Lumino City is an award-winning game made by State of Play Games that explores the ins and outs of a beautifully hand-built world. To succeed in the game, the player must use investigative skills to work their way through the different machines and processes that structure the city. Through its handcrafted design, the game stimulates the player’s creative side and strives to promote the creation of sustainable energy through the use of reusable objects.

Oxenfree is a point-and-click adventure game that has a clear tone and imparts a certain ambiance for the player as they make their way through the game and interact with the dialogue and story. The suspense and mystery compel them to play on and uncover the ghost story’s mystery.

In A Mortician’s Tale, a video game that explicitly takes death and the processes surrounding death as its focus, many of these traditional views about death are challenged and unsettled. The game offers a positive view on death and educates its audience about various options for after-life care.

In the absence of light, darkness reigns supreme, amplifying feelings of terror and tranquility. The interactive video game A Blind Legend, published in 2015, captures these emotions by conveying the sensation of being blinded, while also fostering gameplay accessible to the visually impaired. Raising awareness about blindness, DOWiNO and France Culture—the developers behind A Blind Legend—focus on the journey of an old legend: the blind knight, Sir Edward Blake.

Played as a serious game, Ndemic Creations’ Plague Inc. effectively incorporates these elements to underscore its purpose as a game designed to inform players about disease transmission and pandemic culture. Plague Inc. is a single-player video game in which the player takes on the role of a disease and attempts to infect and eliminate the entire global population.

Designed by Lucas Pope, Papers, Please (2013) is a border-security simulator in which the player is “assigned to the Ministry of Admission in the war-torn dystopian nation of Arstotzka” (Pope 2012). While the player carries out their daily duties of verifying passports and identities, they put their meager earnings towards providing for their family and paying down their debt. As the days pass, players are presented with more and more responsibilities—bribe offers, pleas, and threats—as the State of Arstotzka demands disciplined performance from its employees and pays only by person processed. No time can be wasted in the 12-hour work day, lest the player fail to earn enough to support their family.