LIMBO

Playdead's 2010 debut is a monochrome side-scroller about a boy looking for his sister, and it says nothing else about itself at any point. The presentation is the hook - grain, silhouettes, depth of field, and an audio design closer to ambient recording than a score - but the reason it endured is the puzzle craft. Every mechanic is introduced by killing you once: a bear trap, a rotating gear, a giant spider that has to be beaten in three separate stages. Deaths are frequent, instant and restart you two seconds earlier, so trial and error is the intended verb rather than a punishment. The second half moves from forest to industrial machinery and gets more mechanically inventive, with gravity flips, magnetic rails and water physics. It is around three hours long and ends on an image rather than an explanation, which generated years of interpretation threads. It was one of the games that made the case for downloadable indies as a serious commercial category, and Playdead spent six years topping it with Inside.