A Short Hike is a casual exploration adventure game from adamgyru. I know am by no means the first to be to make this analogy, but A Short Hike is pretty much a one-take Animal Crossing, with a well-woven yet gracefully casual narrative. You’re Claire, a bird that’s stuck on a trip, desperate for cell reception. Distressed by not being able to get an urgent call, your Aunt May tells you that you may be able to get cell reception at the top of Hawk Peak Provincial Park. Distraction is the name of the game here. Sure, you have your plan to get to the summit of Hawk Peak, but while you’re workin ..read more

Sealed Bite is a forest platformer game by securas and wondard, which took first place in the 2019 GitHub Game Off. You play as a little red riding hood character who is venturing around the forest. During some light platforming, you're suddenly attacked and bitten by a werewolf, and black out. What sort of trouble can you get into in the forest? Recovering from the wolf bite, you meet a spirit who tells you what’s happened and gives you the quest to find and bring three crystals to an altar. As you progress through the game, your platforming ability is augmented by these crystals so you ca ..read more

Picking up the Pieces, by Cole Chittim, is an experimental narrative game about mental health. It’s sort of a low poly walking sim, where you experience a cross-section of the life of the narrator, picking up the pieces of their life. The game grapples with feelings related to external pressures, like unsupportive friends or reading news stories about people relatively more successful than you are. Or feeling like you’re stuck in a messy room, or trapped in the dungeon of your mind. I thought I understood my brain better than this. But, now, I feel like I never did. Picking up the Pieces ca ..read more

Are there ever any stories that you feel like you’d want to role-play, but they seem too real or out of reach? AI Dungeon 2 is here to give you a wide-open playground for text adventure role-play. It’s built by Nick Walton using OpenAI’s GPT-2 Language Model fine-tuned with text adventures from chooseyourstory.com. AI Dungeon does its best to set you up for a pretty safe and fun adventure, letting you pick what kind of story you want, what class your character is, and your character’s name, and it does the rest. It’s up to you to fill in the rest. You can build rockets, be a wizard, try to do ..read more

The Gems is an Action-Adventure game made by sharpfives, for the Github Game Off. In a world being taken over by demons, a ghost has lost his magic gem-stone, which has broken into fragments—23 to be exact. Your job as the hero is to collect these gem fragments and return them to the ghost. Equipped with a bow and arrow, you travel about the world and recover gems from demons you encounter. The game puts you up in various action-filled scenarios, like rescuing campers—who are just trying to enjoy their time in the forest—from scores of demons, or shooting a one-eyed beast who tries to jump o ..read more

The Good Time Garden is a surreal environment exploration game by James Carbutt and Will Todd. That says everything yet nothing at all. I have no clue how to describe this game, even though that’s kind of what I do here. The Good Time Garden is one of those surreal things that you have to let happen to you. But, let’s still take a stab at it: You play as a naked flower guy—dick and all—that’s bloomed out of a plant in the ground. Unashamedly bare-assed, you walk around and explore this world. You’ve got your hands to slap and pick up things, and using your nose as a fountain to water things ..read more

You know the saying: “Nothing is more certain than Death and Taxes,” right? Well, in Death and Taxes, you play as the Grim Reaper, assigned the job as the arbiter of death for humans in peril. It’s up to you to choose if they live or die. It's a boring office job, with perilous consequences Fate, your boss and keeper of world order, assigns you a new batch of humans each day from your assigned region of Cosmopolis City in Sun County. Your instructions might be to mark one or two people with the Marker of Death, or—more sinisterly—to mark anyone with an engineering or medical background. You ..read more

MOLEK-SYNTEZ is a puzzle game by Zachtronics, known for SpaceChem, SHENZHEN I/O, and TIS-100. It’s a cousin to Opus Magnum, but with chemistry instead of alchemy. It’s 2092, and you’re living in a cold Romanian apartment. Your task is to program a molecular synthesizer—your MOLEK-SYNTEZ—by breaking and building bonds in ordinary industrial chemicals to synthesize new pharmacological molecules. These walls don’t do a damn thing to keep the cold out. The game tells the story of a 2090-era chemist, so get used to fiddling around with hydrogen bonds here. Cutscenes between puzzles fill out the mo ..read more

Afterparty is a Hell-based narrative adventure by Night School Studio, known for the acclaimed mystery adventure game, Oxenfree. You play as Lola and Milo, two recently deceased friends who find themselves in Hell—mistakenly, or so they think. Soon after arrival, they learn of a loophole: outdrink Satan, and he’ll let you return to Earth. The Abyss If you distill it down, the point of this game is bar-hopping: drift from bar to bar, order new drinks, and chat with different people as you take on the various puzzles and situations in the game. This variant of Hell isn’t all that bad of a plac ..read more

Card of Darkness is a card game by Zach Gage, Pendleton Ward (of Adventure Time fame), and Choice Provisions. Card of Darkness like a game of solitaire mixed with distilled roguelike elements and a vibrant atmosphere. But don’t let this game’s sweet colorful aesthetic deceive you; this game is trying to wind you up. You’ll be seeing cards for days—they’ll even haunt your dreams. Pick up a card The game is relatively simple. Each game starts with a few cards face up. A card can be anything: a wide variety of monsters that will attack you, a chest that gives you gold, potions to heal yourself ..read more