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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a specific feeling you get about ninety minutes intoChants of Sennaar, and I’ve been trying to work out how a puzzle game manufactured it. You are standing in front of a person who has been shouting the same glyph at you since you arrived. You have finally worked out what it means. And the glyph, it turns out, meanswelcome.

Rundisc’s game came out on 5 September this year, published by Focus Entertainment, and it is built on the Tower of Babel — five peoples stacked up a single structure, each speaking a language the others have forgotten, each convinced the floor above them is a threat. You climb. The only thing you carry is a notebook.

How the validation page works

The mechanic is simple to describe and much harder to build. You see glyphs — on signs, in speech bubbles, carved on doors. You have a journal, and against each glyph you write your best guess at the meaning, in plain French or English or whatever the game is running in. You can write anything. Nothing is checked.

Then, periodically, the journal produces a page with several illustrated panels on it and a slot beside each. Drag the right glyph onto the right drawing for every panel on the page, and the page locks: those meanings are now confirmed, and from then on the game silently prints them as words wherever they appear.

That page is the entire design. Three things fall out of it.

It defeats guessing without punishing being wrong. A page only validates as a set, so you cannot brute-force one slot at a time and read the tick. Getting five of six right tells you nothing, in the same way a nearly-correct hypothesis tells a scientist nothing. But a wrong guess in your notebook costs you nothing either — no penalty, no lockout — so you’re free to be confidently wrong for hours, which is how actual decipherment works.

It separates two different pleasures. Working out that a glyph means “door” is one kind of fun: you noticed it above every doorway. Working out that a glyph means “forbidden” is a much better kind: you noticed it abovesome doorways, and beside a guard, and on a sign the guard was pointing at while making an unmistakable gesture. The page validation lets both count, and then rewards the second by turning a wall of nonsense into readable prose.

It makes the world the dictionary. No character teaches you anything. The language is only ever learned from context — a hand gesture, a repeated juxtaposition, the layout of a room, the fact that this word appears exclusively in a kitchen. Rundisc had to author every glyph’s meaning into thelevel design, which is a properly enormous amount of invisible work, and it’s why the tower feels lived-in. Every prop is a lexical entry.

Why the translation reads as empathy

The Warriors are the point at which the game reveals its argument, and it does it without a line of dialogue you could quote.

When you first reach their floor you cannot read a syllable of it. They are armoured, they shout, they hunt you through corridors in genuinely tense stealth sections, and they are — obviously, self-evidently — hostile. That’s not an interpretation. That is the raw sensory data.

A floor’s worth of glyphs later, you can read the signs on their walls. And the signs say things about duty and about fear of what’s above. The stealth section doesn’t change. The level layout doesn’t change. The soldiers still chase you. What changes is that you now understand that they are frightened people doing a job in a building whose upper floors they believe are full of monsters, and you have just come down from those floors, and you are the monster.

The game achieves this with zero exposition, because it made you do the work. This is the whole reason “empathy machine” fits here rather than being marketing: comprehension arrives asyour achievement, at a moment ofyour choosing, and it retroactively rewrites everything you already saw. A cutscene could tell you the Warriors are afraid. Only a language puzzle can make yourealise it.

The later floors take it further, when the game starts asking you to translatebetween the peoples — using one language you’ve cracked to bootstrap another, and eventually acting as an interpreter for two groups who have spent generations inventing reasons to hate a noise they can’t parse. The mechanic and the theme are the same object. That’s the highest thing a game system can do and it happens about four times a decade.

Where it fights itself

The stealth is the seam, and everyone says so for good reason. The Warriors' floor and a later sequence swap deduction for patrol routes and hiding spots, and Rundisc are plainly better at semiotics than at line-of-sight cones. It’s not punishing — a fail sends you back a few metres — and it is a different, lesser game wedged into a great one, presumably because someone worried the middle act needed a pulse. It didn’t.

The second issue is subtler. Because the validation pages arrive at authored moments, the game’s difficulty is partly a function ofwhich meanings Rundisc decided to check. There are glyphs you will crack instantly and glyphs you’ll carry for two floors, and occasionally a page will ask you to distinguish two concepts on evidence that is thinner than the rest of the game’s standard. Those moments feel like a design slip in a piece of work that’s otherwise extraordinarily precise about what it has shown you.

And it’s short — a weekend — with no second run in it, since you can’t un-know a vocabulary. That’s the same taxObra Dinn pays, and it’s the correct price for both.

The ancestors

Heaven’s Vault (2019) is the obvious comparison — Inkle’s game also has you translating an ancient script — and the two differ in one instructive way.Heaven’s Vault lets you be wrong and keep walking; it will accept your bad translation and build on it, and the ambiguity is deliberate and, for a lot of players, maddening. Sennaar validates. You always eventuallyknow. Inkle made a game about interpretation; Rundisc made a game about decipherment, and decipherment has a right answer, which is why Sennaar’s dopamine hits harder.

But the real ancestor isCaptain Blood, 1988, and I say that with the confidence of someone who owned it. ERE Informatique’s oddity — on the Amiga, the ST and the C64 — put you in a spaceship talking to aliens through UPCOM, an icon language of pictograms. You built sentences out of those symbols and the aliens replied in pictograms, and the whole game was a negotiation conducted in a vocabulary you had to assemble by trial. It was unfriendly and slightly broken and completely unforgettable, and it understood in 1988 the thing Sennaar understands now: that the moment a stranger’s grammar clicks is a bigger event than any firefight.

Tunic is the modern cousin — an invented script and an in-game manual you learn to read — though Tunic’s language is mostly a wrapper on its secrets, where Sennaar’s languageis the secret.

The verdict

Chants of Sennaar is the best thing this genre has produced sinceObra Dinn, and it gets there by a completely different route: where Pope built a forensic machine, Rundisc built a social one. The validation page is a small, elegant answer to the verification problem, the art — cel-shaded, Moebius-flavoured, all flat colour and clean line — does real work in making glyphs legible as glyphs, and the central trick of making comprehension feel like forgiveness is genuinely new.

The stealth is a wart. Ignore it; it’s over in twenty minutes and the game on either side of it is close to flawless.

It’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox, and the Switch version is the one I’d choose, because this is a game you play with a real pen and paper next to you and a handheld leaves the desk free. Guess wildly, and be wrong in ink.

If you want another game where the systems carry the argument instead of the script,Cocoon came out a fortnight ago and has no words in it at all.

Spoilers below

The Anchorites are where the structure pays off. By the time you reach the top of the tower you are carrying four vocabularies, and the final floors stop being about learning a fifth and start being aboutarbitration — the game hands you the ability to move meaning between peoples who cannot address each other, and every puzzle after that is a diplomatic act.

It is also Babel told properly. The myth’s usual reading has the confusion of tongues arrive as a punishment dropped from above; Sennaar puts the whole catastrophe on the ground floor, where it belongs — generations of people directly above and below each other, each treating an unparsed noise as a threat and building a theology out of the misunderstanding. Rundisc never state that. They let you assemble it, glyph by glyph, and then hand you the job of undoing it.

And the descent at the end is the finest thing in it. You go back down through floors you crossed in fear, and you can read all of it, and the tower that spent the whole game being a hostile puzzle box is now simply a building full of people who have been shouting explanations at you from the start.