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Notes -
Yeah, sure thing. I don't know which genres you're most partial to, but here are some games I think are particularly well done, along with a short description of what they're about.
1: SOMA (2015)
SOMA is a horror game by Frictional Games, a studio best known for pioneering a game mechanic where you can essentially only run and hide from enemies. They primarily broke out with the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent which blew up on Youtube everywhere in the heyday of Let's Plays. Ever since then, they've mostly tried to recapture the pure horror vibes of Amnesia, but there was a brief moment where they decided to make a horror title with more existential sci-fi leanings.
Frictional's game designer, Thomas Grip, has stated that SOMA was hugely inspired by hard sci-fi authors such as Peter Watts and Greg Egan, and it really shows. It's by far my favourite game of theirs, and if you're playing one game on this list, make it this one. Go in completely blind. You won't find a better game narrative anywhere.
2: Baba Is You (2019)
I feel like Baba Is You is one of these indie titles I don't have to say too much about because of its ubiquity, but Baba Is You is a sokoban puzzle game where you push statements around an endlessly manipulable game world in order to satisfy a win condition. The game allows for constructing statements that allow the player to change the very characteristics of the level, to the point that you can yourself define the win condition of many levels.
It is not easy, and is one of these sadistically difficult puzzle games which you'll find yourself banging your head against for hours. According to Steam I've wasted 47.5 hours of my life on this game's puzzles alone.
3: Growing My Grandpa! (2022)
Now this is a weird one. Growing My Grandpa! is a short game by up-and-coming indie creator Yames that exhibits a strange hybrid of influences coming from Virtual Pet games, 90s adventure/edutainment games and Cronenbergian body horror alike, and the result is an extremely surreal and unique game that has absolutely no parallel elsewhere. The gameplay is fairly sparse, innocuous and repetitive, as is par for the course for a game based around a virtual pet-like mechanic - but it gets contrasted against an increasingly eerie, grotesque and uncanny plot, a dichotomy that's exploited as both a source of humour and horror in the game.
This game is very esoteric. It's not for everyone, and I can imagine people being really put off by any combination of the mechanics, the visual style, or the writing. In my case, I think his work is enticing enough to want to donate to his Patreon, which is fairly unusual for me.
4: INSIDE (2016)
INSIDE is a dark, cryptic platformer from developer Playdead. It draws many elements from their breakout hit Limbo - child protagonist, bleak atmosphere, abstract plot, many ways to die in bloody fashion - except it's executed better in virtually every way. As is usual from this developer, there's not a single line of dialogue and there isn't too much explanation provided to contextualise the events of the game, and much of the story is told through the environment.
A major draw of INSIDE is the art direction and music, which is executed beautifully throughout - it's a very atmospheric and potent game, and despite the lack of a clear through-line for the situations the game throws at you there is always a sense of intentionality behind every design decision that keeps it coherent.
5: Inscryption (2021)
This is a roguelike deck-building card game from Pony Island creator Daniel Mullins, and it's yet another title
where it's best to know as little as possible about the game gong in, because suffice to say, it does not stay in that genre for very long. Despite appearances in the beginning, it is a plot heavy game - while the story is certainly a (I'd say intentionally) campy one, it provides the framework for a lot of very interesting genre-bending that gets executed quite smoothly and cleverly.The element of surprise is crucial in this game, and the only reason I'm giving this much away about it is that I am aware of people who completely didn't anticipate the later shifts in the game, and were fairly disappointed by it since they went in expecting one thing and got another.Forget everything you just read. This is a perfectly normal game.
There are many more quality games that have been released over the past few years, but these are the ones that currently come to mind which I actually think try to do something really interesting and intriguing with their setup, even if sometimes they are a little rough around the edges. Note I have a bit of a bias towards plot-focused, generally bleak games (with the exception of Baba Is You), these are my own genre preferences showing through and they might not align with yours.
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