10 Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a narrative-driven role-playing game in which you inhabit a synthetic body eking out a living on the margins of a precarious future. Dice rolls and relationships intertwine, rendering chance as a social force rather than a random one. Labour, debt and dependency shape every choice in this science fiction world.
Jump Over the Age; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
9 Blue Prince
Blue Prince is all about the anxiety of choice. You play as the inheritor of a mansion filled with secrets and shifting schematics. As you explore the house, the architecture transforms exploration into uncertainty. It’s clever without being smug, and mysterious without, for the most part, being withholding.
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Dogubomb; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, macOS
8 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is unapologetically French, from its belle époque melancholy to its painterly, art nouveau-inflected world where existential dread sits alongside theatrical flourish. Beneath that surface runs a deep affection for classic Japanese RPGs too, borrowing their operatic storytelling, disciplined, turn-based combat and sense of fatalistic momentum. The result is a game that completes a cultural circuit, fusing Gallic specificity with a Japanese design grammar into something confidently its own.
Sandfall Interactive; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
7 Hollow Knight: Silksong
The long-anticipated sequel to one of the most influential indie games of recent years, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a hand-drawn, side-scrolling action game built around precision movement and demanding combat. You explore a subterranean kingdom, chaining acrobatic jumps, dashes and wall-climbs with increasing fluency. Here difficulty is not punishment but instruction; you learn through repetition and response in a world that is exquisitely, ruinously alive.
Team Cherry; PC, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S
6 The Seance of Blake Manor
The Seance of Blake Manor, a detective mystery set in a creaky Irish manor house, is about attention: what you notice, what you disturb and what you choose to leave untouched. Every action has a cost, as time is converted into a resource. Its horror emerges from the slow accumulation of suggestion because its puzzles are often acts of interpretation.
Spooky Doorway; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
5 Ghost of Yōtei
In Ghost of Yōtei (above) you play as Atsu, a mercenary roaming the northern frontier of Japan in pursuit of the masked figures who murdered her parents – a quest that gives the game its violent momentum and moral weight. This tale of vengeance is repeatedly interrupted with moments of stillness that serve to emphasise the cost of violence sustained over time.
Sucker Punch; PlayStation 5
4 Expelled!
Expelled! turns a boarding school mystery into a study of systems under pressure, where truth is less valuable than timing. Its looping, Groundhog Day-like structure forces players to rehearse, revise and occasionally weaponise their own accounts. The comedy masks something colder: a world where authority is arbitrary and survival requires compromise. Moral clarity here is a luxury few can afford.
Inkle; PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, iOS
3 My Child New Beginnings
In My Child New Beginnings you care for a traumatised teenager starting a life of independence. The game – as much the result of academic research as playful experimentation – reveals how trauma mutates rather than disappears, becoming social, behavioural, ambient. Its systems render care as labour and insist that responsibility is cumulative rather than heroic. The game’s power lies in its refusal of catharsis.
Sarepta Studio; iOS, Android, PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5
2 Hades II
Hades II treats the sequel not as escalation but as another stop in the unending tradition of reinterpreting Greek myth. As Melinoë, warrior-daughter of Hades and Persephone, your goal is simple: escape the underworld. The journey is long and arduous, and each attempt unfolds like a rehearsal, a chance to refine skill and understanding. Myth here is not a destination but a cyclical habit.
Supergiant; PC, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2; Xbox Series X/S
1 Sektori
Sektori strips the video game back to its essentials: movement, pressure, rhythm. Like the great twin-stick shooters it follows (1982’s Robotron 2084; 2005’s Geometry Wars), its pleasures emerge from bodily fluency rather than narrative explanation, trusting repetition to do the expressive work. Progress feels less like mastery than acclimatisation as you chase that alluring state of Zen-like flow.
Kimmo Lahtinen; PC; PlayStation 5; Xbox Series X/S