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A Dark Room (2013) — The Single Fire Lit in a Room Made Only of Words
On June 10, 2013, a browser game with no images and no sound was released: A Dark Room. All it showed was a line of text and a button. Built by Michael Townsend, this experiment arrived amid the same season that produced Candy Box! and Cookie Clicker, but set itself apart with a hidden narrative. Ported to iOS by a stranger, Amir Rajan, it rose in 2014 to the top of Apple's official paid games chart. This piece traces how a single hobby project, running on nothing but imagination, climbed to the top of the market.
Lara Croft GO (2015) — A Board Where Distilled Memory Still Moves
In 2015, Square Enix Montreal followed Hitman GO with a second Go-series title, Lara Croft GO. Its method was to distill only the idealized feeling of an old game, remembered rather than replayed, onto a board of nodes and lines — a method that swept critical honors even as the studio itself was shut down in 2022. Because the game shipped as offline, server-independent software, it outlived the company that made it. This piece traces that method, and where it ended up.
Hitman GO (2014) — The Year an Assassin Became a Board-Game Piece
In 2014, after its console Hitman project collapsed, Square Enix Montreal shipped Hitman GO, a turn-based puzzle played across a board of nodes and lines. Born from paper prototypes, this "distilling" design method spawned Lara Croft GO (2015) and Deus Ex GO (2016), and eventually reached Steam. This piece traces the lineage of a method that turned a AAA brand into a board-game piece.
Monument Valley (2014) — Walking Impossible Architecture in Mobile's Golden Hour
Released for iOS on April 3, 2014, Monument Valley was made by a six-person team spun out of a London design agency, who turned Escher's impossible figures into architecture you could walk. Arriving when freemium apps dominated the App Store, it sold millions by betting on the opposite: paid, short, and dense. I re-read it as both a record of mobile gaming's golden hour and a node in the lineage of perspective puzzles.
Threes! (2014) — One Last Board That Grows by Three
Threes! arrived on the iPhone in 2014. Prototyped in a single night and polished over fourteen months, it lived through a strange reversal when, a month later, the 2048 craze left the original accused of being the copy. We trace the origin of the merge-slide puzzle through the developers' own testimony.
