It’s a game about doing sit-ups with a big fuzzy dog! You can deliberately leave the kid’s face sunk into the warm fur, until he sinks so deeply in that he sees through the dog’s eyes. And I really want to get to know that sealion better. Go on, let yourself experience something completely weird and yet utterly lovely. You’ve earned it.

It all just comes together so nicely, the lovely cartoon design looking splendid, somehow managing to operate hundreds of enemies on screen at once without any issues, and offering a really good level of challenge without ever putting me off having another try. This is a properly fun time.

Hopefully it’s relatively clear at this point that this game is odd. It is indeed wonderfully strange, set in some sort of adjacent reality, where death and life seem to overlap. You are as likely to be solving object puzzles as you are to be cooking raw brains to restore the internal organs of a renter. It’s creepy, but presented as if it were anything but.

It looks lovely, it stays out of your way as you’re playing, but sensibly highlights rows and columns as you hover over them, and thank goodness there’s an option to switch off the inflatables-in-the-gutters cheating that highlights clues that can currently be addressed. So, independently of anything else, it’s a top quality delivery of a puzzle type that seems to elude so many.

Oh, and it’s FREE. Presumably a requirement of being a student project, but damn, these devs need to be making money from this fantastic game. It’s so great, so smartly put together, and also the St Peter pigeon has a moustache.

I’m so pleased games like this are still being created. They certainly deserve to be supported. An English Haunting is a surprisingly long, enormously detailed creation, with stunning artwork and immaculate prose. And features a bunch of lovely in-era cameos and references for those who are already fans of the genre. For those who aren’t, there’s a fair chance they will be by the end.

This is in fact the impossibly sublime mix of a twin-stick shooter with a mining game, and it’s compellingly fun.

It’s £4! This is such an obvious buy. If you’re super-great at this sort of game, you can make it harder for yourself with the tougher hats. If you’re terrible at them like I am, you’ll have a great time laughing at your own ineptitude. It’s a huge bundle of fun, and just extraordinary for something made so quickly by so few.

My unfair complaint is I want so much more of this. I think it really gets going around puzzle 19, and then you’re just six from the end! However, this is £2, and a really lovely collection of puzzles, so at this point I’m just being greedy. Yet, by puzzle 25’s fantastic sprawl, I really felt like it had found its groove. Perhaps if everyone just buys this, it’ll incentivise developer Molter to make some more! I thoroughly recommend you do.

A bright, cheerful, superbly well-made platformer designed for everyone to enjoy?! Have we, too, fallen through a portal into another universe? In fact, this is the continuing work of Skipmore, a Japanese developer which has previously given us, amongst others, Kamiko, 1-Bit Rogue, and Synopsis Quest. Transiruby is their finest yet.

It is, in many ways, an exercise in frustration. But it’s a far more controlled one than QWOP or Getting Over It. Those games leave me feeling useless, unable to achieve, always thwarted. But Heavenly Bodies makes its goals possible, and a sense of progress always available. It is, ultimately, a chapter-based puzzle game, intended for you to win. That’s crucial.

There’s a co-op mode, even, so you can be trapped in these escape rooms with a chum, which sounds absolutely fantastic. But on my own, Escape Simulator offers a far more tangible sense of the feeling of playing a real-world escape room, one spaceship aside, keeping things within the realms of possibility. Ooh I can’t wait for that DLC.

I’m just so impressed! So no, as tempting as it is to call this “the missing Nintendo Zelda game” it does of course fall short of the bizarre perfection of A Link to the Past or what have you. But damn, it’s still tempting. This is a spectacular achievement, and a hugely fun and enormous game, packed with original ideas among the appropriately borrowed conceit. It’s a game the whole games press should be – I think the young people say – popping off over. Especially given it’s out for Nintendo Switch, along with other consoles. So let’s sing its praises until it can’t be ignored.

So temper exaggerative notions based on such comparisons, because this is after all a solo indie project. And a brilliant one, that manages to combine its crafting loops with a fun, surprising story and a constant sense of satisfying progress. It also delivers a great ending, with a tense climactic finish, and then the good nature to allow you to return to before that moment to continue on surviving in your base should that be your jam.

It makes me so happy that games this smart and unique get made. Which other Lovecraft-meets-70s horror game set in betwixt-war Italy have you played recently? And Beyond Booleans has more to come, with The Tragic Loss of M. Slazak due some time soon.

There are some nifty puzzles in here, wrapped in its completely excellent presentation, across its two-to-three hours. That this is all the work of one person is completely crazy-bonkers. And for less than a fiver. Goodness gracious, it’s worth waking up for.

Oh, and goodness me it looks amazing. The screenshots obviously show off the lovely modern interpretation of Game Boy-ish graphics, but a lack of motion doesn’t do it justice. Even the level picking screen is a thing of beauty. Add in some of the best music I’ve heard in a very long while, and the completely brilliant sound effects, and this is a fine package.

I’m a fair way into its puzzles, but have an awfully long way to go. As the complexity increases, the need for calm, careful exploration of each new section’s possibilities becomes more pronounced. It can look overwhelming at first, until I methodically break it down, start pulling at threads. And then when it all works, I feel frankly magnificent.

I call BS that this game is, as its marketing claims, a reaction to Covid-19 lockdowns. It has nothing at all to do with that, and I suspect was thought of beforehand. But it’s definitely about the crappy horror of anxiety and agoraphobia. And as I say, it’s actually about it, rather than some beacon of hope within it. Or it’s just a mean super-short horror game in which you’re repeatedly mocked, both by unfair deaths and a very horrid narrator.

It’s been done! After thousands of years and countless deaths trying, someone has finally made Chess 2! Shotgun King: The Final Chronicles, winner of Ludum Dare 50, is the vastly improved version of the dated, low-violence game of Chess. It removes most of the pieces from the board, and gives one side a shotgun.

This is really decent. Strong puzzle design, such that when you find one that seems too easy, it means there is going to be one that follows that looks almost identical, but is much more fiendish. And I’m delighted that, in the end, it doesn’t even make sense to compare it to Flow Free – this is a wholly different approach.

I’ve had a great time with this, and am currently somewhere in the mid-60s of floors. The farther I’ve progressed, the more lovely details have slipped in, bits of storytelling either through prophetic dreams at campfires, or from overhearing conversations among the enemies. And the puzzles keep getting smarter too. There are lovely twists, sections where returning to the previous floor becomes necessary to progress further down, or moments to recognise how you can amend the next floor before you get there.

For a weeny $5, this is well worth your time. It’s intelligent, peculiar, and replayable. I do wish more items in the shop could be interacted with, even if it’s just to pick them up and put them down again. But there’s enough detail hidden around to keep me happy.

Those who want more involvement than occasionally making a choice from two or three options won’t suddenly get over their frustrations with the nature of what’s essentially a visual novel, but for people who want to enjoy a good slightly sci-fi thriller, I’d really recommend this. I’ve really enjoyed it.

There’s a good amount of game here – it’s a lot shorter than The Witness, but then, good – I’m a way in, and I’m convinced. And indeed frustrated that this isn’t already more famous. Being derivative of something enormously popular is often more of a hindrance than a help, and that’s likely an issue too. I mean, I strive to review things in isolation, and yet all I’ve done is compare it to The Witness throughout. It’s kind of inescapable. But I honestly prefer it, even though I can recognise that it’s not as good in almost every way.

I think the social media narrative delivery is a brilliant idea, one I hope a bunch of other people have the sense to steal. It’d be lovely to see other games running with that conceit, much as so many picked up on the lost phone gimmick. But if they don’t, then I Hope She’s OK has offered it with aplomb.

I’m so, so impressed by Neoproxima. I desperately wish it had been properly script edited in English (hey, indies, hit me up – my rates are very reasonable!), because it’s a constant issue. But it’s testament to the quality of every other aspect that I still loved this game so very much. Especially the way it begins to mess with its own UI, to force you to ask questions about your experience as you play. Just excellent. This is a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed, and absolutely shouldn’t be overlooked.

StormEdge is, therefore, refreshingly original in many respects, while familiar in its constituent parts. It’s also just a really good time. Failure doesn’t feel awful at all, especially given you return to the village with progress either way. It’s a lovely game for chipping away at improvements, and learning new approaches and finding preferred methods. That’s a pleasure, which is a good term to describe the entire game.