Videogames

80 Days is a branching sort of text adventure game (certainly inspired by / in the genre of “interactive fiction”) that puts you into a steampunk “around in the world in 80 days” and lets you go exploring - there are so many branching paths to get there, the writing is so good. “Winning” in 80 days is barely the point.

Very inspired by Candy Box - playable for free in a browser or there’s a great ios/android port. This game does so much with barely any graphics, does a bunch of amazing stylistic shifts, tells a good story. The opening moments are so evocative. It’s a combination of a cookie clicker and a text adventure game and … then it changes …

An absurdly hard mind-bending game that’s worth trying.

A unique take on what a text game can be.

One of 2022’s most acclaimed indies, the Game Awards-nominated Citizen Sleeper is a Tabletop-inspired narrative RPG set on Erlin’s Eye, a ruined space station that is home to thousands of people trying to survive on the edges of an interstellar capitalist society.

I’m so terrified they’re eventually going to stop updating this game for iOS and it will no longer be playable. This is what hypertext was meant to be. Feels like if the 60s TV show “The Prisoner” was a living book. Incredible.

I’m just going to let Wired describe it “DISCO ELYSIUM, if you didn’t play it when it came out in 2019, is a narrative-focused gem that emphasizes a vast story, worldbuilding, and themes, which in my opinion overdelivers on its promise to leave you stunned, and perhaps changed, by the game’s conclusion. Exploring madness, heartbreak, postwar culture, racist pseudoscience, and cryptozoology in a game that’s equal parts existential philosophy and absurdist nonsense, Disco Elysium was like nothing we’ve seen before.”

Gone Home is a first person 3d exploration game. In it, you play a young woman, back from her European summer vacation during college. Her parents have moved while she was away to big creepy house that’s completely abandoned when she gets there. The game feints at horror, but there’s never horror, just the horror of all fucked up families.

This game is like if an infinitely zooming mc escher painting was a meditative video game puzzler. Beautiful. Plays great on mobile. All hand drawn, took years to make.

Unique text/narrative/choice game, it plays like a point-and-click adventure but most of the gameplay is in conversations and deciphering an ancient language puzzle. Feels like you really are exploring a vast arab-influenced universe that’s experienced a major “dark ages” period that’s only just being understood.

The vibes in this game are so good. Simple narrative puzzler with fantastic vaporwave aesthetics.

This is one of those “press A to feel something” games

It’s the greatest game, narrative, movie, interactive experience, magical surrealist novel of the 21st century. What more can I say.

If you know me, you know I love art that attempts to be erotic without being tawdry, while being meaningful and fun and playful. This is a very silly and really fun exercise in trying to make a japanese-style erotic visual novel / dating simulator for a queer american audience. Is it good? maybe. Is it messy? oh yes. Is it art? 100%

Part of a genre of semi real-time “texting” games where you are in an interface that looks like a single-player chat-app, talking to a far away character who needs your help. Occasionally the game forces you to take breaks while the character goes and does something. Not the most effective but an interesting experiment.

Very inspired by Zelda and other top-down dungeon adventure games. This game does so much with a beautifully limited color palette. There’s a game mechanic in it that causes rounds to last sixty seconds which weirdly works well to create tension and playability. This made me feel more than dozens of hours in Zelda Breath of the Wild (a game with a like 1000x budget to Minit)

An incredibly gorgeous game inspired by the works of MC Escher, you manipulate a world that follows the slightly incorrect perspective physics of Escher. The gameplay is a bit simple - there’s often only one obvious move and it’s the right one, but the graphics, sound, design and the light moody text of the game allows it to create a strong feeling of

See: Lifeline

The game that proved to the world that you can make a “serious game” (ie, one that’s about a meaningful, serious, real-world topic) without being a didactic, unfun scold about it.

Portal asks “What if a 3d-shooter involved solving puzzles, not shooting things, and had an engrossing narrator, world and backstory?”

It’s Portal, but the sequel. More mechanics, more story, more voice acting, more space.

Comes from when there were lots of little moody ios puzzle games coming out. But this is definitely one of the best, has a kind of creepy-zen vibe about it, meditative yet menacing.

This game is like if the part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance where the main character slips into psychosis was an incredibly beautiful game that makes incredible use of the mobile/touch form factor. Fantastic and underrated.

A comedy game that actually works. It’s a first person walking simulator with a narrator who tells you what to do and as you disobey them, interesting things happen. There are a million endings.

What if a “platformer” (a 2d jumping game like Mario or Sonic) had quite low-fidelity graphics, a killer soundtrack of original ‘electronic ambient’ music with a childlike exploratory yet dark feel and a british narrator? It would be Thomas Was Alone.

pitch: “It’s a 3d shooter but instead of a gun, you have a camera to document climate change induced anime-inspired alien invasion of giant blue slugs”

Almost more of a “toy” than a game - you manipulate candy colored flat-shaded objects until they click into place to become other objects. “Solving” these physical/visual puzzles comes with a satisfying click and a visual rhyme that will make you smile.

What if a walking simulator involved playing through your family’s horrifying history of mental illness and schizophrenia?