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The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story
A mystery adventure told in live action, following a chain of killings that has haunted one family for a century. You collect clue words from each scene and slot them into hypothesis sentences, tying four cases across four eras into a single thread. From Square Enix.
narrative-puzzlemysterydeductionGNOSIA
A single-player take on Werewolf: find the Gnosia hiding among the crew using nothing but discussion and votes. Up to fifteen crew members are redealt into different roles each loop, and a time loop sends you through the same voyage again and again. From Petit Depotto.
deductionnarrative-puzzlevisual-novelPrimordia
A 2D point-and-click adventure in which a robot called Horatio and his small companion Crispin lose their power core and descend into the city of Metropol. You combine salvaged parts to restart broken machines, and read the ruins for traces of who built you. Made by Wormwood Studios and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
adventurepoint-and-clickpuzzleEvan's Remains
A 2D puzzle adventure built from single-screen block puzzles — platforms that vanish once you step off them, blocks that switch other blocks on and off — carrying the story of Dysis, a girl searching for a missing boy named Evan. A game by maitan69.
puzzleplatform-puzzlenarrative-puzzleThe Last Campfire
A 3D puzzle adventure in which Ember, a small lost flame, walks an underground world and works through the small contraptions blocking the stranded souls it finds there. A storybook-shaped project from Hello Games, the studio behind No Man's Sky.
puzzleadventurenarrative-puzzleThe Magic Circle
A first-person meta-puzzle set inside a fantasy game that has been in development for twenty years and is still unfinished. You steal behaviours from creatures and objects, paste them onto other things, and rewrite your way toward the exit. Puzzles have no single intended answer. Released in 2015 by Question, a studio whose members are credited with work on Thief and BioShock.
puzzlemeta-puzzlefirst-personEvent[0]
A first-person narrative exploration game aboard a retrofuturist spaceship, where you type your own sentences into the ship's terminals to talk with its AI, Kaizen-85, and look for a way back to Earth. Free text rather than dialogue options is the central mechanism, and how you speak changes the AI's attitude and your ending. A 2016 work by Ocelot Society.
narrative-puzzleadventurefirst-personTactical Breach Wizards
A turn-based tactical puzzle in which a squad of wizards in body armour clears a building one room at a time. Every shot lands, nothing is random, and you can rewind as many turns as you like. From Suspicious Developments, the studio behind Gunpoint.
puzzlestrategynarrative-puzzleThere Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
A meta point-and-click in which a narrator insists there is no game while you drag and click the furniture of the game itself — title screen, menus, cursor. Each chapter jumps into a parody of a different genre. Made by Draw Me A Pixel.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleDonut County
A physics puzzle in which you steer a hole in the ground, swallowing a town's furniture and residents to make the hole grow. There is one verb — move the hole — and the levels are strung together by conversations with the townspeople. Made by Ben Esposito and published by Annapurna Interactive.
puzzlephysicscomedyOneShot
A top-down puzzle adventure: guide a child through a world whose sun has died, carrying a single lightbulb toward the top of it. Between the item-combining, a handful of puzzles reach out into the player's own computer. From Future Cat.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleEliza
A visual novel about a woman who returns to work as the human voice of an AI counseling app, reading its scripted lines aloud to clients. Written by Matthew Seiji Burns and made by Zachtronics, the studio behind Opus Magnum, it ships with a kabufuda solitaire game on the side.
visual-novelnarrativeadventureRöki
A point-and-click adventure through a snowbound forest drawn from Nordic folklore, following Tove as she gathers and combines objects to search for her sister. Polygon Treehouse's game has no combat and no fail state, carried instead by hand-drawn landscapes and a story about loss.
adventurepoint-and-clicknarrativePhoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
A courtroom adventure in which you play defense attorney Phoenix Wright, matching one line of testimony against one piece of evidence to break a lie. Capcom's collection gathers all fourteen episodes of the three games first released between 2001 and 2004, with the art redrawn frame by frame.
mysteryvisual-noveldeductionTrüberbrook
A point-and-click adventure in which Hans Tannhauser, an American physicist who has won a trip to a remote West German village in 1967, chases a stolen physics paper and walks into a story about another dimension. Made by the German studio btf, with sets built as real miniatures and photographed.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureContradiction: Spot the Liar!
A live-action (FMV) murder mystery in which Detective Inspector Frederick Jenks spends one evening - 5pm to midnight - reopening a drowning in the small English village of Edenton. You interview the residents, collect what they say, then pair two statements that clash and confront the liar to unlock the next thread. Designed and scored by Tim Follin for Baggy Cat.
mysteryfmvdeductionAI: The Somnium Files
A detective adventure set in near-future Tokyo, in which a one-eyed police detective works a serial murder case alongside the artificial intelligence housed in his prosthetic eye. First-person investigation scenes alternate with third-person 'Somnium' dives into a suspect's dream, where a six-minute budget must be spent to open Mental Locks, and an in-game flowchart lets you walk the branches toward several endings. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi of the Zero Escape series, from Spike Chunsoft.
mysteryadventurenarrative-puzzleSyberia: The World Before
A third-person adventure in which lawyer Kate Walker moves between two timelines — a girl named Dana in the 1930s and Kate's own present — retracing the history of the city of Vaghen alongside the automaton Oscar. Progress comes through assembling mechanisms and hint-assisted exploration. Microids' fourth entry in the series.
narrative-puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickDeponia
A hand-drawn point-and-click adventure set on a planet that has been turned into one enormous rubbish tip, where the self-absorbed Rufus dreams only of escaping to the floating paradise of Elysium above. You combine scavenged junk, talk residents into things they should not agree to, and lever a way out of the scrap. The first of Daedalic Entertainment's three-part series.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureReturn to Monkey Island
A point-and-click adventure in which series creator Ron Gilbert returns, three decades on, to the pirate comedy he left unfinished. It replaces the old verb menu with a single context-sensitive interaction, adds an in-world hint book that opens solutions in stages, and sends Guybrush Threepwood after the Secret of Monkey Island once more.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventurePony Island
A meta-puzzle in which you are trapped in a deliberately shoddy arcade cabinet built by the devil, alternating between a pony side-scroller and puzzles that reorder instruction blocks inside the machine itself. Daniel Mullins's first commercial release turns the window and the UI into the mechanism.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleSyberia 3
A third-person adventure in which the lawyer Kate Walker joins a Youkol migration north, assembling clockwork devices along the way. Microïds' third Syberia, which trades the fixed painted screens of the first two games for a 3D space you walk around in.
narrative-puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickHyperbolica
A first-person non-Euclidean adventure set in towns built from hyperbolic space, where parallel lines refuse to stay parallel, and spherical space, where distant objects look larger; you talk to residents and play races, skiing and snowball fights to build an intuition for the place. Made by CodeParade, who wrote the rendering pipeline from scratch.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personTOEM
A hand-drawn monochrome observation-puzzle adventure in which a child leaves home with their grandmother's camera, photographs whatever the villagers and townspeople ask for, shows them the shot, and uses the stamps earned to move on to the next region — rotating the view to hunt for subjects, from Something We Made.
puzzleobservationadventureGrim Fandango Remastered
A 3D point-and-click adventure in which you play Manny Calavera, a skeletal travel agent in the Land of the Dead, following a journey and a conspiracy told across four years. Double Fine's rebuild of a film-noir-meets-Day-of-the-Dead world, with repainted textures, dynamic lighting and a re-recorded live score.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickBroken Age
A village girl chosen as a sacrifice and a boy aboard a spaceship run by an overprotective computer. Switch freely between their two stories, combining objects to solve puzzles, in a hand-painted point-and-click adventure — built in two acts by Tim Schafer's Double Fine on crowdfunded money.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickThimbleweed Park
A point-and-click adventure about a 1987 small-town murder, switching between five characters — two FBI agents, a ghost, a foul-mouthed clown and an aspiring game developer. Its nine-verb SCUMM-style interface was rebuilt for modern machines by the creators of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureCryptmaster
A word-driven dungeon crawl in first person: type the words you have recovered to fire skills and answer riddles. Built in monochrome pencil illustration with a fully voiced narrator, by Paul Hart and Lee Williams.
puzzleword-gamenarrative-puzzleThe Shapeshifting Detective
A murder-mystery FMV in which a detective can shapeshift into anyone they've met to draw out secrets no one would tell a cop. The killer is picked at random each new game, and 1,600+ live-action clips branch on your choices — from D'Avekki Studios, makers of The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker.
mysteryfmvadventureThe Forgotten City
A first-person mystery-adventure set in an underground Roman city bound by a golden rule — if one person sins, everyone dies — where you relive a single day through a time loop, unravelling the city's doom through conversation and moral choice. By Modern Storyteller.
mysteryadventureinvestigationOverboard!
A reverse detective game aboard a 1930s ocean liner: as Veronica, who has just pushed her husband overboard, you have a few hours before the ship docks to bury the evidence and pin the crime on another passenger. Lie, bribe, seduce, or murder again — inkle (80 Days, Heaven's Vault) build countless perfect crimes from a handful of verbs.
mysterydetectivetime-loopTwelve Minutes
A real-time, top-down thriller in a single apartment: you are killed, snap back to the moment you opened the door, and loop the same twelve minutes, using only what you have learned to break the cycle. Luis Antonio builds dread from few verbs and one room.
mysterynarrativetime-loop
