• Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back

• Katamari: A giant ball gets rolled around and collects stuff forever

• Baba Is You: Movable text is rules to the game

• Untitled Goose Game: You have to piss people off the right way

• Billie Bust Up^[unreleased]: Musicals tell you upcoming platforming challenges

• Celeste: every time you die you quickly reset on the same “page”/small tile of map

• Splatoon: you shoot at the ground to go faster, hide, and/or win

• Odama: real-time tactical wargame pinball

• Golf Story: Golf-based fetch quests

• Astral Chain: asynchronously control a companion in combat

• Okami: paint skills on-screen in combat

• Astro Bears: Snake but in 3D

• Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime: Up to 4 players pilot parts of a ship together

• Pokemon Ranger: draw circles around monsters to catch them

• Viva Pinata: breed pinatas to create new species

• Spore: create and evolve a creature

Hey, I might have a few for you!

1. Majesty (Majesty 2 is okay, but lacks the charm of the original, but YMMV) - you run a kingdom full of heroes. The catch? You don’t command the heroes. They have their own AI and goals and you have to offer incentives and place the necessary buildings appropriately to both enable and encourage them to do their jobs of saving the kingdom.

2. Ronin - a stealth/platformer. Combat is turn-based. No, combat is not mechanically separate from the stealth OR the platforming. Relatively short but very fascinating.

3. Pawnbarian - Roguelike, but movement and combat is done by chess rules.

4. Exanima. Combat is based entirely around physics/momentum and positioning. It’s hard to get the hang of, but is immensely satisfying once you get your “He’s starting to believe” Matrix moment and successfully block a few attacks in a row.

5. Crusader Kings 3. You know those map-painting Grand Strategy games, where the goal is to conquer other territories? One of those, but you’re running a noble dynasty whose fortunes rise and fall, even passing between the overlordship of different countries and kingdoms. A lot of personality. I guess it’s not as innovative as it once was, since it’s spawned imitators at this point. Hm.

6. Ring of Pain. It’s… hard to describe.

7. Phasmophobia. Multiplayer only. You hunt ghosts. Not like, ‘combat’ hunt ghosts, like ‘You need to find evidence of ghosts’ hunt ghosts. But the ghosts definitely hunt you back - in a much more malicious way.

8. Death Stranding. Walking simulator. No, not like ‘You don’t do anything but hold down the walk button’, like ‘You need to keep your balance while carrying things’ walking simulator. Immensely weird.

9. Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Multiplayer only (at least practically speaking). Each person plays a separate member of the titular bridge crew, and cooperation to achieve even simple tasks is key.

10. Gods Will Be Watching. A series of puzzle scenarios about calculated risk, failure, and learning the rules anew each time.

Tunic is incredibly unique and I can’t say I’ve played anything like it. On the surface it’s a classic dungeon crawler zelda inspired thing, but once you play… Really any amount of it, you start to see past the veil and the real game is revealed to you. Even after completing the entire game and all achievements, there is technically more of the game available to be explored.

Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Obsidian’s Outer Worlds) will be an absolute bliss for anyone who enjoyed portal or superliminal. It may be the single greatest puzzle/exploration game ever made, with no exaggeration.

Return of the Obra Dinn was a game that I could not put down. I played it in one sitting beginning to end. I was enthralled and I felt like Sherlock fucking Holmes. It is a very unassuming game but by God, you will be gripped. It stands up there with Outer Wilds as being a game that absolutely propelled itsself up to one of the best of its genre (this one being Mystery/Puzzle)

Fez: a 2D plateformer in which you can change the perspective to create ways to unreachable plateforms

Baba Is You: a puzzle game in which you move blocks with words written on them, combining them to create small phrases which become new rules of the game.

Impossible Creatures - an RTS where you slurp up DNA from local wildlife and use that to create weird hybrids of multiple animals, then produce those as units that you control to complete missions. Great concept but I think it ended up being a bit unbalanced.

Papers Please - pretty unique gameplay in that you had to literally read through paperwork and approve/reject people at a border crossing. Good social commentary.

Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.

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Tunic and Outer Wilds

Both have a heavy focus on using knowledge as your core resource in the game, and obtaining new knowledge as a primary gameplay loop.

Maybe Antichamber? It‘s a first-person puzzle game like Portal, but based on the idea of the „rooms“ changing as you go through them, so each room basically has its own mechanic to figure out

Factorio - its a logistics rts but the pollution mechanic is different. Instead of just gather resources to build things which build bigger things, you also make pollution as a side effect. This feeds the native monsters and also evolves them. Managing your pollution cloud is a strategy. That or build massive defensives for when they come to eat you.

Faster than light - manage crew in a 2D strategy environment and jump around in space. Pretty unique gameplay which only recently got some clones.

Teardown - Work as criminal stealing stuff, but the clue is you can destroy everything and you need to create smart parkour to steal stuff right in time before the cops arrive. Also you can sandbox play it if you get bored.

Terra Nil - Bring back nature to a destroyed earth, with relaxing and calm mechanics. Highly recommend.

Others: FEZ, solve puzzles. Deep Rock Galactic, because dwarfs being this much dwarf is just dwarftastic. Rock and Stone!

Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.

Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality

What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.

Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.

Return of the Obra Dinn.

In Return of the Obra Dinn you play an insurance claims investigator. You can magically view the moment of somebody’s death and hear the audio prior to it to aid in your investigation of a ghost ship.

Death Stranding

I’ve never played such a unique big budget game. The core mechanic is terrain traversal to make deliveries, and the game continues to give you tools throughout it to accomplish that.