While Unwording succeeds in creatively introducing the mental health concepts of cognitive distortions using wordplay, the surrounding game is simply too short and too shallow to make a lasting impact.

While a few questionable design choices and derivative character art keep it from achieving true greatness, Creepy Tale 3: Ingrid Penance is nonetheless a solidly eerie, atmospheric and challenging adventure.

Tape: Unveil the Memories is a creative indie adventure that does its best to appeal to suspense lovers whether they prefer stealth or story, but a middling narrative and inconsistent puzzles make it feel like more of a chore than a thrill.

Although hampered slightly by lackluster environments and overly repetitive randomized replays to unlock the story in full, Murderous Muses is another impressively written and performed FMV mystery game by D’Avekki Studios, centered around dynamic characters and an unforgettable setting.

The stylish Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries will grab you at first but the pace quickly slows, as will your interest, feeling like a missed opportunity.

Punctuated by a few big scares, Paper Ghost Stories: 7PM is captivating in its quieter moments, too, with an understated slice-of-life narrative, cultural authenticity, an underrepresented setting, and just the right amount of foreboding. The experience is heightened by a sensible sound design, an effectively eerie score, and an infinitely appealing paper cut-out visual style pulled off to near perfection. A few decisions that lead to unique content make it worth playing again as you fully absorb the detail and charm on offer, especially when a single playthrough is so short. Overall, this unassuming little ghost story adventure does just about everything right. It’s bite-sized indeed, but I truly enjoyed my brief introduction, and I can’t wait to see how this style of game plays out in long-form in the upcoming, full-length Third Eye Open sequel.

There’s nothing about Edengate: The Edge of Life that’s inherently broken or neglected: the voiced dialogue is serviceable, the music fades into its atmospheric background, and navigating the town of Edengate works well enough despite having so little to do. It’s more a case of a game that desperately needed one of its core elements – be it story, puzzles, or creepy mood – to take charge and step into the foreground, putting a definitive stamp onto the overall experience. Instead, everything is accounted for but nothing makes any waves, so the game ultimately just fizzles out and fades away in a forgettable thud rather than a memorable bang.

Pentiment is a captivating Renaissance adventure that challenges players to unravel both a murder mystery and the many enigmas of history.

Finally localized in English after being released in Dutch and French over a decade ago, Mozart Requiem is so unpolished it’s still not ready for prime time release, seriously undermining its fine protagonist and a story full of intrigue and adventure.

Rocco’s Island: Ring to End the Pain gets points for having an interesting story, colorful characters, and beautiful artwork that would have made a great animated movie. Unfortunately, it fails on pretty much every possible level as a game that doesn’t know quite how to be what it wants to be.

If you can withstand a slow and meandering beginning, A Space for the Unbound will reward you with one of the more emotionally earnest and moving stories to be found in an adventure game.

A sequel that’s put in the work to expand its predecessor’s horizons is commendable, but for Deliver Us Mars this doesn’t always work out perfectly. Still, it offers another thrilling adventure for deep-space explorers, with welcome character moments that make it a little less solitary this time around.