Gorogoa

I won't beat around the bush: the only reason this game gets a "Recommended" and not an "Exceptional" rating is its short length. A labor of love of a single developer who did all of the animation, artwork, and storyboarding for the entire game (he had some help with the sound design and the ports), I loved every moment that I spent playing this game but I beat and replayed the game in less than two hours total. Given the price of the game and the amount of potential in both its mechanics and its ambience, I was disappointed enough that it ended so quickly that it hurt my enjoyment of the game.

Onto the good! As I said above, I loved every aspect of this game. The art direction and sound design are phenomenal, and the core gameplay is very solid. The idea of manipulating these little tiles containing interactive scenes by combining and rearranging them is simple enough to figure out immediately but builds into incredibly intricate puzzles. The puzzles are at the perfect difficulty level where you wrack your brain trying to figure them out but they are incredibly intuitive in retrospect, leading to these incredible a-ha moments where you feel like a genius finally putting the pieces together. I actually thought that the game's approach to storytelling -- focusing heavily on ambience and leaving the core elements of what happened in gameplay slightly ambiguous -- complemented the often ethereal and mysterious answers to different puzzles. While the short length meant that the themes developed over the course of the story are introduced and resolved very quickly (which was a bit jarring), they were still quite interesting and there is one story based a-ha moment that left me thinking after the game was done. Overall, I appreciated the gameplay a lot and would recommend the game, although you'll probably be grumbling about the price tag a bit unless you get it at a steep discount.