Roguelikes have always had a story problem, and it is a structural one. The genre runs on repetition — you die, you start again, the numbers reshuffle — and narrative runs on progression. Put the two in the same box and the story becomes something the player skips. Every roguelike before 2020 solved this by having almost no story, or by putting it in item descriptions and letting the community assemble it on a wiki.

Hades solved it by making the repetition the subject.

Supergiant Games put it into early access on the Epic Games Store in December 2018, moved it to Steam a year later, and shipped 1.0 on 17 September 2020 for PC and Switch, with PlayStation and Xbox versions following in August 2021. It won a BAFTA for Best Game and, in 2021, the Hugo Award in a one-off Best Video Game category — the first game to get one, voted on by a science-fiction readership that does not hand those out for combat feel. Five years and a sequel later, the thing it worked out about narrative repetition is still the most important design idea of its generation, and it is still barely copied, because copying it is enormously expensive.

Death is a commute

Zagreus is the son of Hades. He is trying to leave the Underworld. When he dies, he goes into the River Styx and surfaces in a pool in the House of Hades, which is his father’s office, and his father looks up from his paperwork and says something about it.

That is the entire trick, and everything else follows from it. Once dying returns you to aplace where people live, the run structure stops being a loop and becomes a commute. You leave home, you fail, you come home, and everyone at home has an opinion about your failure. Achilles is by the door. Nyx is in the hall. Cerberus wants attention. Dusa is dusting the chandelier and worrying. Hypnos — who is asleep at the reception desk and reads out your cause of death like a receptionist reading a delivery note — is the joke that makes the whole thing work, because he turns each death into an event the fiction acknowledges.

CompareRogue Legacy (Cellar Door Games, 2013), the closest ancestor, which made death diegetic first: your heir inherits the estate and the traits, and the castle persists. That is the right idea, executed as a frame.Hades runs the idea through the writing, and the writing is the part nobody wants to pay for.

The dialogue queue is the actual engine

Here is the machinery, and it is worth understanding because it is the whole answer.

Creative director Greg Kasavin wrote north of twenty thousand lines of dialogue forHades, all of it voiced, most of it by a small cast with Logan Cunningham carrying an implausible share of it. Plenty of RPGs have more words than that, so the volume is only half of it. The innovation is the priority system underneath.

Every character has a large pool of possible lines, each tagged with conditions: what boons you carried, who you last spoke to, which boss killed you, how many runs you have made, what you gave whom, what you have already been told. When you walk up to Achilles, the game queues the most contextually specific line that has not yet fired, and burns it. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and the game notices; die to your father twice in a row and he has a fresh remark about it.

The player-facing consequence is thatHades almost never repeats itself for the first forty or fifty runs, and by the time it starts to, you are deep enough that the story has moved. The illusion is that the House is reacting to you. The reality is a very large deck being dealt in an intelligent order, and it holds because Supergiant did the unglamorous work of writing enough cards.

That is why nobody has copied it. The mechanic is cheap. The content pipeline feeding it is not.

The run itself

None of this would matter if the combat were poor, and it is excellent for a reason that has nothing to do with the writing: the boon system creates a build, and the build is a conversation with chance.

Six weapons, each with aspects that alter them substantially. Boons from the Olympians — Zeus chains lightning, Poseidon knocks back, Aphrodite weakens, Ares does damage over time, Artemis crits, Dionysus poisons — and boons that combine into Duo effects when the right two gods have already blessed you. The Mirror of Night spends darkness on permanent upgrades. Keepsakes weight the pool towards a god you want. Chthonic keys, nectar, ambrosia, the Fated List of Minor Prophecies: every currency you bring home buys something.

The design pressure this creates is genuinely good. You cannot plan a build. You can only lean — take Artemis’s keepsake, hope she shows up, adapt when she doesn’t. It is the same tension I wrote about inBalatro: The Poker Roguelike That Ate a Year: the run gives you a hand and the skill is recognising what hand you have been given rather than the one you wanted.Hades is more forgiving thanDead Cells about this, because the meta-progression means a bad run still pays, and that forgiveness is deliberate — the design wants you to get home so the House can talk to you.

The accessibility work belongs in the same argument. God Mode grants 20% damage resistance and adds 2% every time you die, so a player who keeps failing keeps getting stronger until the story unlocks. Supergiant understood that the story was the reward and refused to gate it behind execution. The Pact of Punishment runs the other way for players who want the difficulty back, in increments they choose.

What it owes

The Amiga I got in 1987 had a port ofRogue on it — Epyx published one in 1986 — and the thing aboutRogue is that it had no story at all and did not need one, because the dungeon generated the anecdote. You told the story afterwards, in a corridor at school. That is the genre’s founding compromise: the game supplies systems and the player supplies meaning.

Every roguelike since has honoured that compromise.Spelunky (2008),The Binding of Isaac (2011),FTL (2012) — all of them make you the author. What Supergiant did was ask whether a roguelike could supply the meaning itself without losing the generative anecdote, and the answer turned out to be yes, at a cost most studios cannot bear. Supergiant had also solved half of it already: the reactive narrator inBastion (2011) was the same technology in an earlier and cruder form, a system watching what you did and commenting on it.Hades is that prototype, nine years of iteration later, pointed at the exact structural problem it was built to solve.

The verdict

Hades is the rare game where the literary ambition and the mechanical design are the same object. Take the writing out and you have a very good isometric action roguelike with a strong art direction from Jen Zee and one of Darren Korb’s best scores. Take the combat out and you have a soap opera about a dysfunctional family of gods. Together they produce something neither half could: a story that getsbetter the more you fail at the game, which no other medium can do at all.

Its limits are honest ones. The Underworld’s four biomes are fixed in order — Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, the Temple of Styx — so the variation lives in the boons and the room layouts, and after enough runs the geography is a hallway you walk fast. The bosses are few, and Theseus and Asterius carry more than their share. The moment-to-moment combat lacks the mechanical strangeness of the best of its peers.

It is on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch — it runs on a toaster, and it is a complete game that never asked for a season pass.Hades II followed the same early-access route and only widens the argument: Supergiant found a design position nobody else can afford, and they are still the only ones standing on it.

What to play next:Dead Cells: The Roguevania Blueprint for the harsher, more mechanically dense version of the same loop, andRisk of Rain 2: The Difficulty Curve as a Clock for a roguelike that solves pacing with time pressure instead of dialogue.

Spoilers below

The ending is the part people argue about, and the argument is a good one.

Zagreus escapes, reaches the surface, finds Persephone, and then dissolves — because he cannot survive outside the Underworld, and the game makes you do this repeatedly. Ten times, in fact, before the story concludes. Supergiant took the one thing a roguelike player wants (the winning run) and made it a chore you must grind, which sounds like a design failure and is instead the sharpest joke in the game: reaching Persephone is the beginning of the story, and the reunion has to be earned through the same repetition everything else was.

The epilogue lands the thesis. Persephone comes home, the family is assembled, and the whole thing closes on a family reconciling — Hades and Zagreus finally speaking plainly, Nyx’s role revealed, Demeter thawing. It is a domestic ending to a myth about escape, and the reason it works is that you have spent sixty hours in that hallway hearing these people slowly change their minds about each other, one death at a time.

Hypnos, who has been reading out your causes of death for the entire game with no idea what is going on, gets the last laugh. Correctly.

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.

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.