“100 Games” that unlock the secrets of game design; polarservicecenter.net guides you through essential titles, offering insights into mechanics, storytelling, and innovation. With our analysis, you’ll boost your understanding of game creation.
1. What Games Introduced the Fundamental Game Design Concepts?
Games can introduce us to new mechanics and systems and can teach us about fundamental game design concepts like feedback loops and input and output randomness. They can also act as a handy reference point when discussing ideas with other game designers. These features are important in the design learning process.
Space Invaders (1978): Space Invaders was arguably the first game with the sort of difficulty curve that we’d recognise today. It was partly a quirk of engineering. As you shoot aliens and remove them from the battlefield, the machine’s primitive processor had one fewer sprite to draw and so the whole game runs a little quicker. Every invader you swat, the faster – and harder – the game becomes. Each level was intentionally designed to be a little more difficult than the one before, as enemies start closer to the bottom of the screen. Together, these create that wonderful spiky difficulty curve where the game is gradually getting harder and harder, but things do ease off when you start a new level.
Pac-Man (1980): One of my favorite things about Pac-Man is the way the game swings between two very different states. By default, the game is about fear. As you try to clear all the pellets in the maze, you are chased around by four meddlesome ghosts who follow your every move, and seem to be able to work together to pin you down and catch you out. But then you grab the power pellet, and for a brief moment, the tables are drastically turned. Now you are the predator, and the ghosts are the prey. They run away from Pac-Man, and if you touch a ghost you’ll earn points and temporarily remove it from play.
Rogue (1980): Designers Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman wanted to make an RPG that would feel completely different each time you play, so hit upon the idea of using procedural generation. Now the dungeon layouts are randomly cobbled together by a computer, which is following certain rules for how to place down rooms, corridors, loot, and enemies. They also didn’t want a way for players to simply learn the dungeon through rote repetition, and so hit upon another idea that would come to define a genre: when you die, you die. No checkpoints, save states, or respawns. It’s back to the very beginning and on to an entirely new dungeon.
Super Mario Bros. (1985): By having a jump that is driven by the push-and-pull of physics, gravity, and player input, the simple act of leaping around is made incredibly fun, expressive, and challenging – a mechanic that could sustain an entire game. Or indeed, an entire genre of games. Mario’s platforming has certainly improved in later games. The physics were tweaked and perfected in Super Mario Bros. 3. They were perfectly reimagined in 3D in Super Mario 64. And new moves like the spin, ground pound, wall jump, long jump, and hat throw add even more expressive action. But Super Mario Bros. is still worthy of study for its ambitious first stab at a proper video game jump.
The Legend of Zelda (1986): Zelda 1 gives a remarkable amount of freedom to players. And this makes your journey through the game feel personal and special. It’s driven by curiosity, rather than a designer’s leading hand. You’re dropped into a forest clearing and told to, essentially get on with it. Your goal is to find eight pieces of a giant golden triangle but how you do this is largely up to you. You can now go in any direction, explore where you like, and take on challenges in any order you see fit. Sure, there are some obstacles that can’t be overcome until you find certain power-ups. Many areas are filled with tough baddies who will flatten an inexperienced adventurer. And the eight underground dungeons are technically numbered.
Mega Man (1987): Every time you defeat a robot master you’ll take on one of their powers. And those powers will prove helpful in other levels and against other bosses. For instance, you can defeat Guts Man to unlock a rock-chucking super arm – which will destroy Cut Man in a couple hits. After the success of Super Mario Bros., platformers fell into a predictable formula: a series of levels, split into a series of worlds, played in whatever order the designer intended. But Capcom shook that idea up with Mega Man. This game begins on a stage select screen, with six buttons that take you to the lairs of six different robot masters. And you can take these dudes on in any order you like.
Tetris (1989): The designer essentially reaching in and tweaking the numbers to make your life harder. As the game goes on – with you manically trying to drop blocks into perfect lines – the game ramps up the challenge in two different ways. The first way is that the speed increases after you clear a certain number of lines. This is a sort of ‘artificial difficulty’. But the second way is what you might call ‘diegetic difficulty’. Basically: the more blocks there are on screen, the less time it takes for new blocks to fall, and the harder it is to play. The game becomes more difficult, as a natural outcome of the play space. It arises from the rules of the game’s universe – hence, diegetic.
DOOM (1993): There’s so much you could say about the influence and importance of Doom. It was a pioneer in 3D graphics, online deathmatch, shareware, cheat codes, community-driven map-making, and it was so formative for the first person shooter genre that similar games were all called “Doom-clones” for about half a decade. Luckily, Doom is more than a stuffy old historical artefact. In fact – it’s still wildly fun to play in 2024. And that’s because – among other reasons – the game is fast. Doomguy whips around the environment like the dude’s on rocket powered roller-skates.
Super Metroid (1994): Through this repeating loop of explore and unlock, Super Metroid is all about using exploration, and your memory of the world map, to slowly unpick a giant knot of locks and keys. Until you find your way to the final boss. That might reward you with a handy upgrade, or it might reveal the next chunk of the map. The game takes place on the planet Zebes – which is not split up into distinct levels or worlds. Instead, it’s a single, contiguous play-space – a non-linear, interconnected ant farm of corridors and elevators. Then again, your travel is often impeded by obstacles like doors that require special missiles or superheated rooms that will burn you alive if you stick around for too long.
Pokemon Blue Version (1996): Pokemon is an excellent example of building community around a game, not just through competition, but through trading and helping each other out. But what made Pokemon so special was the fact that you could trade monsters from one Game Boy to another, using a link cable. To encourage this, Pokemon was split into two games – Red and Blue – which are almost identical except for a number of Pokemon that are exclusive to each game. So if you want Vulpix or Electabuzz, you’ll need a link cable. Other Pokemon would only evolve after being traded. And the starter Pokemon never show up again in your game, so you’ll need to beg your friend for their Bulbasaur.
Tomb Raider (1996): Making your way through these ancient ruins is almost like navigating a submarine or setting up an elaborate machine. You must observe the environment and execute moves perfectly to get Lara Croft from A to B. Mario is all about fluidity, speed, and bouncy trampoline jumps. Whereas Tomb Raider is about positioning, patience, and precision. In my mind, two games really defined the jump to fully 3D gameplay: Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider. And both were about jumping around tricky three-dimensional obstacle courses. But, then again, they worked in very different ways.
Resident Evil (1996): It’s a perfect lesson in how a designer can make a player feel empowered, or disempowered, simply by turning the big dial labelled “resources”. There are plenty of ways that Resident Evil made players feel scared and unsettled. From the aforementioned camera angle, to the clunky movement, to good ol’ fashioned jump scares. But the one I want to point out is the way Resident Evil simply restricts how much stuff you can have. Key items like ammunition and healing herbs are rare, which means you can’t blast your gun at anything that moves. Instead you need to carefully conserve ammo, consider every shot, and sometimes choose to just run away from enemies. And then there’s the inventory – a tiny cramped grid.
Half-Life (1998): The game’s narrative innovation is that this whole thing takes place from Gordon’s perspective. And in real-time – without breaks, level transitions, or cutscenes. This gives the game an immersive and grounded feel which operates on the strengths of video games – rather than simply copying what works in movies. Valve’s Half-Life tells a complete story… but without ever stopping for a cutscene. The game follows Gordon Freeman – a nerdy scientist who gets caught up in an alien invasion.
Thief: The Dark Project (1998): This makes for a game about patient observation, where you look, listen, and try to figure out what the guards are thinking. You’ve got light – you’ll be spotted in bright areas, so stick to the shadows. And sound – echoey surfaces can give your footsteps away, so walk on grass and carpet where possible. And because Garrett is not much of a fighter, you’ll need to focus on sneaking past enemies if you want to get back out alive. Thief: The Dark Project follows burglar Garrett into mansions, cathedrals, and any other place that might hide valuable treasure.
Crazy Taxi (1999): The faster you get them there, the more money you earn. But you can also get a bigger tip by pulling off stunts, tricks, and driving recklessly along the way. The game has you zig-zagging around a San Francisco-style city, trying to make as many taxi journeys as possible within a matter of minutes. So you pick up passengers, and then speed them to their destination. I think there’s a lot to learn about game design from the arcade. These games can’t rely on complex stories, long campaigns, or in-depth gameplay. They need to hook you immediately, explain their gameplay in seconds, and incentivise you to come back and try again when you’ve got more pocket money. All good lessons for game designers to have up their sleeve.
Deus Ex (2000): All of this led to a game of overwhelming player freedom. A game where levels are open-ended playspaces with endless routes and solutions – and it’s up to the player to direct the action. According to Spector, “the game had to be about how clever and creative players were, not how clever and creative we, as developers, were”. In Deus Ex – a globe-trotting cyberpunk spy thriller about conspiracies – the idea is that the player is able to tackle objectives in just about whatever way they want. But in 2000, designer Warren Spector and his team added a while new side to the term.
Diablo II (2000): Being able to see the whole skill tree is also hugely important: much of your time is spent simply reading what later upgrades will do and dreaming of the time you’ll finally unlock it. And it’s this feeling – going from powerless rube to overpowered god – that makes Diablo II so fun, and so hard to put down. You want to see the effect of just one more skill. You want to get just a little more powerful. This game is a highly concentrated RPG which puts the focus almost exclusively on combat, and on powering up your character. Every time you get enough experience points to level up, you don’t just have a chance to boost your stats like attack and dexterity – but you also get to choose a node on a skill tree.
The Sims (2000): Pretty much everyone who has played The Sims has sent a sim into the swimming pool… and then deleted the ladder. For some players, The Sims was about telling stories, and using the simulation gameplay as a means for creation. For others, The Sims was about playing god – putting the sims in strange and uncomfortable situations, or torturing them with a capricious flick of the mouse. We ended up with a game that follows the lives of a user-created family of digitised humans. And the game acts like an ant farm – you can just watch these people go about their day, using smart utility AI to autonomously fulfil their needs and desires. Or you can reach in and exert control.
Grand Theft Auto III (2001): In other open world games, there’s either little of interest to do in the open world, or the story and fantasy precludes you from causing chaos. But by making you a criminal, and filling the city with opportunities for mischief and mayhem, Grand Theft Auto allows for unadulterated sandbox thrills. You see, the game has missions – which are carefully scripted levels with goals, cutscenes, fail states, and rewards. And doing these will advance the story and unlock more of the world. But between those missions, the game encourages you to simply run riot, and let off steam. You can drive off ramps to do stunts. Steal an ambulance and become a paramedic. Or simply get into a ridiculous city-wide car chase with the police.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (2001): There are few games where I can boot them up – even after being away for years – and just instantly slip back into the groove. I can’t ride a skateboard for toffee in real life, but I’ll never forget how to trick in Tony Hawk’s. So whether that’s pulling off a flaming uppercut in Street Fighter, snaking in Mario Kart DS, or bunnyhopping in Quake, these kinaesthetic qualities can elevate a game to a higher level of fun. I sometimes like to talk about how games feel on the thumbs.
Ico (2001): The game is about escorting a princess through a castle filled with monsters – but you can’t speak each other’s language, so have to rely on input and actions to get along. You can hold Yorda’s hand, give her vague commands, and bat away enemies to keep her safe. If you’ve played Ico, that probably sounds familiar. The game is about escorting a princess through a castle filled with monsters – but you can’t speak each other’s language, so have to rely on input and actions to get along.
Rez (2001): Rez is not a complex game by any means, but there’s something truly meditative and engrossing about it. Especially when you play it in the dark, with a good set of headphones on, and – if you’re feeling spicy – the trance vibrator peripheral nestled somewhere on your person. Mizuguchi explains that “the rhythms of play would always be synched, and play would feel good. When we first made this work, it felt like magic.” Tetsuya Mizuguchi is one of gaming’s most interesting designers because, for much of his career, he’s focused on achieving one goal: syncing up music, visuals, and gameplay to put players in a trance-like state of synesthesia.
Silent Hill 2 (2001): There are sections where protagonist James Sunderland travels down – maybe going down a staircase or jumping into a dark pit. And then he goes down again. And again. And at some point you realise: I shouldn’t be able to go down this deep. That’s not how buildings work. It defies logic and physics. This is achieved through long, quiet hallways that slowly build a sense of unease. Through rooms that have scary noises, but no actual monsters, which keeps you on edge at all times. And through the dense fog that hangs over the whole town, making it impossible to know what’s too far ahead. While the Resident Evil games focused on campy B-movie horror – all rubber suit monsters and haunted houses – the Silent Hill games were going for something more… cerebral.
Animal Crossing (2003): Where some designers never want you to stop playing their game, Animal Crossing shows that there’s real value in giving players a reason to switch off and touch grass. You cannot binge through the game’s content as some stuff only happens once a day, and shops open and close at specific hours. This game casts you as a villager in a town filled with animal critters and it leaves you to just… live your life. You can buy furniture for your house, dig up fossils and catch fish, chat to your neighbours, and send letters. The game is full of objectives and things to do but, crucially, there’s no pressure to finish any of them anytime soon.
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! (2003): The real thrill is playing these things back to back, as you must be ready to change your skills every 4 seconds. Each game is a tiny weeny masterclass in design. Because imagine making a video game where you have to communicate how to play in the blink of an eye. So each micro game must express its idea through color, shape, composition, and a single-word prompt like ‘bounce’, ‘catch’, or ‘jump’. That might involve directing a finger up a man’s nose, catching a falling stick, or deploying an air bag. Making a game is hard. Now imagine making 200 of them. But that’s the idea behind WarioWare – a rapid-fire micro game collection where the player needs to see, understand, and complete a microscopic video game in a matter of seconds.
September 12th (2003): It’s up to the player to realise that nothing good can come of this approach and the only way to win, so to speak, is to stop playing. I wanted to include at least one game on this list that fits into the category of serious game, or newsgame. These are games that comment on serious, political, or newsworthy topics – using game mechanics and systems to make a point. The game asks you to drop bombs on the terrorists but it quickly becomes clear that it’s impossible to attack them without accidentally killing civilians in the explosion.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003): The whole game is given a meta-textual twist as it’s actually a bedtime story, told by the Prince himself. The Prince has access to a magic hourglass that lets you rewind time, so any mistakes made in the game’s tricky platforming challenges can be undone. Game design is inextricably linked to failure. Unlike other forms of entertainment, games are built around the idea that you can lose, fail, die, and screw up.
Katamari Damacy (2004): Designer Keita Takahashi focused on four key pillars for the game – novelty, ease of understanding, enjoyment, and humor. And if you ask me, he nailed the lot of them. That constant power creep, that feeling of getting stronger and stronger, is always fun in games – but now it’s visible and tactile. It’s just joyful to start out small and end up big. To look back and see how far you’ve come. The game is about a pint-size prince who must roll up giant balls of garbage, to recreate the stars and moons that his dad destroyed in a drunken bender.
Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening (2005): Your combat prowess is ranked based on how stylish you are – from Dope, all the way to SSStylish. To get the best grade, then, you’ll need to show full understanding of the system by performing the hardest moves, keeping your attacks varied, and never dropping your combo. The humble scoring system, which showed up in most arcade games, fell out of favor by the mid 2000s.
Resident Evil 4 (2005): As soon as one idea, enemy type, or location starts to wear out its welcome, Resident Evil 4 changes things up and tries something new. You never become bored or overstimulated. Which makes it genuinely hard to put down the controller. But then it mixes things up. A bit of downtime, perhaps, with puzzles to solve, or locations to scout, or items to scavenge. Or a cutscene – a campy action-flick story beat. Or maybe a bit of time shopping as you upgrade your items and rearrange your attache case. Or maybe it’s a boss fight – an epic showdown with some ugly zombified nasty.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (2005): You can run away from enemies, while still shooting in their direction. And bobbing, weaving, and slicing through waves of enemies just feels good. Geometry Wars is basically just a pimped out version of Robotron: 2084 from the early 80s. The game explodes with color, and dead enemies erupt into messy particle fountains. When you launch a bomb it literally warps the playfield, which sells the impact of that explosion. Pair it up with a thumping techno soundtrack and you can see why Robotron had to give way to Geometry Wars. Of course, there are many games to study if you want to learn about juice – most notably the work of Vlambeer. But Geometry Wars was the first game I played where I realized that the presentation was sucking me in, just as much as the gameplay itself.
Dead Rising (2006): Getting better at the game means managing your time more efficiently and learning the layout of the game’s shopping mall so you can move more effectively. So the time limit adds to the sensation of being in a fraught situation. This zombie apocalypse game is built around a ticking clock. You’ve got to survive for 72 hours before a helicopter comes to pick you up – and you can feel this time limit hanging over your head at all times.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007): None of these give you an outright advantage over the enemy – each one has disadvantages and counters – but they let you create a highly personalized load-out that fits your play style. So now, each battle you fight will earn you experience points that can be spent on new guns, kill streak rewards, perks, and so on. This gives the online multiplayer a true sense of progression. Battles aren’t just fun throw-downs, but each one brings you a little closer to that cool perk, or that handy laser sight that you can slap on top of your favorite assault rifle.
Portal (2007): Lessons about how games can tell jokes, purely through game mechanics. How puzzles are designed. How a small idea can be expanded into a full game. How playtesting can be used. And how, sometimes, less is more. By setting it in the Half-Life universe and giving you a, quote-unquote, gun, Portal snuck its way into the hearts of FPS players, as well.
Mass Effect (2007): Seeing how your decisions ripple out across three massive games is quite remarkable. You can change Shepard from a heroic Paragon to a selfish Renegade, and start romantic relationships with one – or more – of your party members.
Skate (2007): It’s difficult – but that’s the point. In Tony Hawk’s it’s hard to do a 900 degree spin over a helicopter. In Skate it’s hard to jump down a five step staircase without rupturing your spleen. Playing both Tony Hawk’s and Skate is a fantastic lesson in how you can tackle a topic from vastly different angles.
Team Fortress 2 (2007): And so after nearly 20 years, Team Fortress 2 is still great fun, and still a great example of how to keep a complex multiplayer game feeling balanced and fair. Multiplayer games are balanced around counters. No matter what character, move, or strategy you pick, the other player can respond with an option that will shut you down.
BioShock (2007): This adds an archeological twist to proceedings as you feel like you’re unearthing the past and piecing together the narrative yourself. These logs can also tell side stories, flesh out character backgrounds, and explain bits of lore. The designers of BioShock used a clever narrative device: cassette tapes that were recorded during Rapture’s downfall – and then left scattered about the city after everyone disappeared.
Burnout Paradise (2008): Same goes for the social aspects. Sure, you can pull in friends and do multiplayer races and events but competition is simply weaved into the world thanks to a litany of leaderboards – with each street noting the fastest sprint and the biggest crash.
Far Cry 2 (2008): Playing this game truly feels like being a lone mercenary in a hostile country. You feel outgunned, underpowered, scared, and alone. A lot of game design is about endlessly playtesting a game to remove elements that might be annoying or off-putting. It’s about shaving off the jagged edges, providing “quality of life” features, and secretly giving the player a helping hand.
Left 4 Dead (2008): This innovative system works to keep the game interesting and engaging, specifically by reacting to the player’s current state – proving that difficulty and pace don’t have to be set once, before the game ships. Instead, they can ebb and flow based on what the player is doing. Behind the scenes, “The Director” is an AI system that works to dynamically alter the game’s pace, difficulty, and dramatic tension.
Spelunky (2008): Spelunky’s procedurally generated levels mean you can’t rely on memory or repetition – you have to simply improve your baseline skills. You need to get better at jumping, at dealing with enemies, at blowing up walls, and dropping ropes. He realised that Rogue’s most important bits – the randomly generated levels and the punishing permadeath – didn’t need to be in turn-based, tile-based games about crawling through dungeons.
Dead Space (2008): Dead Space will always be the go-to example of how to hide a HUD in the game itself. This sci-fi horror game is all about immersion. And it achieves this through a bunch of different ways – including its impeccable sound design, and by never taking away your control for a cutscene. But the most memorable feature is the way the game displays its entire interface within the game world.
Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009): Every decision in this game is pushing the player towards feeling like the dark knight. Whether that’s in the free-flow combat system, where the game magnetically pulls Batman towards nearby enemies and automatically pulls off cool finishing moves, or it’s in the stealth sections, where guards are told not to turn around or look up high, so Batman can stalk his enemies like a panther.
Plants vs. Zombies (2009): PvZ will teach you that you need to balance your build between attack power and economic productivity. So while it’s tempting to go fully on the offense, PvZ will teach you that you need to balance your build between attack power and economic productivity.
Fruit Ninja (2010): No one would confuse Fruit Ninja for a complicated game but it’s still a lot of fun thanks, largely, to that tactile way of interacting with the game.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010): Now all you can do is run, hide, and hope for the best. But that’s only the beginning. The game also has a sanity meter which is increased by staying in the shadows or by looking at the monsters. So to stay sane you’ll need to make yourself visible and vulnerable, and to merely glimpse at the game’s grotesque creatures.
Fallout: New Vegas (2010): This post-apocalyptic RPG is littered with side stories that are funny, weird, spooky, and involving. And almost all of them are staggeringly complex in the ways you can solve them.
Civilization V (2010): Civilization will teach you to never underestimate the power of using stuff that the player likely already knows about. It’s easier to grok a game about Egyptians, bananas, and warplanes than a game about Protoss, Vespene gas, and photon cannons.
Dark Souls (2011): This simple concept hangs over your head at all times. When you’ve been exploring for ages and have a massive stack of souls in your pocket, you become desperate to find a bonfire. And when you’re heading back to your stash with 20,000 souls on the line, every step feels dangerous.
Minecraft (2011): Minecraft’s greatest strength is that the game is whatever you make of it. The game does not impose rules or structure – it leaves it up to the player to decide.
SpaceChem (2011): This makes your solution feel deeply personal. Designer Zach Barth notes that “people have a really strong sense of ownership” over their creations.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011): A massive fantasy world that you can explore in any way you want. You can go where you please, following points of interest or curiosity. You can play how you want – perhaps focusing on magic spells, hand-to-hand combat, or firing sneaky arrows from the shadows.
Journey (2012): But still – the connection you make with this other character is surprisingly deep and close. Most so-called social games are either nakedly transactional or violent zero-sum competitions. Journey is different. The only way to actually communicate is with a single button that makes you call out a musical note.
Mark of the Ninja (2012): By showing the player exactly how the world works, the player feels powerful and capable. It’s an effective lesson on how your interaction with a world changes, depending on how much you know about it. Where Thief gives you very little feedback on the state of the world, Mark of the Ninja is drenched in it. UI elements will tell you if you’re in light, or hidden in shadows. It shows you exactly how far a sound is reverberating.
The Walking Dead (2012): Small decisions are referenced, but big decisions can have dramatic ripples on the story. Playing as Lee Everett, you’re routinely dropped into tricky situations where you’ll need to carefully decide what to do next.
Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward (2012): Virtue’s Last Reward takes a staple of interactive storytelling and turns it into a game of its own, making it an essential touchstone for branching paths. And with this you can now jump around – inserting yourself back into the narrative at different points and then making different choices.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012): That’s why Solomon removed them in his next non-XCOM game, Marvel’s Midnight Sons. But at the same time, when someone needs an example of output randomness – i.e., luck is applied after you take an action – XCOM is the go-to game.
Spec Ops: The Line (2012): The game will regularly put you into difficult decision-making moments, but then ask you to make your choice by using the basic actions of the game. In this case: aim and shoot. The game will regularly put you into difficult decision-making moments, but then ask you to make your choice by using the basic actions of the game.
Spaceteam (2012): Basically, each player has a spaceship control panel with a unique set of controls, dials, knobs, and levers. And each player will be given commands that must be followed to keep the spaceship working. Which leads to a game of, well, a lot of shouting.
Dishonored (2012): The level of chaos you cause is reflected in the state of the city – with the streets taken over by hordes of rats at the highest chaos levels. It’s an interesting take on a karma system, and makes players consider their actions but without it feeling overly game-y.
The Stanley Parable (2013): The Stanley Parable is a satirical game about narrative and game-design conventions – specifically player choice.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013): Brothers so firmly establishes the two boys as existing in your left and right thumbs that the most impactful storytelling happens not on screen – but actually on the controller itself. It’s a remarkable piece of interactive storytelling that should be required reading for anyone wishing to tell a narrative through gameplay.
Cookie Clicker (2013): As the ultimate distillation of how players can get obsessed with upgrades, progression, rewards, and optimization, it’s an essential game to know about. Again, you’re clicking on an image to make numbers go up. But now there are upgrades and unlocks that can make you click faster, or do the clicking for you.
Gone Home (2013): With each note you find, you’re mentally filling in blanks, making assumptions and connections, and fleshing out what you know about these characters. And that’s simply because the real gameplay is happening in your head. You play as a young woman who has returned to her family home, to find the whole place abandoned. So to figure out what’s happened in your absence you’ll need to root through your family’s possessions and piece together the story.
Papers, Please (2013): In this precise moment, Papers, Please makes the case for games as a powerful artistic medium. Capable of not just showing you why people make certain decisions, but by putting you right there in that situation and asking… what would you do?
SteamWorld Dig (2013): The only problem is: you’re not the most adept miner. At the beginning of the game you only have a small health bar, a crappy pickaxe, a tiny lantern, and enough inventory space to hold about 3 lumps of gold. SteamWorld Dig operates on a gameplay loop that can be… hazardously addictive.
Alien: Isolation (2014): Most importantly, the Alien’s movements are rarely predetermined by the designers.
Mario Kart 8 (2014): If you’re towards the back of the pack – i.e., you’re struggling – the game will grant you super powerful weapons like the superstar, the bullet bill, or the blue shell: a missile whose sole mission is to seek out the person in first place. When you race through one of these item boxes, the result is far from random. Instead, the power-up you get is entirely determined by your position in the race.
80 Days (2014): And so you’re encouraged to play the whole thing again, this time taking different routes and making different decisions. More than anything, this game really shows the power of using text as your primary technology. Because here’s the truth: text is cheap. It takes just a single paragraph to introduce a player to an entire city or a new character – things that, in other games, would require 3D models, textures, artificial intelligence, and voice acting.
Her Story (2015): It turns you into something halfway between a detective and an archeologist. You’re following leads and doing deductive reasoning – but also piecing together the past using an incomplete set of facts. Her Story, by Sam Barlow, is a perfect example of what some call the ‘information game’.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015): Making sure to mention accessibility. But whatever the case, MGS V is full of great little design lessons and ideas, making it a must-play for anyone – not just those making stealth games.
Undertale (2015): You can either defeat them, like normal. Or you can find a way to spare the monster – perhaps by talking to them, flattering them, listening to their dialogue, or just holding out long enough for them to get bored and leave.
Downwell (2015): Because everything in the game is doing two or more jobs, we get a game with a lot of depth for half the number of mechanics. Downwell is always my go-to example when talking about “dual purpose design”, or the idea that one mechanic can have more than one function.
Yakuza 0 (2015): The idea of “the city is almost another character!” is trotted out a lot, but it’s very true of the Yakuza games. And it only gets better the more of them you play.
Kerbal Space Program (2015): Designers typically want to have a lot of control over how their games work, and physics are – by their nature – unpredictable and fickle.
Super Mario Maker (2015): You’ll soon realize that it’s not easy to make something that’s actually fun to play, and so as you improve your skills, try other people’s levels and hunt down hints and tips, you’ll soon realize that you’re making your first stab at level design.
DOOM (2016): This game wants you to feel like a brutal demon-slaying badass, and does this with every fiber of its being: from the movement speed, to the weapon designs, to way the protagonist ends Zoom calls in the way we’d all
