Matt Berry plays the Mayor, and the rest of the cast delivers a Barnsworth dialect that is doing the same job the Glaswegian does inStill Wakes the Deep: it establishes, instantly, that you are an outsider standing in a place with its own internal weather.

One verb, and the world does the work

Here is the systems read.

Comedy in games is almost alwayswritten. A cutscene fires, a line lands, and the interaction is the wrapper around a joke that was finished before you arrived. The player’s contribution is a button that advances the text. That’s a delivery system, and delivery systems are why so many funny scripts produce unfunny games.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! does the opposite thing. The joke is completed on your input, every time, because the design has made one enormous and expensive commitment:every object in Barnsworth has a bespoke response to being slapped.

Each one is authored individually. The bin has its own gag. The pipe has its own gag. The bloke asleep in the chair has one, and a second one if you slap him again. This is a colossal amount of hand-authored content in service of an interaction the player performs on impulse, and it is exactly why the game is funny: you didn’t receive the joke, youfound it, and the two-tenths of a second between your thumb and the world’s reaction is the space where surprise lives.

That gap is the whole mechanism. A punchline you read arrives on the writer’s schedule. A punchline you triggered arrives on yours, and your brain scores it as a discovery. This is whyUntitled Goose Game worked and why the Panic logo on the box makes sense. It’s the same economics: a tiny verb set, an obsessively responsive world, and the comedy generated at the point of contact.

The design also does something clever with escalation. Because the verb never changes, the game can escalate theworld freely — the scale of what you’re slapping can go completely off the rails while the input stays a small yellow man with an open palm. The stability of the verb is what licenses the absurdity of everything else. You always know exactly what you’re doing. The town is what stops making sense.

The real ancestor is a verb grid and a mole

Everybody saysUntitled Goose Game andWarioWare. Fine. But the actual lineage runs through two places, and one of them is a machine I loaded off tape.

The first is the LucasArts verb grid. SCUMM gave you a dozen verbs and a screen of objects, which is a combinatorial space of a few hundred pairings, most of them wrong. And the genius of the era — the thing that madeMonkey Island funny rather than merely charming — is that Ron Gilbert’s teams wrote bespoke responses for the wrong pairings. Use the rubber chicken on the dog. The joke lived in your bad idea being anticipated. Coal Supper has collapsed twelve verbs to one and spent the entire budget on the responses, which is the same design with the economics rearranged: fewer wrong ideas available, every single one of them answered.

The second is British. There was a whole seam of comedy games on the C64 and the Spectrum that came out of the same soil asViz — working-class, grubby, gleeful, faintly resentful.Wanted: Monty Mole came out in 1984 and was a platform game about a mole nicking coal during the miners’ strike, with a Scargill-alike as an obstacle.Dizzy was an egg doing errands for people who never explained anything. These games ran on the assumption that the funniest possible setting is a shabby British town with a job that needs doing in it, and that the protagonist should be a nobody with no dialogue and a rubbish task list.

Barnsworth is that tradition, resurrected with forty years of animation budget behind it. Nothing here quotes those games. It’s the same instinct, arriving again from the same part of England, and recognising it made me feel about nine years old.

Where it fights itself

Two honest problems.

The first: the density is uneven. The opening streets are so thick with authored responses that you slap everything, because everything pays. In the back half there are stretches where the world thins out, and the moment you slap three things in a row and get nothing, the game teaches you to stop slapping. That’s the risk of a design where the reward scheduleis the comedy — a dry patch doesn’t read as pacing, it reads as the machine being switched off.

The second: there is no failure and almost no friction, which is the right call for the comedy and does leave the middle hour feeling like a corridor with jokes stapled to the walls. You’re carried. Some of the errands resolve because you walked in the direction the game wanted, and the sensation of solving something — which theDizzy lineage always had, however unfairly — is largely absent.

And I have no patience for the “two hours for the money” complaint, but I’ll answer it. This game could not be four hours. The one-verb design has a hard ceiling: once your thumb stops expecting a surprise, the entire engine dies. Coal Supper stopped roughly ten minutes before that would have happened, which is craft rather than economy.

The verdict

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is the funniest game I have played in years and the reason is architectural. It located the comedy in the interaction rather than in the script, committed absurd resources to making one verb pay off everywhere, and then had the discipline to stop before the trick wore through. Everything about it — the palette, the vowels, the shape of the faces — is in service of a mechanical idea that would work even with the sound off.

It’s on PC, Switch and PlayStation. Play it in one sitting, with the volume up, ideally somewhere you can laugh out loud without explaining yourself.

If this is your kind of thing:Hypnospace Outlaw is the other great game built entirely out of obsessive, hand-authored responses to poking at stuff, andCocoon is the year’s other demonstration that knowing when to stop is a skill nobody credits.

Spoilers below

The structural joke — the one the whole thing is built on — is in the title, and it takes about ninety minutes to fully land.

Everyone in Barnsworth is delighted to see you. Nobody knows you. Every single interaction begins with a stranger’s relief and a task, and at no point does anyone ask your name, your business, or why a small yellow salesman is in their kitchen. You have no dialogue. You never object. The errands chain outward from the Mayor’s appointment you’re too early for, and each one exists because somebody looked at you and saw a solution to their problem.

That’s the shape of the entire game, and once you notice it you realise the escalation was never really about the scale of the set pieces. It’s about how completely a person can be defined by other people’s convenience. The town swallows you. You get further and further from the appointment that brought you here, doing favours for people who will never think about you again, and the game finds this hilarious for two hours and then, in the last few minutes, finds it briefly and genuinely melancholy — before deciding it’s hilarious after all.

Coal Supper earned that turn with the verb. Two hours of slapping the world and having it answer builds a very particular relationship: Barnsworth notices you constantly and knows you never. The ending is the design telling you what you were doing the whole time. A game about being useful to strangers had to be a game where the only thing you can do is act on something, and the only thing that ever comes back is the reaction.

I was in my late teens when the PlayStation turned up, which puts me in an awkward and useful position for talking aboutCrow Country. I had spent a decade with a C64 and then an Amiga, and I watched the 32-bit generation arrive as ashift — I could see the seams in it, because I hadn’t grown up inside them. The jagged geometry, the textures that swam, the characters built out of about forty triangles: none of that was a style. It was a budget. Everyone involved was doing the best they could with a machine that could barely afford a face.

Which is why most PS1-revival horror annoys me. It reproduces the compromises as if they were intentions. It puts the wobble back in and calls it atmosphere.

Crow Country, from SFB Games, out on 9 May 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, is the one that thought about it.

The park, spoiler-free

It’s 1990. You are Special Agent Mara Forest and you are walking into Crow Country, a theme park that shut down abruptly a couple of years earlier and has been rotting quietly ever since. The park’s owner, Edward Crow, is missing. You are here to find him. The gates are open, the mascot statues are still up, the log flume is full of stagnant water, and there is something moving in the maintenance corridors.

The look is pure late-90s: low-poly bodies, big-eyed faces that would sit comfortably in aFinal Fantasy VII field screen, chunky filtered textures. The camera sits high and back at a three-quarter angle and — here’s the first tell — you can rotate it freely, whenever you want, with the right stick. Movement is twin-stick. Aiming is manual and slow and awkward on purpose, with a laser sight you hold to line up a shot while a thing walks toward you.

Six to eight hours. Two modes on the front end: Survival Horror, which is the game, and Exploration Mode, which strips out the enemies entirely and leaves you the park and the puzzles.

The good friction and the accidental friction

This is the systems read, and it’s the reason the game is worth an essay rather than a shrug.

Survival horror in 1996 had two kinds of friction in it, and they got welded together in everyone’s memory.

The first kind was designed. Ammunition scarcity, so that every trigger pull is a decision. Inventory limits, so that what you carry is a plan. A map that folds back on itself, so that progress is knowledge rather than distance. Enemies that stay dead once killed, so the space you have cleared is a space youown, and the cost of clearing it was a resource you can never get back. All of that is deliberate, and all of it still works — it’s economics, and economics doesn’t age.

The second kind was the hardware talking. Tank controls existed because a fixed pre-rendered camera makes screen-relative movement incoherent at every cut, and the camera was fixed because the PS1 could not render a mansion in real time. Doors were doors because loading. The wobble was the absence of a floating-point unit. None of that was a choice anybody would make twice.

Most of the revival scene can’t tell the two apart, so it ships tank controls in 2024 as a signifier.Crow Country separates them with a scalpel. You get a free camera and modern movement — every ounce of the accidental friction gone. And you get scarcity, a small inventory, permanent kills, a park that knots around itself, and an aim so deliberate that shooting is always a small act of nerve. The designed friction is entirely intact. Nothing has been “modernised” in the direction of comfort.

The result is that the horror lands harder than in the games it’s imitating, because you can no longer blame the controller. When you back into a corner, that’s on you.

The real ancestor is the Spencer Mansion

Everyone saysResident Evil andSilent Hill about this game as if they were interchangeable. They aren’t, and which oneCrow Country actually descends from tells you what it’s for.

Silent Hill’s town is a mood; the fog was a draw-distance fix promoted to a metaphysics, and the design’s genius was that the geography barely matters. The Spencer Mansion is the opposite: it’s a lock. It’s a single object with a hundred moving parts, and every key, crank and crest is a tumbler. You don’t explore it so much assolve it, and the moment when a shortcut you unlock connects the east wing back to the hall you started in is the moment the whole design clicks over.

Crow Country is a Spencer Mansion with a log flume in it. The park is one machine. The ticket booth and the ride mechanisms and the staff-only doors and the drained water channels are all tumblers in a single lock, and the game’s real pleasure — the one that kept me up — is the slow collapse of a sprawling map into a compact, comprehensible object.

Which explains the other thing about this game, once you know who made it. SFB Games are the Vian brothers, and before this they madeSnipperclips and theTangle Tower detective adventures. They are an adventure-game studio. That’s why the puzzles are the best-constructed thing here by a distance — the fair, chunky, physical-logic kind that a good point-and-click runs on, with a clue density that means you almost never stall for the wrong reason. Horror studios usually treat puzzles as gates. Adventure studios treat them as the content, and Crow Country is a horror game where thelock is the point and the monsters are the tax you pay to work on it.

Where it fights itself

The combat is adequate. That’s the honest word. Shooting is tense the first few times because the aim is slow and the ammo is countable, and by hour four you have a routine — hold the sight, step back, fire, step back. The enemy roster doesn’t force enough variation in that routine to keep it interesting for the full runtime, and the game’s answer is mostly to place them in more awkward doorways.

Exploration Mode is the tell here, and I mean that admiringly. A studio that offers to remove all the enemies knows precisely which half of its game is the good half. It’s a generous option and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants the park without the nerves. It is also a quiet admission.

And the tonal register wobbles once or twice. The big-eyed character art is doing a specific job — the cutesy surface over the rot is the entire aesthetic thesis of an abandoned theme park — and it mostly holds, but there are lines of dialogue that reach for a wink and land in a different game than the one the corridors are running.

The verdict

Crow Country is the best argument I’ve seen that the retro-horror revival is worth having, because it’s the only one that did the analysis. It asked which parts of 1996 were craft and which were the price of a CD drive, and it kept the craft. The park is a beautifully built lock. The economics are real. The aiming is scary because it’s slow rather than because it’s broken.

It’s on PC and current consoles and it’s about seven hours, which is the correct size for a machine like this — long enough to learn the park, short enough that learning it stays the pleasure rather than becoming the work.

For where to go next:Signalis is the other great modern piece of the same tradition and goes much further into the imagery;the 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake is the counter-argument, a game that reinterprets its ancestor rather than restoring it; andStill Wakes the Deep does the no-weapons version of the same “learn a place, then lose it” trick.

Spoilers below

The structural reveal is that the park’s fiction and the park’s map are the same reveal.

You spend the first half reading Crow Country as a location with a mystery hiddeninside it — find the missing owner, find out what happened. Somewhere around the midpoint the emphasis inverts. The layout, the ride placements, the maintenance access, the things that were built where they were built: the park’splan is the evidence. The reason a door is where it is turns out to be the answer to a question about what Edward Crow was actually doing here, and once you see it, every earlier hour of key-hunting retroactively becomes an investigation you didn’t know you were running.

That’s why the Spencer Mansion lineage matters so much and why the Silent Hill comparison misleads. In a mood-horror game the geography can be arbitrary because it’s dream logic. Here the geography has to berational, because the plot’s entire mechanism is that a rational plan was drawn up by somebody, executed in concrete, and left standing after everyone who could explain it went away. The monsters are downstream. The park is upstream.

And it’s why Exploration Mode works as something better than an accessibility option. Take the enemies out and the game becomes what it always was underneath: a detective story where the suspect is a set of blueprints. The Vians spent years making detective games. They didn’t stop.

The first hour ofStill Wakes the Deep is a man walking to work. You are Caz McLeary, an electrician on the Beira D, an oil platform in the North Sea in December 1975, and before anything goes wrong you spend a good while doing the job: crossing gantries, being shouted at, ignoring a payphone, absorbing the specific social weather of a workplace where everyone knows exactly why you took a posting this far from home.

I have watched The Chinese Room build atmosphere for over a decade —Dear Esther,Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs,Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture — and the studio has always been able to do a place. What it has historically struggled to do is give you something todo in the place. This one, out on 18 June 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles and on Game Pass from day one, is where that changes. Not completely. But enough that it’s worth taking apart.

The Beira D, spoiler-free

The rig has a name out of Scottish folklore. Beira is the winter hag, the Cailleach who shapes the land with a hammer and holds the cold in place until she’s beaten. Somebody in the writing room chose that, and it’s the kind of detail that tells you the game’s Scottishness is load-bearing rather than costume.

The premise is public and simple: the drill goes into something it shouldn’t, and the platform stops being a workplace. You have no weapons. You never get any. What you have is a body that can climb, crawl, squeeze, swim, and hide, and a set of colleagues whose survival is variously your problem.

It runs five to six hours. The Unreal Engine 5 work is genuinely startling in places — the rig at night in a swell, lit by sodium and flare-stack orange, is one of the best-realised industrial spaces anyone has shipped, and the water has a weight to it that most games don’t bother to simulate because most games don’t need you to believe the sea is trying to kill you specifically.

The accent is a mechanic

Here is the first systems observation, and it is going to sound like a criticism of the sound design until I finish it.

The dialect is thick. Glaswegian, unsoftened, at speed, with the swearing left in and no concession made to a player who wants every line legible. A chunk of the reaction to this game was people asking for subtitles, or asking why a horror game would deliberately make its dialogue hard to parse.

Because that is what being the new guy in an industrial workplace sounds like. You catch about seventy per cent. You reconstruct the rest from tone and context and the direction somebody is pointing. You laugh half a second late at a joke you only partly got. The comprehension gap is thecharacter’s comprehension gap made yours, and it does more to establish Caz’s position on that rig than any amount of expository voice-over could.

It also does something structural. When the horror starts, the radio chatter and the shouted instructions become the only information channel you have, and you are already trained to work at seventy per cent. You are already leaning in. A game that had flattened its accents for legibility would have had to build that tension from scratch.

The rig is the antagonist

The second systems observation is the one that makes the design work.

The Beira D is aknowable machine. In that first hour, before anything is wrong, the game teaches you the platform: the module you sleep in, the walkway to the drill floor, where the noise is, where the wind gets you, which door sticks. It is doing the thing a good level does, which is to install a map in your body rather than in your menu.

Then it takes the machine apart. Structures list. Corridors you walked upright become chimneys you climb. Floors become walls. The route you knew is stillthere, geometrically, and it has been rotated forty degrees and half-flooded and you have to re-derive it under pressure with a thing behind you.

That is the whole horror engine, and it’s an elegant one, because it needs no monster to function. The dread comes from a competent man losing his competence — from the specific, awful feeling of knowing where you are and being unable to use the knowledge. The creatures are the punctuation. The disassembly of a workplace you had learned is the sentence.

The Chinese Room’s traversal verbs are simple to the point of austere: grab, shimmy, mantle, swim. There is no stamina system, no climbing gear, no crafting. And the austerity is right, because the game wants every ounce of your attention onreading the space, and a resource bar would have given you something else to look at.

The real ancestor of this is the Ishimura

Everyone reached forAmnesia when this landed, which is fair — The Chinese Room made a sequel to it, and the no-combat, hide-and-look-away grammar is inherited directly from Frictional’s 2010 design.

But the truer ancestor is the USG Ishimura.Dead Space worked because the ship was a plausible industrial vessel with an engineering logic, staffed by people doing jobs, and the horror was administeredthrough the machinery — you went to the centrifuge because the centrifuge needed fixing. The Chinese Room has taken that lesson and stripped out the plasma cutter, which is the interesting move, because the cutter wasDead Space’s compromise: a horror premise resolved by an inventory.

Take the tools away and the industrial setting has to carry everything. It nearly does. And if you want the modern statement of that idea in its most polished form,the 2023 Dead Space remake is a masterclass in the ship-as-antagonist, with the shooting reduced to something closer to maintenance.

Where it fights itself

The design has one honest problem, and it’s the problem every no-combat horror game has: the failure state.

When you cannot fight, the only tension a designer can add is death by mistake, and death by mistake in a linear game means a checkpoint reload, and a checkpoint reload converts terror into procedure. There are stretches in the back half ofStill Wakes the Deep — chases, hide sequences — where the third attempt at a corridor has stopped being frightening and become a route to be executed. The game knows this, which is why it uses these sparingly, and it still uses them a few times too many.

The other issue is inherited from the studio’s history. There are passages where the game stops being a game and becomes a corridor with a monologue in it, and however good the voice work is, you can feel the hand on your shoulder steering you toward the emotional beat. The Chinese Room got better at verbs here. It has not yet fully stopped believing that the meaning lives in the writing rather than in what you do.

The verdict

Still Wakes the Deep is the best thing The Chinese Room has made, and the reason is that it finally aimed its enormous talent for place at a place that could beoperated. A rig is a machine with a job. Teaching you the machine and then breaking it is a horror design, executed with verbs, and it works.

It also does something almost no game does: it takes British industrial labour seriously, gives it its own accent, and lets the men on the platform be funny and tired and competent before they are victims. That’s five hours well spent, and the length is honest — it stops at exactly the point where the trick would have started to show.

Play it on whatever runs Unreal 5 comfortably; the lighting is most of the argument. If you want the neighbours:Signalis does isolation horror with far stranger tools and a much tighter grip on its own imagery, andControl is the other great game about a building that stops behaving like a building.

Spoilers below

The clearest evidence that the design understands itself is the way the rig’s geometry becomes the story’s argument.

By the last act the Beira D has been reorganised into something that is still, recognisably, an oil platform — the handrails are handrails, the signage is signage — while being entirely unusable as one. Caz climbs through the accommodation block from the wrong angle. Doorframes are load-bearing in the literal sense. The thing that came up the drill string does not need to hunt you, because it has already made the environment do the hunting.

And the ending is where the game’s whole thesis about labour lands. Caz took this job to get away from a mess he made onshore. Everything he does on the rig is an attempt to get back to the family that mess was aimed at. The last hour keeps offering him the industrial verbs — fix it, climb it, open the valve — and every one of them is a competent man’s tool being used for something no rig manual anticipated.

What The Chinese Room got right is that it never asks him to become a hero. It asks him to do maintenance under impossible conditions, and then it asks what maintenance costs. The final act is a job, and the job is finished properly, and the price of finishing it properly is the whole point of setting a horror game in a workplace in the first place.

About six hours intoLorelei and the Laser Eyes I got up, went to the kitchen drawer, and came back with a pad and a biro. I hadn’t done that for a game in a very long time — long enough that the gesture felt archaeological. The pad filled up. By the end it had a page of four-digit numbers, a rough map of a hotel’s ground floor, two dates I could not stop seeing, and a doodle of a hedge maze with an arrow and the wordWHY.

Simogo’s game, out on 16 May 2024 for Nintendo Switch and PC and published by Annapurna Interactive, is a fifteen-hour puzzle box that has made one enormous, deliberate, slightly rude decision: it will not remember anything on your behalf. That decision is the design. Everything else is decoration on top of it, admittedly some of the most beautiful decoration anyone shipped that year.

The invitation, spoiler-free

It is 1963. A woman is invited to a hotel in central Europe by a filmmaker named Renzo Nero, who wants her for a project he is not in a hurry to explain. The hotel is called the Letztes Jahr —Last Year — and if you have seen the Alain Resnais film that name is nodding at, you will know roughly what kind of trouble you are in before you have opened a single door.

Inside, the place is a museum of itself. Rooms hold documents, exhibits, film equipment, correspondence, ledgers. There are locked doors with numeric keypads and locked doors with stranger requirements. There is a maze outside. There are machines running crude, chunky little programs that feel decades older than the hotel’s own fiction. And there is an escalating suspicion, gathering across hours, that the building is a single object with a single lock on it.

The presentation is black, white and one shade of red, rendered with fixed camera angles and a deliberately coarse resolution that makes a corridor look like a woodcut with a light on in it. It is the best-looking game Simogo has made, which for the studio behindYear Walk,Device 6 andSayonara Wild Hearts is a genuine claim.

The mechanic is your notebook

Here is the systems read, and it is short, because the whole thing rests on one refusal.

Modern adventure design has spent fifteen years quietly assuming responsibility for your attention. You find a code; the game logs it. You find a clue; a journal entry appears, timestamped, cross-referenced, filed under the correct case. Some games go further and grey out the puzzle you’ve already got the answer to. The intent is kindness. The effect is that you stop holding anything in your head, because you have been trained — correctly, by the interface — that holding things is somebody else’s job.

Lorelei keeps a notebook. You can call it up. It contains almost nothing you would call a solution. It has a scattering of noted material and a great deal of white space, and the white space is deliberate: it is the exact shape of what the game has decided you should be carrying yourself.

So you carry it. You read a plaque in the east wing in hour three and use what it said in hour eleven, and the reason you can is that the plaque went intoyou rather than into a menu. Simogo understood something that a decade of quality-of-life features has obscured: the feeling people describe as “this game respects my intelligence” is usually the feeling of having been permitted to store something.

And the payoff is physical. When a door opens because you remembered a number from a room you left four hours ago, the sensation in your chest is your own memory working, which the game has arranged to happen and then stepped politely out of the way of. A solved puzzle feels like a solved puzzle. This feels like being handed proof that you still have the equipment.

The real ancestor of this is the code wheel

Everyone will tell you the ancestors areMyst andThe Witness, and they’re in the family. But I loaded games off tape into a C64 when the industry’s answer to piracy was to make the game unplayable without the paper that came in the box, andLorelei is descended from that far more directly than from anything Cyan built.

The code wheel, the manual lookup, the dark-red-on-black page you had to hold under a lamp: those were anti-copying measures, cynical in origin, and they had a completely accidental side effect. They put part of the game outside the machine. The desk you played at became part of the apparatus. You hadstuff — a pad, a manual, a wheel — and the fiction leaked onto it.

That vanished, for good reasons, and what replaced it was the journal. The journal is more convenient and it is a smaller experience, because it moved the whole game back inside the box.

Lorelei puts it back on the desk, by choice this time, with no cynical motive at all. And because it’s a choice rather than a defence against piracy, it can bedesigned: the information you need to externalise is metered, the puzzles that depend on recall are placed at distances that a human memory can actually span, and nothing in the fifteen hours ever requires you to have transcribed something that wasn’t obviously worth transcribing. That last part is the craft. Plenty of games make you take notes. This one isfair about it.

Two other things are worth flagging for anyone who cares about how the parts fit. The camera is fixed, which is a survival-horror inheritance, and it functions here the way it did in 1996: the frame is chosen, so the frame is a statement, so an object placed in the corner of a composed shot is being pointed at. And the in-fiction machines, running their blocky little programs, do more than provide period colour — they let the game change what a puzzleis without breaking its own reality, which is a trick most games only manage by cheating.

Where it fights itself

The pacing sags. There is a stretch in the middle where the density of documents outruns the density of ideas, and the reading becomes a task rather than a pleasure — an inevitable hazard when your design principle isthe player holds everything, because the moment the player’s arms are full, every new page feels like weight.

Some of the maths puzzles are maths puzzles. That sounds churlish; I mean it precisely. The best locks in this game are made of the fiction — you open them because you understood the hotel. A few are made of arithmetic, and those ones could be lifted out and dropped into any other game with no loss, which in a design this coherent registers as a seam.

And the fiction is dense in a way that will lose people. Simogo has never been afraid of obliquity, and the film-history apparatus around Nero rewards a particular kind of viewer. If you want the story to resolve, it will — the puzzle box is honest and it does open — but the game’s tolerance for you shrugging and moving on is lower than most.

The verdict

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is the most confident piece of adventure design of 2024, and its confidence is expressed almost entirely through subtraction. No quest log. No highlighting. No greyed-out solved puzzles. No hand on your elbow. What it gives back for all that removal is the experience of your own head doing the work, which is the thing the genre used to sell and mostly forgot it was selling.

Play it on whatever you have — Switch and PC both do the monochrome justice, and the handheld option suits a game you will want to put down and think about. Play it with paper. The pad is the intended hardware.

If this is your shelf,Return of the Obra Dinn is the other great two-tone deduction machine and the obvious next stop;Tunic is the game that took the same 8-bit inheritance and made themanual the thing you assemble; andThe Case of the Golden Idol trusts you in exactly the same way, at a fraction of the length.

Spoilers below

The single sharpest structural move in the game is that the hotel is itself the puzzle, and the individual locks are its teeth.

You feel this the first time a solution requires you to compose two things that the game never presented in the same room, the same hour, or the same register — a date from a document, a shape from a screen. At that moment the map in your head stops being a route and becomes adiagram, and everything you have written down reorganises itself around a centre you hadn’t noticed you were circling.

That is why the note-taking has to be real, and why a journal would have destroyed the game rather than eased it. An auto-log stores facts as a list. Lists have no shape. The pad on your desk, by the tenth hour, is full of arrows — you drew connections as you found them, and the drawing is the act of understanding. Simogo could not have given you that, because the whole value is that you made it.

The title, by then, has stopped being a piece of Simogo whimsy. Laser eyes cut through. Memory is what you cutwith. The game hands you a labyrinth and withholds a thread, and the ending’s real trick is that when you finally see the centre, you understand you have been building the thread out of your own recall the entire time — which is, when you think about what a puzzle box is actually for, the only honest way it could ever have opened.

There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes intoIndika, when you kneel at an icon, press the button to pray, and a small number floats up out of the candlelight. Points. You have earned points for praying. A menu exists to spend them in. It has tiers and branches and the little connecting lines that every progression screen has had since somebody decided a role-playing game needed a visible spine.

I have been reading progression screens since a C64 loaded them off tape one agonising block at a time, and my hands knew what to do with this one before my head caught up. Which is exactly the trap.Indika is a game about a novice nun in an alternate nineteenth-century Russia who is talked at, constantly, by the Devil, and it puts an experience bar in front of you because it wants to watch you reach for it.

The setup, spoiler-free

Odd Meter’s game arrived on 2 May 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, published by 11 bit studios — a house with a taste for games that have an argument in them. The studio itself has a documented history worth knowing: founded in Moscow, relocated to Kazakhstan following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and finishing a game steeped in Russian Orthodox iconography from outside the country that iconography belongs to. That context sits under the whole thing without ever being announced.

You are Indika. You live in a convent where the other novices bully you in the small, grinding, deniable way that institutions permit. You are sent out with a letter to deliver. On the road you meet Ilya, an escaped convict with a ruined arm and an unshakeable conviction that a relic will heal it. The two of you travel together through snow and industrial ruin and a landscape scaled somewhere between Tarkovsky and a fever, all of it rendered in Unreal Engine 5 with a fondness for enormous rusted machinery that has no business being that big.

And the Devil talks. He talks in the register of the friend who is bad for you. He is reasonable. He is funny. He asks the questions Indika is not allowed to ask herself, and he is right often enough to be a problem. The voice work carries most of the game’s weight and it holds.

It runs three to four hours. I want to be plain about that, because a chunk of the discourse aroundIndika was about price against length, and it is the wrong argument. Three hours of a design that knows precisely what it is doing is worth more of your life than forty hours of a map full of icons.

The points that are not points

Here is the systems read.

Praying awards points. Collecting things awards points. The upgrade tree lets you spend them. Everything about the presentation of this system is competent and familiar and utterly straight-faced — the fonts, the chimes, the satisfying little tick as a node fills in.

The system does nothing.

I don’t mean it is badly balanced. I mean the fiction and the mechanics are pointing at each other. Indika’s piety is being measured, quantified, banked and upgraded, in a game whose entire subject is whether any of that measurement means a thing. The Devil’s running commentary is essentially an audit of her interior life, and the game hands you a UI that performs the same audit and asks you to enjoy it.

What makes it land is that it isn’t a gag delivered once. It is asystem, running the whole time, accruing. You keep praying because the number goes up. You keep detouring for pickups because the number goes up. Some part of your brain that learned to want numbers thirty years ago is being played like a cheap instrument, and the game knows, and it lets you carry on.

The real ancestor of this is the arcade

Everyone reached forThe Stanley Parable whenIndika landed, and I understand the reflex, but I think the ancestor is older and duller and more interesting than that.

Score is vestigial plumbing. It exists because arcade cabinets needed a reason to want another coin, and when games moved into the home the score came with them out of pure inheritance — nobody was competing for the leaderboard on the sofa, and yet there the number sat, top of the screen, on game after game I loaded off tape. It measured nothing. It was ritual. Later, role-playing games rehabilitated the number by wiring it to actual capability, and a whole industry learned that the safest way to keep somebody playing is to show them a bar filling.

Indika takes that inheritance and puts it in a habit. The upgrade tree is the ritual number, restored to its original meaninglessness and then aimed at something. That is a better joke than a fourth-wall gag, because it needs you to have decades of trained behaviour in your thumbs before it can fire.

Where the design earns it

Two other mechanics do real work.

The pixel-art interludes — 2D sequences in a deliberately crude retro register, standing in for Indika’s memories and inner life — could easily have been a stylistic flourish. They function instead as a second register of truth, a childhood rendered in the visual language of the era’s cheap games, which is to say rendered as something already flattened and simplified by being remembered. The shift in fidelity is doing the narrative work.

Then there are the bells. Ringing one causes the world to change state around Indika: geometry shifts, obstruction appears or clears, the route through a space is rewritten by an act of religious noise. As a puzzle mechanic it is generous — the solutions rarely ask more of you than noticing. As anidea it is the sharpest thing in the game, because it makes faith load-bearing in the most literal sense available to the medium. The bell tolls and the world is different. That is what the doctrine claims and what the game, for a few minutes at a time, makes true.

This is the craft point worth taking away. A metaphor in a cutscene is decoration. A metaphor in a traversal system is architecture.Indika keeps choosing architecture.

Where it fights itself

It is not tidy work. The puzzle sections are the weakest tissue — a handful of them are box-and-lever busywork whose only function is to slow your walk so the dialogue can finish, and a game this confident about its systems should have trusted itself to just let you walk. There are stealth-adjacent stretches that add tension by adding failure states, which is the least imaginative tool in the drawer, andIndika reaches for it more than once.

The Devil, too, occasionally does the thing where a character explains the theme he is embodying. He is at his best being wrong in a charming way. He is at his worst being a commentary track.

And the tonal ceiling is real. The game wants to be both a serious interrogation of institutional faith and a piece of blackly funny absurdism, and in the last stretch those two intentions start elbowing each other. Some of what reads as a swing at profundity lands as a shrug.

The verdict

Indika is the most interesting thing 11 bit put its name to in 2024, and the reason is that its argument lives in the verbs. A game about whether piety can be counted gives you a counter. A game about faith making the world tractable gives you a bell that makes the world tractable. Odd Meter understood that the medium’s native language is systems, and it wrote in that language rather than around it.

The puzzles are thin, the stealth is filler, and the last act reaches past its grasp. It is still three hours you will think about for longer than the three hours, and it does something almost nobody else attempted that year: it treats the progression bar — the industry’s most naturalised, least questioned piece of furniture — as a subject in its own right.

If you want more games where the interface is making the argument,Tunic turns its own instruction manual into the design’s central puzzle, andInscryption keeps breaking out of whichever frame it has just taught you to trust. For the narrative-first end of the same shelf,Pentiment does the historical-faith setting with a much steadier hand and a much longer runtime.

Spoilers below

The system pays off at the end, and the payoff is the whole reason to talk about it.

The points go away. Every prayer you banked, every detour you took, the entire tree you spent hours filling in — the game closes the ledger and hands you nothing for it. The accounting was real; the account was fictional. The surprise is the least of what makes it work. What makes it work is that the game told you, over and over, in the Devil’s voice, in every line of dialogue about whether Indika’s devotion is worth anything, and you kept pressing the button anyway because a number went up.

That is the difference between a twist and an argument. A twist reverses what you believed. An argument makes you complicit and then shows you the receipt. You were told the counting was hollow by every non-mechanical element of the game, and you counted regardless, because thirty years of design taught your hands to want the bar full.Indika isn’t asking whether its protagonist’s faith is a delusion. It has already answered that question about yours.

Which is why the length is not a flaw. The joke only works if you play long enough to invest and not so long that the investment becomes labour. Three hours is the correct dose. Odd Meter measured it.

Animal Well has no attack button. You spend a couple of hours waiting for it — the metroidvania contract has been the same since 1986, you get a weapon early and better weapons later — and it never arrives. What arrives instead is a bubble wand.

Billy Basso built the game alone over roughly seven years, on his own engine, and Bigmode published it on 9 May 2024 for PC, PS5 and Switch. It is about thirty-odd megabytes. That number gets quoted a lot as a novelty and it’s actually a design fact: everything in this world is procedurally lit, hand-authored and reused, and reuse is the entire principle the game runs on.

The toolset is a set of questions

Take the bubble wand. It fires a bubble that floats up and pops after a moment. Stand on it and you get a platform. Fire again while airborne and you get another, so the wand is a double-jump, and a triple, and an arbitrary-height climb if your timing is good enough — the skill ceiling is entirely yours and the game never mentions it.

The bubble is also a light source. It’s also something an enemy will follow. It’s also a thing you can push into a place you can’t reach. One item, and by the time you’ve had it for an hour you’ve used it in four incompatible ways, none of which the game taught you.

Every tool works like this. The yo-yo goes out and comes back and can trip a switch you’re standing away from, or bonk something, or hold a plate down for exactly as long as its travel allows. The slink walks along a floor and up a wall. The flute makes a noise, and noises mean things to animals. The disc has physics. The firecrackers make light and sound and pressure at once, which is three different keys in one hand.

This is the design that makes the missing attack button work. In a normal metroidvania, an item is apermission — the double jump means the ledges marked “double jump” are now available. Here an item is averb with properties, and the properties interact with a world that was built with those properties in mind rather than with the item’s advertised purpose. The door doesn’t open because you have the key. The door opens because you noticed that a bubble floats, and there’s a fan, and the fan is on.

Why the fear works without combat

Removing combat should have removed tension. It doesn’t, and the reason is a change of relationship.

The animals inAnimal Well are hazards withbehaviour. The chained dog lunges to the end of its chain. The ostrich charges in straight lines and wrecks the terrain it hits. The chameleon watches. You cannot delete any of them, so you have to learn them — where the reach ends, what the pattern is, what makes them move — and the knowledge you build is the same knowledge you’ll need for the puzzle in that room, because the animalis part of the puzzle in that room.

That’s a much older relationship with an enemy than the modern genre’s. When a monster is a health bar, you solve it by arithmetic. When a monster is a machine you can’t switch off, you solve it by watching it. The dread that builds in the back half of this game comes almost entirely from things that could be trivially killed in any other metroidvania and here just keep existing.

The save system does its share. You light candles as you go, and a lit candle is a checkpoint — a small warm thing you made in a place that didn’t have one. Deaths are cheap. The tension comes from being somewhere dark that doesn’t know you exist.

The map is the puzzle

The pause map is a beautiful, mostly useless drawing of where you’ve been. You can stamp it with markers — a limited set of icons — and that stamping is the whole navigational system, because nothing else records anything. No quest log. No “you have not yet visited” highlight. No fast travel until you find it.

So the map becomes a notebook, and the notebook becomes the thing you’re actually playing with. What you stamp is a record ofyour own hypotheses: a stamp here means “there’s a hole I couldn’t reach”, a stamp there means “the fan does something”. Which means when you finally understand a system, the payoff arrives as a sudden re-reading of a dozen stamps you made hours ago and didn’t understand at the time.

I mapped games on graph paper in the eighties because the C64 gave you no other option, and the thing I’d half forgotten until this game reminded me is that the paper wasn’t a chore. It was where the thinking happened. Sixteen bits of RAM saved on a map screen bought a whole category of player engagement, and the industry spent thirty years buying it back with waypoints.Animal Well just declines the purchase.

The ancestor

Everyone saysLa-Mulana, and everyone is right. Nigoro’s 2005 game (remade in 2012) is the direct forebear: an interlocking underground, puzzles solved by cross-referencing information from other rooms, an in-game notebook, and a total refusal to signpost. If you lovedAnimal Well’s middle layers,La-Mulana is where they came from and it’s harder.

Fez (Polytron, 2012) is the other parent, for the metapuzzle architecture — the game underneath the game, cracked collectively by strangers on forums. And further back, the eight- bit arcade adventures:Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum and C64 in 1984, a house of rooms with no explanation and no mercy, where the community mapped it because the game plainly wasn’t going to.

For the modern relatives,Tunic does the same withholding through a fake instruction manual and is the closest sibling in spirit.Blue Prince takes the same “the room is the riddle” idea somewhere architecturally stranger. AndMetroid Dread is the useful contrast: the genre’s founding studio, doing the orthodox version, extremely well, with every door colour-coded.

Where it fights itself

The obscurity has a floor and a ceiling, and both are real problems.

The floor: some of the first-layer solutions read as guesswork rather than deduction, and there’s a difference between a game that withholds information and a game that hasn’t given you enough to reason with. A few of the mid-game item uses land on the wrong side of that line, and the honest experience for most players involves at least one wiki tab.

The ceiling: the later layers are, by design, community puzzles — the kind of thing solved by a hundred people pooling screenshots for a week, involving out-of-game reasoning that no individual is expected to complete. I admire the ambition and I’ll say the quiet part: that content isn’t reallyfor you, playing alone, in 2024 or later. It’s an artefact of a moment, and the moment has passed. The game’s first ending is complete and satisfying. Everything past it is a different hobby.

The verdict, argued

Animal Well is the most confident piece of design I’ve played this year, and the confidence shows up assubtraction. No attack. No tutorial. No objective marker. No dialogue. What’s left is a world where every object has properties, every animal has behaviour, and every locked door is locked by your own failure to notice something that’s already on screen.

That’s the whole pitch and it’s a real one. One man, one engine, seven years, thirty megabytes, and a design that gets more out of a bubble than most studios get out of an arsenal. The size is aconsequence of building a game out of interactions rather than assets, and that’s the thing to take from it.

It’s on PC, PS5 and Switch, and it plays fine on all three. Go in blind. Stamp the map. Resist the wiki for as long as your pride holds.

Play next:Tunic, immediately, andBlue Prince after.

Spoilers below

The first ending is a lie of omission, and it’s the best-constructed lie in the game.

You collect the four flames, you open the door, you leave, and the credits acknowledge you. It’s a complete metroidvania: a couple of hours of clean, weird, well-paced work with a proper shape. Then you find tools the first layer never asked for, and the world you finished turns out to have been the tutorial layer of a considerably larger object.

Layer two is the eggs. Sixty-four of them, scattered through rooms you’d already cleared, reachable with tools used in ways the first layer never demanded. The bubble wand you’d been double-jumping with becomes a precision climbing rig. The yo-yo becomes a measuring device. Nothing new is added; the same verbs are asked harder questions. That’s the design thesis proven on itself — the game demonstrates that its own toolset had depth it never showed you, which is a claim most games make in marketing and none of them can cash.

Then layer three, and this is whereFez’s ghost walks in. The bunny mural. Sixteen rabbits hidden behind puzzles that reach outside the game — pattern-matching across rooms, information that only means something once you’ve seen an unrelated wall two hours away, and at the far end a set of solutions that were genuinely cracked by a Discord full of strangers in the weeks after launch, working together, screenshotting everything.

I’m ambivalent about that last tier and I’ve said why. What I’m not ambivalent about is what it reveals: the entire game was built downwards from the metapuzzles, and the two-hour metroidvania on top is theskin. The reused rooms, the sparse decoration, the thirty megabytes, the animals that persist because you can’t kill them — all of it exists so that every screen can be evidence for something you haven’t thought of yet.

Which is why the locked room is the right frame. You stand in the same rooms the whole time, in front of the same objects, getting slowly less stupid. The labyrinth was always this size.

The first time a peasant speaks inPentiment, the words appear in a rough, uneven hand, scratched across the page as if by someone who learned letters late and under duress. When a monk speaks, you get blackletter — dense, formal, expensive-looking. When a humanist scholar speaks, the script is clean and Italian and self-satisfied. Nobody explains this. The game simply hands you a different typeface per mouth and lets you work out that you are reading class, education and self-image directly off the shape of the letters.

That’s the game. Obsidian shipped it on 15 November 2022 on Xbox and PC — day one on Game Pass, which is how most people found it — and brought it to Switch, PS4 and PS5 in February 2024. Josh Sawyer directed it, which is to say the man who madeFallout: New Vegas andPillars of Eternity spent his studio-earned favour on a 2D adventure game about a journeyman artist in sixteenth-century Bavaria. It’s the best thing his studio has made.

Typography as a system

Push on the typeface idea and it keeps giving. Characters make mistakes as they talk, and the mistake appears on the page and is thenscratched out and corrected in real time — a scribe catching his own error, mid-sentence, in front of you. A slip of the tongue becomes a visible act of revision. You are watching people edit themselves.

When a character’s education or standing changes, the hand changes with them. When someone is writing rather than speaking, the ink behaves differently. The game’s entire presentation is the conceit that you are inside a manuscript being made, and the manuscript has opinions about who’s talking.

I’ve seen a lot of games use art direction as a mood layer painted over a system. This is the opposite arrangement: the art directioncarries information the mechanics need. You judge credibility partly by the hand. That’s a UI decision with a moral edge on it, and the game knows exactly what it’s doing, because the whole story is about who gets to write things down and whose account survives.

Time is the only resource

There is no inventory puzzle inPentiment, no lockpicking, no combat. The scarce resource is hours in a day, and the game spends them the way a real investigation would.

You are Andreas Maler, working at Kiersau Abbey and living in the town of Tassing, and when a murder happens you have a limited window to investigate before the verdict is delivered. Every conversation costs time. Every meal you eat with a family — and the meals are a mechanic, a whole scene each, warm and slow and full of the small facts you actually need — is a meal you didn’t eat with somebody else. You cannot see everything. The design guarantees it.

So you build your case out of apartial record, and here is where Sawyer’s structure closes its jaws. At the end of the act you must accuse someone. Not “may”. Must. And your evidence is a set of half-corroborated impressions gathered from people who all had reasons to lie, in the time you happened to have, on the topics you happened to think of.

Andreas’s background makes it worse in the best way. At character creation you pick where he studied and what he studied — theology, medicine, imperial Latin, logic and rhetoric, the occult, and so on — and those choices unlock conversation options that let you understandsome evidence and stay blind to the rest. A theologian reads a Latin document and knows what it means. A craftsman looks at the same page and sees ink. Your build determines which facts are legible to you, which means two players investigating the same murder are looking at two different murders.

That’s the sharpest character-build design I’ve seen in years, and it works because there’s no optimisation in it. No build sees everything. You are always choosing your own blind spots.

The thing it refuses to give you

Pentiment never tells you whether you were right.

You accuse. Someone dies. The town lives with it. The game moves on, twenty-five years across three acts, and the consequences of your accusation compound in ways you can watch — families altered, children grown into the shape of what you did — and at no point does a screen appear confirming the killer’s identity.

This is the single bravest decision in the game and it’s the one that made people angry. It’s also the correct one, because the game is about historical record rather than truth. The whole frame is a manuscript, and manuscripts are made by people with agendas, time pressure and partial sight — which is exactly the position the design put you in. You produced a document with a body attached, and the game calls that what it is.

CompareReturn of the Obra Dinn, which validates in batches of three and is apuzzle: there’s a right answer and Lucas Pope will confirm it. OrThe Case of the Golden Idol, which withholds hand-holding and still, in the end, marks your work.Pentiment removes the marker entirely, and by removing it converts deduction into judgement. Those are different activities and the medium almost never attempts the second.

The ancestor

The obvious reference is Eco’sThe Name of the Rose — a monastery, a murder, a scholar, manuscripts as the murder weapon — andPentiment wears the debt openly.

The game-shaped ancestor isLa Abadía del Crimen, Opera Soft’s 1987 Spanish take on the same novel for the Spectrum and Amstrad. I came to it late, through emulation, and it’s remarkable: an isometric abbey running on a real clock, monks with schedules, a routine you had to obey — be at prayers, or you fail — and a mystery you investigated in the gaps. It failed at almost everything it tried and it understood the one thing that matters here, which is that a monastery is atimetable, and a detective story set in one is a story about what you can’t be present for. Thirty-five years later, Obsidian shipped the version with the budget.

For the other end of the argument — an RPG where the build determines which reality you perceive — the modern companion isDisco Elysium, which does with skills whatPentiment does with an education.

Where it fights itself

The middle act sags. Act II jumps years forward and spends a long time re-establishing a town you already knew, and the investigation it hangs on has less to grip than the first. Movement is slow — Andreas walks, and Tassing is a lot of walking, and there’s a fast-travel system that arrives later than it should. The Switch and PS4 ports fixed nothing about the pace, though they did put the game on the machine a lot of people actually read on.

There’s also a real accessibility cost to the central conceit: the historically accurate hands are genuinely hard to read, and while the game offers a legibility option, taking it throws away part of the system. That’s an honest trade and the game should be praised for offering it, and it’s also a reminder that a mechanic made of typefaces excludes some people from the mechanic.

The verdict, argued

Pentiment is a game where the font is evidence, the clock is the antagonist, your education is your blind spot, and the ending refuses to grade you. Every one of those is a design decision that a bigger game would have sanded off, and Obsidian shipped all four in one object, on Game Pass, at a price that suggests nobody expected it to matter.

It matters. It’s the strongest argument I know that historical games can be abouthistoriography — about how the record gets made and who makes it — while still working as an adventure game you play for the people. The meals alone would carry a lesser game.

It’s on Xbox, PC, Switch, PS4 and PS5, and Game Pass remains the cheapest door. Give it your attention rather than a second screen; a game made of typefaces punishes glancing.

Play next:Return of the Obra Dinn for deduction with a scoreboard, orDisco Elysium for the build-as-perception idea at full volume.

Spoilers below

Act III is where the design reveals what it was for, and it’s the reason the withheld answer holds up.

You stop being Andreas. You play Magdalene, a young woman in Tassing, decades on, and the town you investigated is now a place shaped by things you did as somebody else. The accusations from Acts I and II are in the ground. The families are altered. Andreas is a figure in other people’s memories, and the memories are wrong in the specific way memories go wrong — flattened, moralised, useful to whoever’s telling them.

And then Magdalene’s task is to paint a mural of the town’s history — todecide what the record says, panel by panel, choosing which version of events Tassing will look at for the next two hundred years, using evidence that is itself the residue of your own partial investigations from thirty years earlier.

The game hands you the manuscript and asks you to be the one who writes it. Every constraint that annoyed you — the clock, the blind spots, the refusal to confirm — turns out to have been the game teaching you what it costs to produce a history. You were never being tested on the murders. You were being shown how the record gets made, from the inside, by someone with too little time and the wrong education and a deadline.

That the murderer’s identity is available if you dig hard enough, and irrelevant to the mural either way, is the last joke. Tassing doesn’t get the truth. Tassing gets what you painted.

Hypnospace Outlaw has no URL bar. I want to start there, because it’s the decision that makes the whole game work and it’s the one thing every screenshot fails to convey.

You are an Enforcer — a volunteer moderator of Hypnospace, an alternate-1999 network you browse in your sleep via a headband. The game hands you a desktop and a browser and a case file that says something likesomeone is distributing copyrighted material, go find it. It does not say where. There is no address to type. Navigation runs entirely on the search box, which matches on tags and page titles, and on the links that pages have to each other. To get anywhere you have to guess what a 1999 hobbyist would have called their own page, type that, and follow the wreckage.

Tendershoot — Jay Tholen, with Michael Lasch and Xalavier Nelson Jr. — shipped it through No More Robots on 27 March 2019 on PC, with console versions following in August 2020. It Kickstarted as a joke about GeoCities. It is one of the best-designed adventure games of the last decade, and the reason is that it stopped pretending an interface is a wrapper around a game and made the interfacebe the game.

The search box as a lock

Think about what a keyword search does that a hyperlink doesn’t. A link is a door somebody built for you. A search is a lock where the key is athought you had.

When a case tells you to find whoever’s sharing music they don’t own, the game is asking you to model a person. What kind of teenager, in 1999, uploads music to a sleep-network? What would they name the page? What community would they be adjacent to? You type your guess, you get nothing, you try the slang instead of the noun, and eventually a page loads with a tiled background and an animated GIF and there it is. The click that opens the door is adeduction, and the game never told you that you’d made one.

This is the same load-bearing move asReturn of the Obra Dinn — knowledge in your head as the actual key item — andHypnospace pushes it further, because Obra Dinn at least tells you when you’re right. Here you find out you were right by watching a page load. There’s no fanfare. Nobody hands you a puzzle-solved chime. The reward isinformation, and the game trusts that information is enough.

The other half of the system is the tags. Every page carries user-written tags, so the search index is a folksonomy assembled by imaginary teenagers with imaginary priorities. Follow a tag and you don’t get a curated list; you get a slice of a subculture, most of it irrelevant, some of it the thing you needed, and all of it written by somebody with a voice. It’s the most convincing internet ever built in a game, and it’s convincing because theretrieval is period-accurate. AltaVista made you think like the person who wrote the page. So does this.

The desktop is a real surface

The second system is the machine itself. HypnOS gives you a desktop with icons, a taskbar, a help app, a chat client, downloadable themes, cursors and screensavers, and a hard drive with finite room. You buy things with Hypnocoin. You install things. Some of them are adware. Some of them are viruses that eat your icons, and one of them is a malware infestation you have to clean up with a downloaded tool while it actively fights the desktop you’re trying to work on.

Making a fake OS is easy. Making itload-bearing is not, and the trick here is that the OS is where the consequences land. Your evidence is the files you’ve dragged onto your own disk. Your bookmarks are the map you drew. When a virus scrambles the desktop, it’s scrambling the level. There’s a whole genre of games with a fake-computer skin where the desktop is a menu with wallpaper;Hypnospace is one of the few where you’d feel the loss if it broke.

The ancestor here isUplink, Introversion’s 2001 hacking game, which put you in a fictional OS and let the fiction and the interface be the same object. Before that,Digital: A Love Story (Christine Love, 2010) — chronologically later, spiritually earlier — did the BBS version with nothing but a modem, a dialler and message boards, and proved you could carry an entire romance through an interface with no avatar in it. And further back than either: I grew up on Workbench and dial-up boards, and the thing this game gets right that the nostalgia merchants miss is that the old internet wasslow to search and full of strangers, which is precisely what made finding anything feel like an achievement.

Where the loop bites

The moderation work is the sharp edge, and it took me a while to notice how it had been built.

You are being paid, in a currency you spend on cursors and desktop toys, to enforce rules written by a corporation, against people whose pages you have just spent twenty minutes reading. The design makes youknow them first. You find the shared file by understanding the kid who shared it, and then you flag the page, and the flag has an effect on a person you’ve now got a mental model of. The game never lectures you about this. It just orders the verbs that way: read, understand, report.

That’s a systems argument about content moderation delivered without a single line of dialogue about content moderation, and it lands harder than any essay would, because you did the labour. The cases escalate. The rules get pettier. Hypnospace Central’s tone stays cheerful throughout, which is the joke.

Where it fights itself

It’s a real adventure game, which means it has real adventure-game failure states. Some searches want a specific word and accept nothing adjacent, and when you’re stuck you’re stuck in the worst way: you can’t tell whether you’ve had the wrong idea or the wrongspelling. The game’s built-in hint system — chat contacts who nudge you — is thin, and the case pacing in the middle act sags while the writing does world-building the puzzles don’t need.

The other cost is volume. The network is enormous and most of it is texture, andloving the texture is basically a requirement. If you find the fake GeoCities pastiche exhausting rather than delightful by hour two, the puzzles behind it will not carry you. There’s no version of this game that works if you’re not willing to read strangers’ terrible poetry.

The verdict, argued

Hypnospace Outlaw is the strongest case I know for building your game out of its interface instead of behind it. Every reward is a page you found, every key is a word you thought of, and every consequence lands on a desktop you personally cluttered. That’s a closed loop with no fat in it, and it’s why the game is still being recommended five years on while the prettier adventure games of 2019 have evaporated.

The thing it does that I’d steal, if I designed anything: it never confirms your cleverness. You type a word, a page loads, and you move on. The absence of a chime is the whole design philosophy. It assumes you know when you’ve been smart, which is a level of respect the genre almost never extends.

It’s on PC, Switch, PS4 and Xbox, and it wants a mouse — the console versions work, and the console versions are also a compromise with a game built for a cursor. Play it with a notebook. You’ll need one.

Play next:Immortality for search-as-mechanic taken somewhere much stranger, orNorco for point-and-click with the same eye for people at the edge of a network.

Spoilers below

The turn is the Mindcrash, and it recontextualises every system above.

Late in 1999, Hypnospace runs a New Year’s event, and the headband — the consumer device piping this network into people’s sleeping heads — malfunctions at scale. People die. The network you have spent the game policing for copyright violations and mean comments turns out to have been the actual hazard, and the company’s response is what any company’s response would be: the servers go quiet, the archive rots, and the game skips forward.

What makes it work is that the game had already told you. Zane Lofton’s pages are all over the early network — a kid running a fan site, being a kid — and the case files have you flagging his stuff for petty infractions while the real risk sits in the hardware nobody’s moderating. You spent hours enforcing rules aboutcontent on a platform whose danger was structural. The Enforcer programme was, in retrospect, a corporation crowdsourcing the appearance of safety.

Then comes the epilogue, and it’s the best thing in the game. You’re in 2019, poking at a recovered archive of Hypnospace on a modern machine, and the network is a fossil. The pages you searched are files on a disk. The people you flagged are twenty years older or gone. And the search box still works — same tags, same folksonomy, same terrible poetry — which means you can go and find out what happened to the specific stranger you got banned in hour three.

The final act asks you to use the game’s core mechanic on the wreckage of the game’s own world, and the mechanic doesn’t change at all. Nothing has to. The keyword search that felt like a lock in 1999 now feels like an exhumation, and the only variable that moved is what you know. That’s the same trick every good deduction game runs, andHypnospace is the one that ran it on an entire fake civilisation.

It’s April, and the year is over. Balatro came out on 20 February, a solo project from an anonymous Canadian developer trading as LocalThunk, published by Playstack, and it passed a million copies inside a few weeks with no marketing apparatus worth the name. Whatever else 2024 does, it will be doing it in Balatro’s shadow, on people’s phones, on their lunch breaks, in the tab behind the spreadsheet.

The reason is not poker. LocalThunk has been fairly open about barely playing poker; the hand rankings are a UI he borrowed because everybody already knows them. What’s underneath is something else entirely, and it’s the oldest trick in this business done better than anyone has done it in years.

What it is

You play a run. Each run is a ladder of antes, and each ante has three blinds — Small, Big, and a Boss Blind with a rule attached that breaks something you were relying on. To beat a blind you need to reach a score. You have a standard 52-card deck, a hand of eight cards, a small number of plays and a small number of discards. You select up to five cards, the game identifies the poker hand, and it scores.

The scoring is the game. Every hand produces two numbers: chips and mult. Your score is chips × mult. A pair is 10 chips and 2 mult, so 20 points, and the Small Blind of Ante 1 wants 300. So you play a few hands, you scrape past, and you go to the shop.

The shop sells Jokers. There are a hundred and fifty of them and each is a rule. One adds chips per club. One adds mult for every discarded card. One multiplies your mult. One doubles the effect of the Joker to its left. You have five slots.

Also on sale: Tarot cards that transform individual playing cards, Planet cards that permanently level up a hand type so that every future Full House scores more, Spectral cards that do something drastic with a cost attached, and Vouchers that change the run’s rules outright. Fifteen starting decks, each rewriting the opening position. Eight escalating stakes that layer restrictions on top.

You need 300 at Ante 1. You need hundreds of thousands by Ante 8. Do the maths on what has to happen in between.

The whole design is one multiplication sign

Here’s the argument. Balatro’s central insight is that chips and mult are on opposite sides of an operator, and almost every decision in the game is you choosing which side to feed.

Chips are the safe side. They add. A Joker that gives +30 chips is +30 chips forever, dependable, boring, and it will not carry you past Ante 6.

Mult is the dangerous side. Additive mult is a solid living. Multiplicative mult — the ×3s, the ×1.5-per-condition, the ones that scale off something you have to maintain — is where the run either explodes or dies, because a ×3 is worth nothing without chips to multiply and everything with them.

So the run has a shape, and it’s the same shape every time and it never gets old: the first three antes you’re building a chip base and it feels like admin; the middle antes you’re hunting for the multiplier that will make the base mean something; and then either you find it and Ante 7 evaporates in one hand for four hundred thousand points, or you don’t and you die at Ante 6 doing perfectly respectable arithmetic.

That escalation from “300” to “300,000” across forty minutes is the drug.Vampire Survivors runs the identical curve — trivial start, absurd finish, the player’s own build outgrowing their comprehension — and does it with no decisions in it at all. Balatro makes yousign every step of the escalation. You chose the Joker. You sold the other one. You are personally responsible for the number, and the number is ridiculous, and that combination is why people cannot put it down.

The boss blinds are the balance patch

The obvious failure mode for a design like this is the degenerate strategy: find the one engine, run it every game, watch the game die. Balatro’s answer is elegant and it’s built into the ladder.

Every ante ends in a Boss Blind, and boss blinds attack your assumptions rather than your score. One debuffs an entire suit. One only lets you play one hand type. One blocks your discards. One turns your cards face down. One demands you play five cards every hand.

What that does structurally is force every build to have a second gear. A run built entirely on flushes meets the boss that debuffs a suit and has to have an answer ready three antes before it knew the question. So the shop stops being a place where you buy the best thing and becomes a place where you buy insurance you hope to waste, andthat tension — optimise now versus survive later — is a resource-allocation problem dressed up as a card game.

It’s the same instinct behindInscryption’s willingness to break its own rules, though Inscryption breaks the frame for a narrative payoff and Balatro breaks it purely to keep you honest. Slay the Spire did the ancestral version of this with its elite and boss relics; Balatro tightened the loop until an entire Spire run fits in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

Why it feels like that

Talk to anyone who’s played it and within a minute they’ll do the noise. The score punch — the way the chips tally with a rising pitch, each card flipping and firing, the Jokers going off in sequence left to right, the number climbing in audible steps and then the whole thing landing with a thump.

That’s not decoration. It’s the payoff structure made physical. The hand is already resolved the moment you press play; the game could show you the total instantly. Instead itperforms the multiplication, card by card, so you get four seconds of accelerating evidence that the thing you built works. It’s a fruit machine’s reel-stop rhythm applied to a decision you actually made, which is the respectable version of the same neurology.

The presentation carries it. Everything is chunky, CRT-warped, curled at the edges, and the whole thing looks like a card game running on a machine that should not be running a card game — a deliberate and very well-judged bit of texture from someone who clearly understands that a slightly wrong phosphor glow makes numbers feel heavier.

Where it fights itself

The luck floor is real. There are runs where the shop offers you nothing, the Jokers don’t talk to each other, and you die at Ante 5 having played correctly throughout. That’s the genre’s tax and Balatro pays it more than most, because the multiplicative engines it’s built around are binary — you have one or you don’t. Slay the Spire could grind out a win on fundamentals. Balatro often can’t.

The higher stakes expose the seams too. Gold Stake asks for a level of consistency that the deck’s variance doesn’t really support, and the result is a fair amount of run-abandoning at Ante 2 when the opening doesn’t cooperate. That’s not a difficulty setting so much as a lottery with a longer queue.

And the game had a genuinely stupid month. In March it was pulled from several storefronts after a ratings body decided that pictures of playing cards constituted gambling content and slapped an adult rating on a game with no money, no wagering and no chance to lose anything but forty minutes. Balatro simulates a slot machine’sfeel precisely, which is worth being honest about — the reel-stop dopamine is engineered and it works on people. It also has no gambling in it. The rating was wrong about the object and accidentally right about the mechanism.

The verdict

Balatro is the tightest escalation engine anyone has shipped this decade, built by one person, running on a laptop, in a genre everyone assumed was solved. Its real achievement is structural: it found a way to make a number going up feel earned, by putting a multiplication sign in the middle of it and making you responsible for both operands.

Buy it on whatever’s nearest. It runs on anything, the console versions are identical to the PC one, and the thing you’re buying is a forty-minute loop you’ll run four hundred times.

If the escalation is what got you,Vampire Survivors is the same curve with the decisions removed, andHades is the same loop with a reason to press start.

Spoilers below

The endless mode past Ante 8 is where the design’s real character shows, and it’s the part I’d argue about.

Beat Ante 8 and you can keep going, and the required score stops climbing steadily and starts going somewhere the number formatting can’t follow. The game begins displaying scores in scientific notation, then in a naming scheme that gives up on dignity entirely, and the blinds ask for figures that no honest engine can reach. The only way through is to break the game — to find the specific Joker interaction that produces a genuinely unbounded loop and let it eat itself.

That’s a confession. Endless mode admits that the multiplication engine, given no ceiling, has no interesting equilibrium; past a point the game is only playable by exploiting it, and LocalThunk simply left the door open and let people find out.

I think that’s the correct call, and it’s also why Ante 8 is where the game actually lives. The eight-ante ladder is the designed object: a curve tuned so that a good run peaks exactly as it ends, which is the hardest thing in this genre to get right and the reason Risk of Rain’s loop and Spire’s Act 4 both wobble. Balatro gets to stop while it’s still beautiful. Everything past that is the developer showing you the machinery, with the panel off, on purpose.

In 1991 I could not play Monkey Island without the cardboard wheel. You’d line up the pirate’s hair with the pirate’s chin, read off a date, type it in, and the game would let you past. Lose the wheel and you owned a coaster. Every Amiga in the country had a shoebox of this stuff: code wheels, Lenslok, and the lookup tables that made you find page 14, line 3, word 6 in a manual you’d otherwise never open.

Publishers did that to stop people copying disks. What it actually did, by accident, was make the manual part of the machine. The game was on the disk and the game was also on the kitchen table, and you couldn’t run one without the other.

Tunic is what happens when someone takes that accident seriously.

What it is

Andrew Shouldice released Tunic in March 2022 after roughly seven years of work, published by Finji. It came to Xbox and PC first and reached PlayStation and Switch in September of the same year. It has spent the time since drifting through subscription services and sales, which is how most people meet it now — a small isometric action-adventure with a fox in a green tunic, obviously wearing the first Zelda’s clothes.

That’s the trap. It’s dressed as an homage and it’s actually an argument.

The manual

Scattered through the world are pages of an instruction booklet. Not lore fragments — an actual manual, laid out like something that fell out of a 1987 box: glossy illustrated spreads, a map, diagrams, a bestiary, arrows pointing at buttons. You collect the pages and you can open the booklet at any time, and the booklet is where the game keeps everything it hasn’t told you.

The manual is almost entirely written in a language you cannot read.

There’s an invented script — Trunic — running through every page, and the first time you open it your eye slides off it and lands on the pictures. Which is the point. You start reading the manual the way a nine-year-old reads a manual for a game they don’t own yet: guessing from diagrams, inferring from arrows, building a theory of what the game must contain out of pure iconography.

And then a page teaches you something real. There’s a spread that shows you how to dodge-roll, and until you find it, you do not dodge-roll — the button worked all along, and you simply did not know the verb existed. Later there’s a page that shows you a mechanic so fundamental that finding it retroactively re-explains everything you’ve been walking past for six hours.

This is progression made out ofknowledge rather than items. The character never gets a new ability. You do.

Why it works

Metroidvanias gate you with objects, and objects are honest but inert: the game withholds the double jump, gives you the double jump, and the space of what you can do expands by exactly one predictable increment. You knew the double jump was coming. You’ve played this before.

Knowledge gating has a different shape. When Tunic hands you a page, your entire back catalogue of memories re-sorts at once. Every strange wall, every suspicious statue, every geometric thing you clocked as decoration — the page doesn’t open one door. It opens all the doors of that type, everywhere, retroactively, and the game didn’t have to build a single new room to do it.

That is enormously efficient design, and it’s also the reason the game can’t be patched into being easier. You cannot hint your way around it, because the thing being withheld isn’t in the save file.

The related trick is that Trunic is not decoration. It’s a real cipher — a consistent mapping to English phonemes, learnable, and people did learn it, sitting down with the pages and cracking the script like a philology homework. The manual is fully readable if you do the work. Shouldice built an entire functioning writing system and then made almost nobody need it, which is the single most confident act of restraint in the medium.

Chants of Sennaar went at the same problem from the front, making the decipherment the loop and giving you a notebook to be wrong in. Tunic buries it and lets you walk past. Both work. Sennaar is the better teacher; Tunic is the better ambush.

The manual as an artefact

Look at the pages themselves and you find the second layer of the joke. They’re faithful to a specific era of print — the slightly off registration, the airbrushed box-art idiom, the bilingual clutter, the way European manuals crammed six languages into a booklet none of us read. There are hand-scrawled annotations in the margins in biro, because of course there are; every used manual in every second-hand game I ever bought had somebody’s map of level three in the back.

Those annotations do heavy lifting. They’re the previous owner. Somebody was here, they figured some of this out, and they left you circled hints in a hand that isn’t the manual’s. It gives the game a social texture without a single line of multiplayer code — the same trick Souls messages pull, achieved with a pen.

None of this is nostalgia bait, and I’m allergic to nostalgia bait. The point isn’t that manuals were nice. The point is that manuals were asecond information channel the game couldn’t see, and when that channel died — when everything moved in-game, into tutorials and tooltips and quest markers — designers lost the ability to withhold. If the game must teach you everything it can do, then everything it can do is a checklist. Tunic reopened the channel and immediately used it to lie to you.

Where it fights itself

The combat is the weak link and always was. It’s a slow, stamina-gated, roll-and-poke system with a shield, and it wants to be taken seriously enough to be tuned but loose enough to be forgiving, and it settles in an unhappy middle. The bosses have real teeth and the moment-to-moment fighting doesn’t have the precision to make that teeth-baring feel fair. There’s an option to switch off damage entirely, and I don’t think it’s a defeat to use it; the game’s actual content is above the neck.

The isometric camera is the other tax. Tunic hides things behind geometry deliberately — an entire class of secret depends on a path being invisible from your fixed angle — and this is genuinely clever the first six times. After that it’s a game where you occasionally walk into walls hoping. Depth ambiguity as a puzzle mechanic has a low ceiling, and the game finds it.

And the mid-game asks you to do a lot of running. The world folds beautifully and the shortcuts open, and there’s still a stretch around the halfway mark where you’re crossing three biomes because a page told you something and the thing it told you about is a long way away.

The verdict

Tunic is a game about the pleasure of not being told, and it holds a position almost nothing else in the medium is willing to hold: that the player is capable of figuring it out and will enjoy the figuring more than the finding. It spends its first hours letting you believe it’s a small polite Zelda tribute so that the betrayal has somewhere to stand.

Play it anywhere — it’s on everything now, and it’s light enough to run on a toaster. Play it with a notebook and a pen, actually, and be ready to be embarrassed by how long it takes you to notice you’re allowed to draw things.

The pairing I’d suggest isReturn of the Obra Dinn, which runs the other great knowledge-progression system of the era, andInscryption if what you liked was being lied to about what kind of game you’d bought.

Spoilers below

The Holy Cross is the whole thesis, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen a game do with an input.

There is no new item. There’s a sequence of directional presses, and the manual has been showing you where to use it the entire time — hidden in the page borders, in the decorative frames, in the fold. The instruction was in your hands from the first page you picked up. You looked at it a hundred times. It was printed on the paper.

And so the game’s real final ability isliteracy. Once you see the border code, you go back through every page you’ve collected and read the game’s own documentation as a walkthrough, which is precisely the ritual the code wheel and the lookup table trained a generation to perform — go to the manual, find the page, read off the answer, come back. Shouldice took the most hated piece of 1980s anti-piracy friction and rebuilt it as the reward.

The two endings sharpen it. You can beat the Heir with a sword, which is the answer the game’s combat has been training, and it’s the lesser ending. Or you can gather the pages, understand what the fox has been doing to the previous heirs, and end it another way entirely — an ending available only to a player who read the paperwork. One route is reflexes. The other is attention. The game knows exactly which one it thinks is worth more, and it never once says so out loud.

My car developed a habit. Every time I opened the boot, the headlights came on. Not a problem, exactly — a tic, the kind of thing you’d mention to a mechanic and he’d shrug at. Then, deep in a zone with a storm closing, I opened the boot to stow salvage in the dark and lit myself up like a fairground for everything in a hundred metres.

That’s Pacific Drive. That’s the entire pitch, and I’ve never played anything else that does it.

What it is

Ironwood Studios released Pacific Drive on 22 February 2024 for PS5 and PC. It’s a first-person survival driving game set in the Olympic Exclusion Zone: a cordoned-off stretch of the Pacific Northwest where the science went wrong in the mid-1950s and the resulting weather has spent decades not obeying anything.

You are a driver who ends up inside the wall with a battered station wagon and a garage. The loop is a run. You pick a destination, you drive out, you scavenge resources from abandoned buildings and dead vehicles, you find and gather the anchors that power the gateway home, the storm notices you’ve done it and comes for you, and you drive very fast at a portal while everything you own falls off the car. Then you’re back in the garage, and you spend what you took to repair what you broke.

Three voices come to you over the radio — Oppy, Tobias and Francis — and they have the good manners to be characters while doing a quest log’s job. The writing is dry and specific and knows exactly how much to withhold.

The quirks system is the reason to care

Survival games have a companion problem. If you want the player to be attached to something, the standard tools are a dog, a child, or a talking device with a voice actor, and all three work by telling you to be attached. Ironwood gave you a car and made the attachment emerge from a bug tracker.

Here’s the mechanic. As you drive through the zone and take damage, your car develops quirks: persistent, irrational faults that link an input to an unrelated output. Opening a door pops the boot. Turning left switches on the radio. Braking kills the electrics. The game tells you a quirk exists; it does not tell you what it is.

To fix it, you diagnose it. There’s a board in the garage where you record what you did and what happened, and you narrow the cause down by hypothesis and test — open the door, watch what moves, log it, do it again. When you’re confident, you name the fault and the car forgets it.

Look at what that does. In every other survival game, damage is a number you top up with a resource. Here damage is abehaviour, and diagnosing it is a genuine act of attention paid to a specific object. You cannot fix your car without learning your car. And because quirks are generated per-vehicle and per-playthrough, your wagon’s list of tics is unique to you and unshareable. It is not the car in the trailer. It’s the one you broke.

That is a character. Built entirely out of unreliable state transitions, with no dialogue, no face and no arc. It’s the smartest thing anyone did with a survival loop last year.

The design detail that makes it sing is that quirks are rarely fatal. A headlight that fires when you open the boot is an inconvenience nine times out of ten, so you don’t fix it immediately; you file it, you work around it, you build a private mental model of your vehicle’s nonsense and you drive accordingly. The game is counting on that laziness. It wants you carrying a list of small forgivable faults into a place where one of them will eventually matter, and the moment it does, the consequence is legible all the way back to a decision you made hours ago in a warm garage. Neglect with a delay fuse. Very few games trust the player to be the author of their own ambush that patiently.

The damage model does the emotional work

The other half is granular. The car is panels, doors, tyres, windows, battery, engine, and each is tracked separately with its own condition. A door doesn’t have hit points that lower a global health bar; a door gets bent, then it doesn’t close, then it comes off, and now you’re driving through acid rain with a hole in your side.

The result is a language of decline you can read at a glance. You come back into the garage and the state of the vehicleis the story of the run — one wing crumpled where you clipped a pylon, rear window gone from the hail, a tyre you limped home on. Nobody narrates it. You look at it.

This is where the game earns its comparison toDredge, which runs a structurally identical bargain: go out, get greedy, the dark is coming, and every extra minute is a bet. Dredge tightens the screw with a grid-inventory Tetris and a sanity meter. Pacific Drive tightens it with the weather and the thing you know your rear axle can’t take. Both are pure risk-return engines dressed as a job.

The real ancestor is Jalopy (2018) — the Trabant road-trip game where the entire drama was a car that could not be trusted and a boot full of spare parts. Jalopy had the mechanical intimacy and no jeopardy. Ironwood added the storm.

Where it fights itself

The mid-game sags, and it sags for a reason worth naming. The tension curve depends on scarcity — on wanting a resource badly enough to take a stupid risk — and about fifteen hours in, the crafting economy tips. Once your wagon has decent panels and you’ve unlocked the better fabricator tiers, runs stop being desperate and start being errands. You go out with a shopping list. The storm becomes a schedule rather than a threat.

The game’s counter is to send you deeper, where the anomalies are nastier and the resources rarer, and it half works. But the fundamental problem is that survival crafting trees resolve, and a design whose whole engine is precarity has to keep the player poor.Citizen Sleeper understood this cleanly enough to make it the theme — the dice degrade, the clock runs, and stability is always a lie. Pacific Drive lets you actually get comfortable, and comfort is the death of it.

The anomalies are the other soft spot. They’re a wonderful bestiary in concept — the abductor, the bunnies, the things that follow — and in practice most of them resolve to “an object that damages the car if you’re near it” without a distinct answer. They behave like weather. The game would be better with fewer of them and a real verb for each.

And the driving, which had to carry everything, is merely good. The wagon has weight and the roads have surface, and it never quite reaches the tactile authority that would let the traversal itself be the reward on a bad-loot run. Compare what the handling model does for a game like Euro Truck Simulator, where the act of steering is sufficient payment for the hour: Pacific Drive needs the zone to be interesting because the road, on its own, isn’t. Every stretch of empty tarmac between anomalies is time the design has to fill with something, and the somethings run out.

The verdict

Pacific Drive is a great idea executed with real conviction and a loop that can’t quite sustain itself to the end. The quirks system alone justifies it — it is a genuine invention, the first mechanic I’ve seen that manufactures affection out of debugging, and I expect to see it stolen within two years by somebody with a bigger budget and less nerve.

Play it on PC if you have the option; the PS5 version is solid and the DualSense work is a nice touch. Play it in long sessions in the dark, and stop when the runs start feeling like a commute, because the first fifteen hours are as distinctive as anything released this year and there is no shame in leaving a game while you still like it.

Then go and takeDredge out for the same bargain in a boat, andStill Wakes the Deep when you want the same weather with none of the control.

Spoilers below

The Remnant material is where the fiction and the systems finally converge. The zone isn’t a disaster site; it’s an experiment that never stopped running, and the deeper you go the clearer it becomes that ARDA’s people didn’t lose control so much as decline to regain it.

What I keep turning over is the ending’s implication about the wagon. The whole game has been quietly suggesting that the car is a participant — the quirks that feel like preferences, the way the vehicle keeps turning up where you left it — and the late-game revelations make that literal enough to reframe every hour you spent with the diagnosis board. You weren’t debugging a machine. You were negotiating.

Which means the quirks system was never a repair mechanic. It was a conversation in the only language available, and the game had you fluent in it before it told you anybody was listening. Reveals rarely earn themselves that thoroughly, because most of them arrive as information. This one arrives as a re-reading of every hour you already spent at the diagnosis board, squinting at a wiper motor, being answered.

You are sitting at a table in a cabin. The man opposite you has no face, only two eyes floating where a face should be, and he is dealing you cards. You will play cards for a while. Eventually you will realise you can stand up.

That is the moment Inscryption is built around, and everything else — the found footage, the ARG, the three genre swaps, the card game that turns out to be four card games — descends from it. Daniel Mullins Games released it on 19 October 2021 for PC through Devolver Digital, with PlayStation following in August 2022 and Switch that October. Two years on, it’s still the best answer I know to a question most games never ask: what is thetable for?

The card game is real

Start with the part people skip, because it’s the part that makes the rest possible.

Inscryption’s deckbuilder is a genuinely good deckbuilder. Four lanes, creatures with power and health, a scale between you and your opponent that tips when damage gets through — win by tipping it far enough your way. Simple enough to read in a minute.

The costing is where it gets its teeth. Most creatures costblood, and blood comes from sacrificing creatures already on your board. So playing a strong card means killing a weak one you played earlier, which means every turn is a small act of asset-stripping your own tableau. Other cards costbones, which you get from things dying — yours or his. The economy is entirely built out of loss. You cannot spend anything in this game that you didn’t first destroy.

Compare that to Magic’s lands, which are a resource you set aside and grow. Inscryption’s currency isattrition, and it makes the play feel morally different on a turn-by-turn basis. You get good at feeding squirrels into a stag. It becomes routine. The game notices that it has become routine for you, and that noticing is the first crack in the wall.

The frame, and the breaking of it

Act 1 is the cabin. You’re playing a roguelike run against Leshy, the eyes across the table, who narrates your journey across a little map board and cheats when he feels like it. Lose and you die; die and you make aDeathcard — a custom card built from your failed run, sigil and stats and a portrait you draw yourself — which gets shuffled into the pool for future attempts. Your failures become furniture in the next game.

And you can stand up. You can walk around the cabin. There’s a safe, a clock, a wolf pelt, a carving. The escape room is not a bonus; solutions found in the room change the card game, and cards found in the game unlock the room. The two layers feed each other, which is the trick that makes the framing device structural rather than decorative.

Then Act 2 happens and the entire visual register drops to 8-bit — an overworld, four rival card-masters, four wholly different rule-sets grafted together into one deck. Then Act 3 happens and it’s a different thing again, with a different currency and a different narrator and a different joke.

Threaded through all of it is a man called Luke Carder, filming himself, opening card packs on a webcam, playing the disc he shouldn’t have. The found footage sitsoutside the cabin the way the cabin sits outside the card game. Frames all the way down.

Why it works, mechanically

Here’s my systems read, and it’s the reason I keep recommending this over the other meta-games.

Fourth-wall breaking is cheap. It has been cheap since Psycho Mantis read your memory card in 1998 and since Eternal Darkness faked a TV channel change in 2002 — both brilliant, both agag, a thing that happens to you once and then the game resumes. The gag works by violating an expectation, and an expectation can only be violated so many times before the violation becomes the expectation.

Inscryption solves this by making the framea mechanic with a cost. When Leshy interferes, it changes your odds. When you stand up from the table, you’re spending time you could have spent playing. When the room gives you something, it goes in your deck and has stats. The meta layer never gets to be free commentary, because everything it does has to be paid for in the currency of the card game underneath. That’s the discipline Mullins learned between Pony Island in 2016 and here: Pony Island is a magic trick about a game, and Inscryption is a game that happens to contain magic tricks.

The genuine ancestor, though, is older than either, and it’sHacker — Activision, 1985, which I loaded on a C64 as a kid and which opened with no instructions whatsoever, just a login prompt and the flat lie that you’d broken into something you shouldn’t have. There was no manual to consult because theabsence of the manual was the design. Inscryption is doing the same thing with forty years of extra technique: withholding the frame so that finding the frame is the reward.Tunic is playing the same game from the opposite direction, handing you a manual you can’t read;Hypnospace Outlaw does it by making the interface itself the level. All three descend from the era when a game could justlie to you and there was no wiki to check.

Where it fights itself

Act 1 is the best hour of card game released this decade, and Inscryption spends the next several hours moving away from it.

That’s a design decision, and I understand it, and I still think it costs the game real weight. Act 2’s four-scrybe mash-up isbroad — every mechanic from every act, all at once — and breadth is the enemy of the tension Act 1 built. The blood economy worked because it was the only lever. Give me bones and energy and mox gems and a pixel overworld, and I’m no longer making the one horrible decision over and over; I’m managing a system. The horror was in the narrowness.

Act 3 recovers some of it by imposing a new constraint, and by then the story has enough momentum to carry a weaker table. But the shape of the game is a diminuendo in mechanical terms while the plot escalates, and the two curves fight.

The evidence for that reading is Kaycee’s Mod, the free update Mullins put out in March 2022: Act 1’s cabin, extracted, made endlessly replayable, with escalating challenge modifiers and no story at all. It exists because players finished the game and wanted thefirst part back. When your own post-release content is an admission that your best system was in the opening act, the review writes itself.

The other cost is structural and unavoidable: this is a game that can only be new once. Deckbuilders are usually re-playable machines — that’s the genre’s entire economic proposition. Inscryption’s power lives in the reveals, and reveals don’t survive a second viewing. Kaycee’s Mod is the patch for that, and it’s a good one, and it’s also a card game with the meaning surgically removed.

The verdict

Inscryption is a game about the difference between playing and being played, and it earns that sentence by being a genuinely excellent card game first and a conceptual stunt second. The order matters. Plenty of games have broken their frames; almost none of them built something strong enough underneath that the breakhurt.

It’s uneven. It peaks early, sprawls in the middle, and ends on a note that some people will find inevitable and some will find like a rug being pulled for the fourth time in six hours. None of that stopped it from being the thing I’ve thought about most since 2021, and the eyes across the table are still there when I close mine.

Go in knowing nothing. Then come back and play Kaycee’s Mod for a hundred hours like the rest of us.

What to play next:Tunic, for the other great modern game about withheld information, andHypnospace Outlaw, which builds a whole world out of an interface that pretends to be furniture.

Spoilers below

The Luke Carder framing is the piece that turns Inscryption from a good trick into a coherent argument, and it took me a second run to see how carefully it’s wired. Luke isn’t a narrator — he’s aplayer, and specifically a player of the kind the internet manufactures: a collector, a completionist, a man who cannot leave a mystery alone and who films himself failing to leave it alone. Every terrible decision he makes is the decision the audience is loudly telling him to make, which is the joke and also the indictment.

The Karnoffel Code and the OLD_DATA business is the weakest strand, honestly. It’s the ARG scaffolding, and it exists to give the found-footage layer a reason to have stakes. It works well enough to hold, and it’s the one place where Mullins reaches for a conspiracy plot because he needs a plot rather than because the plot is the idea.

What redeems the final act completely is the deletion. Inscryption ends by having the gameremove itself, and it commits — cards get erased, systems get switched off, and the last thing you do is the thing that ends the possibility of doing it again. For a genre built on the promise of infinite runs, closing on permanence is the single most aggressive design choice in the game. Leshy’s whole tragedy is that he only ever wanted to keep dealing. Kaycee’s Mod, arriving five months later to give the cabin back forever, plays like Mullins conceding the point to him.

Six slots. That’s the number everybody argues about, and it’s the right thing to argue about, because Signalis is a game where the number of pockets you have is a statement of intent.

rose-engine — Yuri Stern and Barbara Wittmann, two people — released Signalis on 27 October 2022 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch, published by Humble Games with Playism handling Japan. A year on it has quietly become the survival horror that other survival horrors get measured against, and it managed that without a marketing budget, a famous engine, or a single frame of hardware showboating. It looks like something that fell off a shelf in 1998. It thinks like something written in 2022.

What it actually is

You are Elster, a Replika — a mass-produced synthetic worker unit, model LSTR-512 — and you wake in a wrecked ship on a frozen world with a photograph and a hole where your memory used to be. You are looking for someone. The game will not tell you clearly who, or why, or whether you have done this before.

The camera sits above and behind, roughly top-down, in the way the fixed cameras of the original PlayStation era sat: composed rather than convenient. The art is deliberately low-resolution and heavily dithered, the whole thing bathed in CRT scan and red emergency light. Enemies are other Replikas, and they shamble.

Mechanically it’s Resident Evil’s architecture, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. Locked doors, keys in the wrong wing, save points that cost you a walk, a map that fills in as you go, an inventory that runs out constantly. Elster carriessix items. A pistol takes a slot. Its ammunition takes another. A health item takes another. The key you need is a fourth. Do that arithmetic in a corridor with something walking toward you and you’ll understand the entire design philosophy inside twenty minutes.

The one genuinely novel system is the radio. Elster carries one, you can tune it, and the world broadcasts on frequencies — puzzles are solved by finding a number somewhere and dialling it in, and the radio hisses and sings and occasionally says something it shouldn’t. It’s a diegetic puzzle interface that also functions as a mood machine, which is exactly the sort of double-duty this game does everywhere.

And the dead don’t stay dead. Down a Replika and it will get back up after a while, unless you burn it with a thermite flare — and flares take a slot too. That mechanic has an ancestor, and it’sResident Evil proper: the Crimson Heads of the 2002 remake, where a corpse you didn’t burn became a faster, angrier problem an hour later. Signalis takes the idea and makes it structural. Every kill is a debt with interest.

Why the constraint is the point

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, and it’s why the six slots matter beyond the grumbling.

A limit in a game is usually a difficulty dial. Signalis uses its limit as agrammar. Six slots means the game can guarantee you are always making a sentence out of the same small vocabulary: what you carry, what you leave, what you walk back for. Every room becomes a decision about what you’re willing to be defenceless for. That’s the survival-horror bargain from 1996, and it works now for the reason it worked then — scarcity makes spacemean something, because space has a price.

But rose-engine push it further than the genre usually does, and this is the bit that earns the headline. The whole game is built out of compression. Fragments of text that don’t resolve. A word repeated in three different registers until it warps. Scenes that recur with one detail changed. Imagery lifted openly from Robert W. Chambers’The King in Yellow — the sign, the play, the thing you shouldn’t read — and from Stanisław Lem, whoseSolaris haunts the game’s central question about whether the person you’re looking for is a person or a projection of your own wanting.

That is how a poem works. It gives you less than you need and makes the shortfall do the labour. Signalis’s six-slot inventory and its six-fragment story are the same design instinct pointed at two different systems, and the fact that both land is why the game is more than a very good pastiche.

The mechanics, and where they fight the game

I’m generous to ambition and merciless about padding, and Signalis has one real problem: the back half asks you to carry the six-slot bargain further than the bargain can hold.

Early on, scarcity is tension. Later, when the puzzle chains get longer and the item you need is four rooms and two loading screens away, scarcity becomesadmin. You will do laps. You will stand in a save room playing inventory Tetris with a keycard and a flare, and the fear will drain out of the game while you do it, because nothing is chasing you in a save room and the horror doesn’t survive a spreadsheet.

This is the oldest tax in the genre and Signalis pays more of it than it should, largely because it’s honest to a 1996 template that had reasons — disc-loading reasons, memory-card reasons — that stopped existing decades ago. Resident Evil 4’s remake spentan entire redesign figuring out how to keep scarcity while deleting the errand, and it’s the one lesson Signalis declines to take.

Combat is the other soft spot. Aiming is stiff by design, and stiffness is a legitimate horror tool —Dead Space’s 2023 remake knows exactly how much friction to leave in a weapon so that firing it feels like a commitment. Signalis’s shooting is stiffand thin: the guns don’t have much character, and the enemies don’t react enough to make you feel the hit land. You end up avoiding fights, which is correct survival-horror behaviour, arrived at for slightly the wrong reason.

The thing it does that nothing else does

And then it does something I haven’t seen another game do this well.

Signalis makesthe interface itself unreliable. The screen is a device Elster is looking through, and the game knows it. Things get into the frame that shouldn’t. The presentation glitches in ways that are plainly authored, and because you’ve spent hours trusting the HUD as a neutral instrument, the moment it lies to you lands like a floorboard giving way.

The ancestor for thelook is older than the PlayStation. Watching Signalis, I kept thinking about Team17’sAlien Breed on the Amiga in 1991 — the same top-down corridors, the same doors that ate keys, the same feeling of a small bright thing moving through a big dark ship. Alien Breed was cheerfully arcade about it. Signalis takes the identical camera and uses it for dread, because from above you can see everything in the room and still not see what’s coming through the door.

The ending — there are several, and they hinge on things the game never tells you it’s counting — is where the poetry either takes or doesn’t. Signalis will not explain itself. It has a theory of what happened, it has left it in fragments across a dozen rooms, and it fully expects you to either assemble it or go and read someone else’s assembly. That’s a genuine choice with a genuine cost, and I respect it more than I enjoy it.

The verdict

Signalis is the best thing to happen to survival horror since the genre started remaking itself, and it came from two people who understood that the constraints were the art itself. It is a game about memory built out of a system that punishes you for carrying too much, which is a joke so good I’m not sure it’s a joke.

It’s also stiff, it’s fiddly, and it will make you walk a corridor eleven times. The last third is a puzzle box wearing a poem’s coat. Every one of those complaints is true, and none of them touched how the thing sat in my head afterwards, which is the only measurement I trust.

Go in cold. Take the flares. Don’t look anything up until the credits.

What to play next:Resident Evil 4 (2023) for the version of scarcity that respects the clock, andDead Space (2023) for the industrial-horror sound design Signalis is clearly listening to.

Spoilers below

The Replika question is the engine, and it’s more carefully built than the fragmentary telling suggests. Elster is a mass-produced unit; the Nation stamps out identical bodies with identical memories; and the game’s horror is that identity here is a manufacturing tolerance. When you meet another LSTR, the correct reaction isn’t fear of a monster. It’s the much worse realisation that the monster and you are the same product with different wear.

The Ariane material is where the poem earns its structure. The repetitions across the game — the same room reassembled, the same photograph degrading, the same promise resurfacing in a different room’s handwriting — read as glitchiness on a first pass and asiteration on a second. You’re being shown drafts. The story has been run before, and what you’re playing is one attempt among many, which retroactively makes the respawning enemies feel less like a difficulty mechanic and more like a thesis.

The endings sort by hidden metrics — how much damage you took, how often you fiddled with the radio, whether you kept certain objects — and I think this is the one place the design overreaches. Signalis is asking you to earn a reading of its text by behaviours it never taught you were text. The Promise ending is the one the game clearly loves, and the one hardest to arrive at by instinct, which means most players get their interpretation assigned rather than chosen. For a game this deliberate about constraint, that’s the one constraint that fires backwards.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from modern puzzle games. It isn’t the puzzles. It’s thedistance between them — the walk back to the thing you already solved, the second cutscene explaining the lever, the collectible you’re meant to want. Most puzzle games are a good idea wrapped in forty minutes of administration.

Cocoon has none of that on it. Geometric Interactive’s debut, released on 29 September 2023 across PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch under Annapurna Interactive, runs somewhere around five hours and spends all five of them doing the one thing it exists to do. I have played puzzle games since the C64 was the only machine in the house, and I can count on one hand the ones this disciplined.

The idea, stated once

You are a small winged thing. You walk. You have one action button. You can pick up a glowing orb, and it sits on your back like a rucksack.

Each orb is a world. Set it on a pad and step in, and you are inside it — a whole biome, with its own colour, its own creatures, its own puzzles. Step onto another pad and you are spat back out, standing next to the orb you were just living in.

That’s the sentence. Everything Cocoon does for five hours is a consequence of it.

Because an orb is a worldand an object, you can carry a world into another world. You can be inside orb A, holding orb B, and set B down and enter it — you are now two worlds deep. Later you’ll be carrying a world that contains the world you need to be in, and you will have to think about what “inside” means for about ninety seconds before it clicks into place.

And because an orb is an object, it can also be atool. Each one lends a power to whoever’s carrying it. So an orb is simultaneously a place you can go, a key you can hold, and a thing that has to be somewhere for a puzzle in a different place to work. Three roles, one noun, zero explanation.

Teaching with the level instead of the text

Cocoon has no dialogue. No text. No tutorial pop-up telling you to press the button. No hint system, no HUD, no map, no journal.

This is easy to describe as minimalism and get wrong. Minimalism is what it looks like. What it actually is isteaching — every mechanic gets introduced in a room where only one thing can happen, in a place where the wrong answer is visibly the wrong answer. You learn the orb-as-tool idea in a corridor where the tool is the only variable. You learn nesting in a chamber that gives you two orbs and a very short leash. By the time the game combines the ideas, you’ve already been quietly examined and passed.

Jeppe Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer on Limbo and Inside at Playdead, and this is the same craft with the safety off. Limbo taught you by killing you; the rooms were short, the deaths were instructive, and the restart was instant. Cocoon barely kills you at all, and it doesn’t need to. It teaches bygeometry — a ledge you can see and can’t reach, a pad that’s clearly a pad, a door that clearly wants something. The lesson arrives through your eyes before it arrives through your hands.

That’s an old skill and a rare one. The real ancestor here is Geoff Crammond’sThe Sentinel (1986), which I played on a C64 in a room with the curtains shut and no idea what I was doing for the first hour. The Sentinel had a handful of verbs and no story at all, and it taught you its entire logic by putting you on a hill and letting you look. Cocoon has that same faith: that a player looking at a well-built space will work it out, and that working it out is the whole product.

Portal (2007) is the other obvious relative, and Cocoon is more austere than Portal — no voice in your ear, no jokes, no character to be charmed by. What it keeps is Portal’s teaching curve, where the tutorial and the game are the same object and you can’t see the seam.

The loop, and why the loop holds

Here’s the mechanical thing I keep turning over.

Most puzzle games have a currency problem. They need to hold back abilities so the difficulty can rise, so they lock things behind doors, gate them behind progress, hand them to you on a schedule. The gating becomes the pacing, and you can feel the designer’s hand on the tap.

Cocoon solves this by making the abilityportable and physical. You don’t unlock the power — you’recarrying it, and you can put it down. So the difficulty rises through logistics rather than through permissions. The question stops being “do I have the tool” and becomes “where does the tool have to be standing while I’m somewhere else”. The game never has to take anything away from you. It only has to build a room where you need to be in two places at once.

That’s a beautiful bit of economy, and it has a downstream effect the whole game rides on:backtracking stops being punishment. In a Metroidvania, going back is a tax you pay for the design’s shape. In Cocoon, going backis the puzzle — the return trip is the move, the carrying is the thinking. Walking is never dead time, because the thing on your back is the reason you’re walking.

The other place the fat gets trimmed is failure. Boss encounters are pattern-reading with instant retries; there is no resource attrition, no inventory management, no lives system left over from an arcade that closed thirty years ago. When you die, you are back a few seconds later, and the game has correctly assumed that your punishment was already the fact that you were wrong.

Where it costs itself something

I’d be a bad witness if I said the discipline is free.

Cocoon is a game with almost no friction, and friction is where a lot of people findfeeling. There’s nothing here to be furious at, nothing to grind against, nobody to like. The world is gorgeous — Erwin Kho’s biomechanical architecture is genuinely strange, all chitin and wet metal and machines that look grown rather than built — and it stays at arm’s length. You will not carry a character out of this game, because there isn’t one.

The difficulty sits in a narrow band, too. The puzzles areclean — nearly every one lands with the small satisfying click of a well-made lid — and clean means the ceiling stays low. Nothing in Cocoon will hold you for an hour the way a late Obra Dinn deduction will, or leave you filling a physical notebook. If your favourite feeling in a puzzle game is being genuinely stuck and slightly insulted by it, Cocoon will feel like it’s letting you off.

And the ending is where the restraint runs out of road. A game this wordless has to land its close on shape and sound alone, and Cocoon’s finish is more of a chord than a sentence. It resolves. Whether itmeans anything is between you and the credits.

The verdict

Cocoon is the best-engineered puzzle game since Return of the Obra Dinn, and it wins on completely different ground. Obra Dinn is a mountain you climb with a pencil. Cocoon is a machine with every unnecessary part removed, and the pleasure of it is watching a designer refuse — over and over, for five hours — to pad his own work.

That refusal is worth more than it sounds. This is a game that could have been twelve hours. It could have had a collectible chime and a lore codex and a second act where you revisit the first orb with a new hat. All of that was available, and all of it would have sold, and Carlsen threw the lot away. What’s left is five hours where every single minute is the good part.

Take the afternoon. It only wants one.

What to play next:Chants of Sennaar, which came out the same month and teaches you a language with no lectures either;Tunic, for the other great modern experiment in telling the player nothing; andReturn of the Obra Dinn if you want the version that fights back.

Spoilers below

The nesting reaches its proper depth in the back half, when you’re moving orbs between worlds that are themselves sitting inside orbs, and the game asks you to hold a mental stack three deep. What’s remarkable is that Cocoon never renders this as a diagram. There’s no map of the nesting, no visual aid, no “you are here” — the structure lives entirely in your head, and the game trusts that it will fit there. It does, mostly, and the two or three moments where itdoesn’t quite fit are the most alive the game gets, because you have to stop and physically reason about containment.

The bosses are the one concession to convention, and they’re better than they need to be. Each one is built out of the orb power you’ve just acquired, so the fight functions as an exam on the mechanic — read the tell, apply the verb, repeat with a variation. It’s the Limbo idea again: the encounter is a puzzle wearing a monster costume, and it dies when you’ve understood it rather than when you’ve out-twitched it.

The final stretch collapses the orbs together, and it’s the one time Cocoon reaches for grandeur. It’s a fine ending and a slightly hollow one — the game has spent five hours teaching you that everything means something mechanically, and then closes on something that means somethingthematically, in a register it never taught you to read. I’d have taken one more puzzle over the awe. That’s a small complaint about a game that got almost everything else exactly right.