Although it wastes most of its narrative potential, for anyone who just wants to play a game chock-full of fun and unusual puzzles while exploring a charming and nostalgia-inducing environment, A Short Tale provides plenty of entertainment for a few hours.

The Last Door opens up another suspenseful, extremely retro-styled exploration of Victorian England and the occult with a second season even better than the first.

With myriad design and localization flaws, it’s best to let Undercover Missions: Operation Kursk-141 rest at the bottom of the ocean.

With its hand-painted 320x200 backgrounds, modest pacing and exploration focus, The King’s Challenge is a solid Golden Age-style fairy tale adventure that stumbles only in its overly serious tone.

The Land of Lamia is a quiet yet intriguing little project featuring a fantastical world and satisfying puzzles, but it doesn’t feel like a full game and will ultimately leave you wanting more.

Perhaps better suited as a jumping-off point for newcomers than existing fans, Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy is a perfectly serviceable game in its own right but falls just short of the mark set by the graphic novels.

Nelly Cootalot’s latest voyage is overflowing with charm and heart – and puns, oh the puns! It may not be the stiffest challenge out there, but it’ll leave you with a warm feeling inside.

Bursting with charm and vibrant life, the beautiful worlds of Samorost 3 are beguiling, so long as you don’t worry too much about logic or plot and just go with the flow.

While it doesn’t quite reach the Promised Land, Heaven’s Hope offers a fun and humorous time that forsakes overtly religious themes in favor of good old-fashioned earthbound adventuring.

Series fans will definitely want to catch a ride on the Rufus Time Travel Express, as the countdown to disaster in Deponia Doomsday packs a grin-inducing, mind-boggling, oft-repeated wallop.

Shardlight manages to build its quirky post-apocalyptic world into something that will leave a lasting impression, though the same can’t be said for the story it tells.

If you aren’t afraid of emotional darkness, terrifying images, and deep moral quandaries, you’ll want to check into the revamped Downfall’s Quiet Haven Hotel to explore the bloody landscape of the human psyche.

The Witness is highly unconventional but will enchant players who come ready to surrender their imagination to its unusual charms and challenging puzzles.

The platforming-adventure hybrid Between Me and the Night benefits from an impressive audio-visual presentation, but falls flat when it comes to narrative and puzzle integration.

While not the most interactive of adventures, Aviary Attorney takes a successful visual novel formula and builds on it in significant ways, all while managing to be sincerely funny and charming.

Agent A is a little amuse-bouche that should somewhat whet your appetite for the next tale in this hopefully ongoing iOS spy series.

Adventurezator‘s heart is in the right place, but for all its charm and potential, neither the game itself nor its built-in user creation system is quite there yet.

Message Quest is great for a lite adventure breather in between heavier games, offering an hour or two of fun without too much thinking involved.

A journey down The Rivers of Alice brings winsome sights, innovative music, and intricate puzzles, but the philosophical waters are deceptively shallow without much story cohesiveness or character development.

The Bulb Boy’s brief but brilliant battle to reclaim his home from the hideous monsters of the night underscores the proverbial victory of light over darkness, and quality over quantity.

With its lighter tone and smaller scale, The Last Crown: Midnight Horror is a nice little snack for fans of the first game before the next main course.

It’s based on a fun idea and setting, but Jerry McPartlin isn’t nearly ambitious enough or committed enough to its humor to leave any lasting impact. What a drag.

Thanks to Prominence’s flair for deft narrative and savvy interactivity, this is a mission with which science fiction buffs and fans of first-person exploratory adventures will want to engage.

Though let down by weak gameplay, Read Only Memories is one of the most human games available this year, which is remarkable for a cyberpunk game dealing with robots and transhumanism.

Sometimes awkward but sometimes brilliant, Life Is Strange brings a fresh new perspective to episodic, choice-driven storytelling.

PataNoir is an amusing wordplay game that doesn’t live up to the uniqueness of its premise.

The one-of-a-kind Dropsy’s heart is absolutely in the right place, but it’s tough to fully embrace a game with so much unwelcome filler.