games, mostlyGeography on a globe you can spin, a party game about holding your nerve, a paper plane you fold yourself, a sewer you would rather not, a minute you have to count out for yourself, a kitchen that serves beans on toast whatever you order, a sunny plot of land where the bugs would rather not be caught, and a night's worth of dreams to get delivered before the sun comes up. On Steam, in the browser, and on phones before long.
Geography, on a globe you can spin.
Identify countries by name, pin cities under a bullseye, match flags, and duel higher-or-lower on populations. Every miss draws a red arc between your guess and the answer, so you always see how close you came. 251 countries and around half a million real places, across 20 modes.
Take the sculpture apart.
A match puzzle where the board is a physical object and nothing is holding it up. If the level starts as a cube, the cube exists only because hundreds of coloured pieces are arranged into one, and every piece you clear is gone from the shape for good — it sags, it opens up, and when the last one goes there is nothing left behind it. 120 levels across twelve regions.
Take one without disturbing the rest.
A heap of coloured sticks dropped on a round table, and a real physics pile rather than a picture of one. Drag to orbit it, work out which stick is actually free, and pull it into a matching colour bucket — or park it in the four-slot rack and hope the right bucket comes round. Pulling one can start others rolling off the table edge, and you lose the moment a stick has nowhere left to go. 120 levels, every fifth one a bonus.
A party game about nerve.
One balloon, a capacity nobody is told, and the growing suspicion that you should have stopped a second ago. Hold to inflate, let go before it bursts. Whoever is holding it when it goes loses the round.
Fold it yourself, then find out.
Draw creases on a sheet of paper, fold it by hand a piece at a time, then throw it off a tower in a very large empty hangar. Nothing about the flight is scripted: fold layers into the nose and it flies fast and firm, angle the wings down and it rolls over, leave the tail flat and it dives.
Ride the sewer, choose wisely.
You are a small log of poo with big dreams, riding the current to the water treatment plant. Three gates come at you at a time and exactly one of them is a good idea: double your size, bolt on more lumps, or take the one that halves you. Jump the weirs, duck the drums, and do not let the heat dry you out, because a poo that stops moving is a poo that has lost.
Sixty seconds, sixty taps.
Click or hit space once a second, sixty times, and find out whether you actually know how long a second is. The report at the end gives you your steadiness, your fastest and slowest gaps, and the drift that crept in while you were certain you had it.
Three meals a day, one recipe.
You are sat at a British kitchen table and the menu offers breakfast, lunch and dinner. Whichever you order, the camera pushes in on a slice of toast, a tin of beans arrives from somewhere above, tips over, and empties itself across it. Order again and the kitchen will do exactly the same thing, with a receipt that grows less apologetic every time.
Catching them is the easy part.
A fenced-in plot of land on a sunny afternoon, and a net. The bugs live where they ought to — skaters out on the pond, cicadas up the trunks, something with a glow in the cave under the cliff — and every one you catch is only provisionally caught. The rarer it is, the bigger it is and the more it is worth, the harder it fights the bucket, so the walk home is the actual game.
Dreams to order, before sunrise.
You are the one carrying the sand. Fill the bowl, pick out a sleeper, and get the dream to them before the sky starts going light. Every night is numbered and every night is counted: the ones you got to, the ones you did not, and a sunrise that arrives whether or not the bowl was full.
The pieces got tired of waiting.
A tower full of rooms, three waves and a boss to each one, and five heroes taken from games that were left in a cupboard. The chess champion fires down ranks and files and cares where everything is standing. The tycoon weaponises his own bank balance. The general arrives alone and leaves with an army. The detective works out what a thing is weak to and then does exactly that. The tinkerer builds machines that set off other machines. Every boss hands you an upgrade that rewrites an ability rather than nudging a number, and by the top floor the rules have stopped applying to you.
A very small frog. A very tall climb.
1,577 metres from a pond to the moon, and nothing on the way up that wants to help. Hold space to gather a leap and let go to commit to it, because the frog is a physics object from the moment it leaves and so is the ledge you misjudged. Nine zones stacked on each other: calm water and oversized leaves at the bottom, a tree older than the concept of frogs, a tower somebody stopped maintaining, machinery, ice, and cloud that is only ever a strongly worded suggestion. It counts your falls. It also counts your ribbits.
Eat everything, then leave.
Five levels of low-poly climbing, and a portal on each one that stays shut until every last bug on it is inside you. Hold space to charge a leap, hold right-click to aim the tongue and let go to fire it. Meadow Steps is standard footing and teaches you the charge; the green gives way to snow; by Whiteout the ground is ice and going up means riding the lifts. The last level takes the ground away and leaves you the jumps and whatever the ferries can reach. There is a ribbit key, and pressing it inflates the throat sac and gets you the words "Ribbit. (Nobody came.)"
Stack the animals. Don’t drop them.
A carnival cabinet with a pile of animals on it and physics that were never on your side. Forty-eight of them across six sets — Barnyard, Savanna, Arctic, Woodland, Cold Blooded and Aviary — and a walrus does not sit on a swan the way you hoped it would. Eleven cabinets to play it on, from the classic to the spooky to the steampunk to the one that is on fire. The music is called Cotton Candy Capers and Big Top Mischief, which tells you exactly how sorry the machine is going to be when the whole tower goes over.
Type anything. Summon it.
A three-lane battler where the roster is the dictionary. Type a word and it is interpreted into a unit with its own stats and its own generated pixel art — the same word builds the same thing on every machine, so a quokka warlord is a real summon and it is the same one for both of you. Around 47,000 nouns are already understood, and anything it has never seen is handed to an oracle that works out what it ought to be. Power runs from a worm at 1 to a dragon at 750 to the sort of thing that answers prayers. No mana: charges, cooldowns, and one living unit per kind per team, so the counter to a wolf is never a second wolf. Twenty-one duel maps, free-for-all up to five, and PvP from a link.