
Desta: The Memories Between
ustwo games
ustwo's tactics-roguelite about grief is one of the most emotionally honest games in the genre, wrapped around a physics-based dodgeball system that's...

I Am Dead
Hollow Ponds, Richard Hogg
A gentle, gorgeously illustrated meditation on death and memory that trades challenge for warmth — and mostly gets away with it. Come for the inventiv...

Bury Me, My Love
The Pixel Hunt, ARTE France, FIGS
A wrenching, formally brilliant text-message drama about the Syrian refugee crisis that weaponizes your phone's most familiar interface against your c...

Happy Game
Amanita Design
Amanita Design weaponizes its own cuteness in a two-hour nightmare that's more art installation than puzzle box. It's short, it's simple, and it will ...

Lara Croft GO
Square Enix Montréal
Lara Croft GO strips a bombastic action franchise down to a chessboard and somehow loses none of its soul. It's short and rarely brutal, but it remain...

Grow Home
Reflections, a Ubisoft Studio
Grow Home is a three-hour experiment that out-charms games ten times its budget. The independent-hand climbing is genuinely novel, the falling is half...

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass
Kasey Ozymy
A solo-developed, Earthbound-descended RPG that hides one of the genre's most devastating emotional payloads behind goofy jokes and a brilliant transf...

Rakuen
Laura Shigihara
Rakuen is a masterclass in narrative design disguised as a humble RPG Maker adventure — a hospital story that trades combat for compassion and lands h...
Myst
Cyan Worlds, Inc.
Cyan's 2021 Unreal Engine remake is the definitive way to play the most influential adventure game ever made — gorgeous, faithful, and smartly moderni...

RiME
Tequila Works, QLOC
RiME is a gorgeous, gentle puzzle adventure whose final hour recontextualizes everything before it — a trick few games attempt and fewer land. The puz...
Card of Darkness
Zach Gage
Zach Gage and Pendleton Ward built one of the smartest risk-reward loops in mobile gaming, then locked it behind a subscription wall. If you already p...

Alto's Adventure
Noodlecake
A decade on, Alto's Adventure remains the gold standard for premium mobile design — a one-touch snowboarding game that plays like meditation and monet...

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers
Purple Moss Collectors
A genuinely inventive blackjack roguelike that mutates a 400-year-old card game into a combo engine with real teeth. It doesn't have Balatro's bottoml...

Pilgrims
Amanita Design
Pilgrims compresses Amanita Design's twenty years of hand-drawn whimsy into a two-hour, card-driven adventure that respects experimentation over corre...

Wheel World
Messhof
Messhof trades Nidhogg's fencing-duel violence for handlebars and sunshine, and the swap works. **Wheel World** is a short, easy, gorgeous cycling adv...

Potionomics
Voracious Games
Potionomics smuggles a genuinely sharp deck-builder inside a pastel shopkeeping fantasy, and the Masterwork Edition sands off the original's most puni...

Sword of the Sea
Giant Squid
Giant Squid has bottled the feeling of a perfect snowboard run and poured it into a wordless spiritual odyssey. It's short, it's easy, and it doesn't ...

Lost Ember
Mooneye Studios
Lost Ember is a gorgeous, gentle five-hour meditation on loss and loyalty whose body-hopping mechanic is more sightseeing gimmick than systemic depth ...

Golf Story
Sidebar Games
Golf Story takes a premise that shouldn't work — a golf RPG made by two people — and turns it into one of the Switch's most charming early exclusives....

Ghost of a Tale
SeithCG
A near-solo passion project that out-crafts studios fifty times its size, Ghost of a Tale wraps genuinely tense stealth in one of the most lovingly de...