Station to Station is often hilarious, often mortifying, and perpetually honest. As Perfect Tides so wonderfully depicted incredible specifics of adolescence, this sequel speaks as truthfully and intricately about the emerging of adulthood. It captures those moments of profound bliss and shattering devastation, alongside the beauty in the mundanity between. And it makes me miss those times with that magical girl from university, and so unbelievable grateful it’s so long in the past and never to be repeated.

Tametsi is one of the best logic puzzle games you can buy on PC. It’s up there with Hexcells in my mind, albeit without the latter’s exquisite presentation. Its increasing complexity and perfect difficulty curve makes it one of the most compelling puzzles I’ve had the pleasure to play.

It’s a game I want to play again and again, exploring all the possible variations, behaving in different ways, experimenting with deliberately antagonising particular characters by purposefully playing bad hands. I want to make friends with those I lost before, and infuriate those I previously befriended. I want to live inside it for as long as I can, in as many ways as I can.

This game is such a total delight. It’s warm, meaningful, and packed with whimsy. (Toby III, Holmes’ new pet dog, can talk, although of course no humans can understand him. A stuffed bear in the background of one small scene can be talked to, too, for a lovely little extra.) Exploring the love between Holmes and Watson could have been so clumsy, but not a foot is put wrong, the result so heartwarming and truthful...I don’t know how this game came to exist, nor how it has gone so completely under the radar. This is, improbably, primarily the work of one person–Helen Greetham. She has written, programmed and drawn the entire game, and I think legitimately added to the Holmesian canon in a way so much of the post-copyright contributions fail to achieve. This is my perfect ending to the tales of Holmes and Watson, and I’m so delighted to have played it.

This is one of the most compelling, consuming games I’ve played in so long. I just cannot recommend this enough.

If you’re reading and you work on a gaming site, trust me, this is great, you’re going to love it. And everyone else, you’re going to love it too!

I’m adoring it, just as I did the first game a few years ago. It’s so zippy, bonkers, rapidly advancing, funny, colourful and challenging. The combat is far rarer and less of a faff this time too, and sometimes delivered as another puzzle rather than an obstacle.

It’s so pretty, and so happy, and somehow non-verbal spaceships are able to have meaningful relationships. More importantly, Minishoot is also exquisitely well designed, with splendid dungeons to puzzle and fight through, and a vast overworld that’s so smothered in secrets that I’m still revelling in finding every part of the game long after I’ve rolled credits. This is utterly stunning.

Tangle Tower is, without a doubt, one of my favourite games of 2019. It’s a joy, some of the finest writing I can remember, accompanied by fantastic performances, excellent puzzles, and a murder mystery that twists and turns throughout its lengthy run. This is completely magnificent.

This is something really special, the work of solo Finnish developer Antti Tiihonen (one of the creators of the mighty Legend Of Grimrock), and for $10, you’d be a loony not to get this. Stuffo captures that perfect sweet spot of puzzle difficulty, where you’ll sit and stare bemused at the screen for minutes at a time, but always with a solution within your reach.

I really hope this becomes one of those reviews on Buried Treasure that’s looked back on as redundant, after the rest of the industry notices this and reviews it. I kept hearing the word “masterpiece” go through my brain as I was playing it. Not a word I like to use, but still, it kept whispering itself to me.

Embracelet is a truly wonderful game, with truthful loveliness at its core. It’s a game about being 17, about those first steps toward adulthood, finding out who you are, and dealing with loss, love and mystical bracelets with magic powers.

This is a series of stories that creates a game about telling stories, and indeed portrays the act of being a game about telling stories. Its ending is something I’ve never seen any game do before, and yet feels so perfectly in keeping with everything that comes before it. This is a fantastic achievement.

Yes! This! I love it so much! It’s fun, cute, fast, with utterly perfect controls. And hang on both grapples at the same time and you can kwaping yourself upward as if on bungee cords! I can think of no higher recommendation.

All of this is presented in a really beautiful way, the levels bursts of colour, changing depending upon your actions, and soundtracked not by a score, but rather the music of your movements. Transferring to the other side of a block, picking up a shape, going past certain places, rotating, sliding, all come with musical plinks and plonks, and your actions build the soundtrack to your play. It’s something Matthew Brown nodded toward in the Hexcells games, and here Nicolás Recabarren and Tomás Batista take it a stage further.

I’m thrilled with Nurikabe World, and I’m so delighted I went back through my Wishlist to rediscover it. It introduces all the complexity of this logic puzzle with smart design, alerting you to specific rules or useful techniques across its first few dozen levels, but reaching a difficulty that is rewarding for long-time aficionados. And it’s so pretty! I really can’t stress enough how pretty it is.

It’s a fascinatingly disturbing game, but – yes – in that Lynchian/Cronenbergian way where if someone asked you to pin down exactly what it was that was making you feel so squirly you’d have trouble beyond, “HE RIPPED OUT HIS OWN HEART!” And, you know, fair play, that’s possibly a good reason too.

This was a risky project, given the automatic assumptions someone might make about a game where dating and invading are conflated. Cast aside all those concerns, because this is a game where consent is primary, yet nonsense is overwhelmingly more important. It’s so funny that this is so lovely, and it’s lovely that this is so funny.

I wept for Mara here. The precision with which creator Meredith Gran recreates that time, both the millennial world and the coming-of-age within it, is astonishing. It’s an incredible feat of storytelling, of recalling the deep truth of being 15-turning-16, without ever patronising. Of clinging to the security of childhood, yet desperately fighting to escape into the possibility of adulthood. It’s also lovely, very funny, beautifully written, and let’s not forget, a really decent point-and-click adventure. This is breathtakingly good.

MotionRec is utterly amazing. It’s brilliantly clever, rewardingly challenging, and the aesthetic is completely delightful. It’s far more instinctive than you might worry, but then offers a challenge that rises to meet your skill. It’s one of those games you’ll want to call someone else in to see. I’m calling you now! Come in! See this!

This is joyful and smart and stupid and hilarious. Yes, my hand still hurts from getting so cross with one platforming bit, but it’s as nothing compared to how funny it is. I so desperately want to give examples, reveal some of the game’s most elaborate gags to prove to you how impressive this is, but I shall resist. You trust me? Trust me on this one. Lair Of The Clockwork God is incredibly funny, impressively big, meticulously detailed, and so very smart about how dumb it’s being.

What’s so special here is there’s no deep dark secret. There’s no awful reveal. This is a positive game! It’s about nice people having a good time! Goodness me, it’s extraordinary that this is such a rare thing as to feel notable, but yes! It’s not dishonestly upbeat, but it offers a reflection of a really normal part of life that most media so peculiarly ignores: when things go well. Lovely moments sometimes get to gently peter out, rather than end in Sudden Calamity.

This is utterly splendid. GOTY stuff for me, certainly one of my favourite games of 2023 so far. It’s already looking like it’s proving popular on Steam, yet has had no reviews anywhere I can find. I do suspect this is partly because it was in Early Access for a few years, which seems to confuse most publications as to when to review something, so they opt for never. But it also means you’re less likely to have been pointed toward it, so let me have done that for you today.

This is such a visually interesting game, using so many different and captivating methods to tell its stories. It’s very sad, and that’s absolutely OK. It offers truth, catharsis, or best of all, gratitude for what you still have. I think this is really splendid.

As the complexity increases, the time you’ll spend with puzzles grows, as you start out on multi-part endeavours within one screen, trying to wire up circuits to open barriers to be able to restart the puzzle over with more freedom to rearrange the pieces, in order to wire up circuits to open bar… You get the idea. And yet it never feels obtuse, nor perhaps most importantly, smug. Instead there’s a cheery demeanour throughout, even when the puzzling has teeth.

Absolutely excellent.

It’s so very gratifying to spend a good long while learning about EMF scams and what a truly dreadful person is Russell Brand, then mousewheel scroll back out from the small section of the puzzle you’re working on to see the enormous painting coming to life. It’s also very fun that after completing certain sections, a pop-up appears referencing the proverb alluded to in the section.

This is simply tremendous, has kept me busy for countless hours while watching YouTube nonsense on the other screen, and I love it.