Manifold Garden is a first-person puzzler; its central mechanic is that you can change the direction of gravity to any of the six principal three-dimensional directions. The puzzles are good, but the spaces that define those puzzles are astonishing. Chyr describes himself as an “artist,” and Manifold Garden’s sensibility is fundamentally architectural. Everything is austere, mysterious, and haunting, and the ability to move through and reorient these unsettling spaces is absolutely essential to the experience.
Piranesi is a slim, elegant novel, but it has the same eye and ear for the uncanny as Clarke’s sprawling and discursive Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Presenting vast and ruined spaces through the eyes of a character utterly unaware how strange and unsettling they are is a masterstroke. It can be tough to bring backrooms-adjacent fiction to a satisfying conclusion, but Clarke absolutely sticks the landing. To say more would be to spoil the delights of this strange but utterly assured novel.
An astonishingly creative book about a brilliantly erudite single mother sinking into profound depression and her even more brilliant 11-year-old son’s quest to find a suitable substitute father—and a book that could only have been written by a brilliantly erudite author sinking into profound depression. DeWitt is unmatched at using repetition for comedic (and tragic) effect, and her decision to avoid quotation marks is gives the book a unique rhythm. The first great novel of the 21st century.
Velázquez’s 1656 Las Meninas, a portrait of the five-year-old infanta Margaret Theresa and her entourage, is part of the European canon. Almost exactly four centuries later, Picasso painted a series of fifty-eight deconstructions of the Velázquez original. Per his wishes, they are kept together in the collection of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, where they are usually displayed as a group. Individually, they are mid, but seeing them all together is a stunning experience, like watching a hypercube (or is that hyper-cubism?) unfold. It changed the way I experience art.
Is Gorogoa the best video game ever made? Yes, Gorogoa is the best video game ever made. Its core mechanic is simplicity itself: slide four pictures around to the quadrants of a 2x2 grid. When the scenes align, people and objects move, opening up new visual options. The puzzles are clever and varied, but the art steals the show. Hand-drawn and symbolically rich, it makes the game into a playable version of the Voynich manuscript or Codex Seraphinianus: a moving journey through a haunting dream-world. The fourth act, in particular, is a wordless story of loss and healing that weaves together picture frames, shattered dishes, and pilgrims’ treks into an unforgettable experience. Don’t miss Roberts’s GDC talk unpacking his thoughtful design decisions.
Passage is a brief game about life. Play it once, and only once.
Blue Prince is superficially a roguelite first-person puzzler about placing rooms on a mansion’s floorplan, but it gradually unfurls into a puzzlehunt wrapped around a family story, both of which go unbelievably deep. Designer Tonda Ros has said that his goal was to defy players’ expectations—and then surpass them. Every detail speaks to the care with which this game was made, right down to the gentle, punnish sense of humor. Delight after delight.