All categories
Puzzle games
Puzzle games are the purest form of the medium: a problem, a set of rules, and the quiet satisfaction of the moment it clicks. Difficulty comes from understanding rather than…
0 games
Platformer games
The platformer is the genre that taught games how to feel good. Everything about it comes down to the relationship between a button press and a character's momentum — how fast…
0 games
Strategy games
Strategy games are about the decisions you make before anything happens, and about living with them afterwards. They reward planning, reading a system for its underlying rules,…
0 games
Arcade games
Arcade games are built around a single loop you can understand in ten seconds and then spend an hour improving at. There is no tutorial to sit through and usually no story to…
0 games
Adventure games
Adventure games are where the writing carries the weight. They are about places, people and the slow accumulation of understanding — you explore, you talk, you piece something…
0 games
Simulation games
Simulation games hand you a system and let you push on it. There is rarely a way to win outright and rarely a way to lose; there is a set of interacting rules, a slowly changing…
0 games
Action
Action games are decided in the moment. They give you a small set of verbs — move, strike, dodge, block — and then apply pressure until you either read the situation correctly or…
1 games
Shooter
Shooters are built on a single question asked many times a second: where is the threat, and can you put your aim on it before it puts its aim on you. The genre has splintered…
0 games
RPG
Role-playing games are about accumulation. A character starts weak and specific and ends strong and specific in a different way, and the space between those two states is where…
0 games
Racing
Racing games are about a single relationship: the car, the surface, and how much grip you have left. Whether a game models that with a full tyre simulation or with three lines of…
0 games
Sports
Sports games translate a physical activity into a set of inputs, and the interesting design question is always what to keep and what to throw away. A game does not need eleven…
0 games
Horror
Horror is the genre where the medium has the clearest advantage. A film can show you something frightening; a game can make you walk toward it. Control is what makes horror games…
0 games
Survival
Survival games start by taking things away. You arrive with nothing, the environment is indifferent or hostile, and the first hour is spent solving problems — warmth, water,…
0 games
Sandbox
A sandbox game gives you a system and declines to tell you what to do with it. There may be goals available, but they are optional scaffolding — the actual content is the space…
0 games
Card & board
Card and board games are the oldest design tradition in the medium and the one that translates to a screen most cleanly. The rules were already abstract, the state was already…
0 games
Rhythm
Rhythm games judge you against a fixed timeline. The music will not slow down, will not wait, and does not care whether you were ready — which makes it the only genre where…
0 games
Idle & clicker
Idle and clicker games make progression itself the subject. You start with one action that produces a small amount of something, you spend that something on a way to produce more…
0 games
Visual novel
Visual novels are games made of text, images and choice. There is usually no failure state and often no mechanics at all beyond deciding what to say and when, which leads people…
0 games