Obduction
Cyan, Inc.
Obduction is the truest heir to Myst anyone has made — Cyan included — a gorgeous, cerebral puzzle box that respects your intelligence to a degree tha...

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...

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech
Image & Form Games
Image & Form's card-battling RPG is the rare genre hybrid where both halves pull their weight — a genuinely deep combat system wrapped in a gorgeous, ...

Escape Academy
Coin Crew Games
Escape Academy is the rare video game adaptation of a physical hobby that understands *why* people love the original. Its rooms are genuinely clever, ...

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...
The Sailor's Dream
Simogo AB
Simogo's ocean-drift novella is one of the most confident acts of subtraction in mobile gaming — gorgeous, mournful, and genuinely singular. Just unde...

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...
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...

Snake Pass
Sumo Digital
Snake Pass is the rare 3D platformer with a genuinely original locomotion idea, executed with charm and conviction. Its physics-first controls will de...
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...

Battle Chef Brigade
Trinket Studios
Battle Chef Brigade fuses brawler combat and match-three puzzling into a cooking-tournament loop that has no business working this well. A short campa...

Umineko When They Cry
07th Expansion
Umineko is less a visual novel than a 50-hour intellectual duel — a fair-play murder mystery that weaponizes the genre's own conventions against you. ...

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...

Expelled!
inkle Ltd
inkle has bottled the chaos of a living, gossiping social simulation into taut 40-minute runs — and the result is one of the smartest detective games ...

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 ...

Baby Steps
Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
Baby Steps weaponizes the most basic human motor skill and turns it into the funniest, most quietly profound game of 2025. It will infuriate you. It w...