ico

ico is a gorgeous atmospheric adventure puzzler, where cooperation with your seemingly helpless but actually quite powerful companion is essential. a metaphor for battling depression, you have to desperately hang on to the girl whilst banishing the gathering black clouds of miasma with your crude toy sword. kids will love this game i think, i would love to eavesdrop a couple of 7 year olds attempting to solve these puzzles.

sometimes you die

talking of dying a lot. in this innovative platformer dying is essential, the ghost of your former self helps you reach previously inaccessible places. a great piece of indie game design.

buster spirits

shoot it! great little bulletstormer. you will die. a lot.
but it's not so ridiculously difficult that you can get through the levels.

bondo

bondo is a very satisfying little merge puzzler in the vein of 2048, match three or more numbers on the rotatable tiles to change it to one tile of the next number up to six at which point you get a bomb tile. match three bomb tiles and you clear some free space. hex merged and merged++ are nice variations on the theme, hex merged coming in the lightest at a very keepable 18mb. it also has very relaxing background music.

saints row IV

'if you could a have any superpower what would it be?'
'all of 'em!'

A riot of colours, saints row IV is like a playful great dane cyber puppy licking your face with magnetism and ridiculousness on a sunny  Sunday morning.
Mechanically it's a GTAV vs Superman vs Destroy All Humans! hybrid, this game really throws the kitchen sink at it gameplaywise, and turns it up to eleventystupid.

(Spoiler Alert)
Whether you are bouncing up a skyscraper, hacking a gun shop, stealing a UFO, or fighting a super cyber monster, this game's acid dreamlike quality and lol sense of humour, will have you hooked from the start;
(oh look, there's a guy dressed as an energy drink dancing with a guy dressed as a hotdog in a high end clothes shop...)
and it's great to get around when you can glide like a flyingsquirrel...
As the President of the USA/ Head of a Gang, kidnapped by aliens, trapped in a matrix like simulation...

...there is a lot to do...
and if you get bored of that,
the reggae channel is awesome.

a brilliantly bonkers take on the crime sandbox genre.

qatqi

qatqi @qatqi #qatqi is scrabble for loners
lovely steampunk design and zen electro evolving soundtrack.
and great stats.
very relaxing.

uru: ages beyond myst

uru is my favourite iteration of the deeply wonderful myst series, being a third person adventure rather than the usual point and click mechanic. the environments are quite stark, by todays standards, but you still feel like you are in them. the puzzles are fiendishly difficult as ever. but you get to walk around them, which feels like progress.

it's a shame the online aspect didn't really happen although hardcore fans did set up functional servers that still work to this day i believe...

a curates egg of a video game for historians, poets, archeologists, cryptographers & mathematicians.
it would nice to see this game dusted off and revamped for tablets...