In Halt! you get to play a typical couch multiplayer competitive game... however, you play it in an entirely atypical fashion. See each of you are knights, time-knights to be precise, and in between weaving your blocks, rolls and attacks, you also have the power to freeze time. All of it. So next time you expect the enemy to attack, you can entirely negate what that player is inputting by simply pausing time for a moment,and then un-pausing it straight after. Just think of their face as you blink the time off and on and their attack just doesn't even register. Their dumb, mute character just staring blankly outwards. Bad luck Player 2! Better luck next time getting a slightly less brain-dead avatar! But not to worry, because every player can pause and un-pause time; regardless of whether or not they started the pause in the first place. Get ready to get inside your opponents' heads and learn to predict their moves, because if you don't you'll be left standing there like a newborn duckling as their swords come slicing down for the kill. Naturally this is when said duckling uses all it's savvy genetic prowess to roll, launch an attack, then pause long enough to confuse the enemy's inputted block so that your attack lands squarely across their face. Who knew ducklings had such skill?

Game Features:

• Pause and un-pause time to wreak havoc when those pesky opponents try and input any control!
• Single-hit kill side-scrolling platformer
• Blocking, dodging, double jumping, wall-jumping, and finally, multiple angles of attack (they'll never see you coming!)
• 2-4 player local/internet multiplayer (AI just won't be fun for this, I promise)

• Remember that one friend who always paused the game to screw you over? Yup. That guy sucked. This game is that guy a million fold.
• Halting input as a mechanic is an interesting angle of approach that has never really been fully developed in a game (maybe it was too un-fun?)

Each solitary finger against your keyboard - as if the ivory and ebony was underneath your touch, your fingers begin to tap a beat, a solitary broken hum against the silence, and the darkness of the tomb lightens as you strike your torch ablaze on the cracked stone walls and step forward into the boiling blackness. A skeleton arises from its dust-covered resting place and its rusted blade rushes towards you as it swings its body in tandem to the death march. With a strike of the keys, a chord echoes against the ruined walls and your sword rushes upwards, blocking the attack, and as your chords progress your defense becomes offense, as you pivot and slice out what remains of its spine. It crumbles to dust as you rush forward, the tempo of your playing increasing with every step you stretch further and further in front of you, striding out into the unexplored. Improvise and improve your musical playing as your skills are tested through the eyes of an adventurer, no more are just a solitary artist; now you must understand your music's role in guiding your delver deeper into the dungeon.

Game Features:

• Play your keyboard like a piano and enjoy the musical rhapsody you build
• Guide your adventurer through careful monitoring of tempo, chord progression, and musical consistency
• See your character develop as you play out your soul to ensure their safety and success

• Develop your musical skills in a non-educational system - just play and see your adventurer wreak havoc!
• Play wonderful music and get to watch your wonderful music be more than an aural experience

In Scripted you take up the role of a dangerous Javascript, sent to cause untold havoc to computers. As you explore and dissolve the files of your poor hapless victim, you will evolve to create more varied and useful powers to help you navigate, proliferate, and destroy the system around you. But your time is short-lived - the anti-virus software is unlikely to be happy to see you causing such havoc! Smash as many files and folders as possible, prioritizing those that are important, and maybe even steal some secrets to escape with! You may start out simply attacking grandmas with no tech experience, but soon your powers and upgrades will let you take down even the mightiest of NASA's computer banks.

Game Features:

• Conquer the world's computers piece by piece, and show the other computer experts out there who the real king is
• Develop powers across multiple levels and apply those strengths to expose weaknesses in existing game areas
• Smash as much as you want - del tree bombs make a hell of a mess though!
• Don't get caught! The anti-virus software won't be kind to you, don't let them break apart your code!

• Explore computer hacking in a visceral, action-packed experience
• Untold mayhem and destruction as you systematically tear apart all manner of files
• Ever wonder what happens when you get a segmentation fault? Well, it's not pretty...

Bored out of your wits? Well, now you won't be. You can yawn as hard as you like in this game, and get points for yawning without being seen. Maximize your yawning to ensure that at the end of the day you're the yawniest player and you've out-yawned everyone in the room. Get seen, and you'll lose a life - lose too many and you won't be welcome back around this place! But yawning is a bit special, whenever you yawn you have a chance of making other people near you yawn too! Making the other people around you yawn will definitely ensure they have a harder time surviving! Switch seats and make sure that your yawns have the most effect - but switching seats a lot will definitely be frowned upon!

Game Features:

• So much yawning. So much.
• Space for plenty of players and AI to play
• Risk/reward of yawning just before being caught to force others to get caught!
• Turns something incredibly yawn-worthy into something mildly amusing!

Unique Selling Points:

• Yawning is super legit.

Image Source: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2012/12/Yawning-Humor-fun-pictures-58.jpg

Barista Brilliance follows the adventures of (you guessed it), a brilliant barista. Or soon to be. Or maybe one day. Regardless, it's your job to take orders, input them into your high tech computer with your clumsy, pudgy fingers, and then make their order. Maybe you could even write their name! Although probably not correctly. Or right. Make sure you add all the right ingredients, and don't spill it all before they come to pick it up - they are paying for a full cup remember! Your manual dexterity may need some work, and you definitely need to stop burning the milk, but you'll certainly find some employment; even if it is at a gas station. As you start to master the art of true barista-ing, you'll soon find yourself in hot demand at better establishments, and maybe they'll even up your pay too! Prove your worth, and one day you too may be a brilliant barista.

Gameplay Features:

• Make coffee
• Serve it
• Done

Unique Selling Points:

• Not Terraria
• Kelsey is cool
• Making coffee is fun yay yay yay yay

Image Source: Austin O'Brien

Sit down and buckle up with one to three of your friends because Apotheosis will show you exactly why local multiplayer is the best. Sent to the Underworld for your misdeeds in your life, you are each offered a final shot at life. Absolve yourself in battle by reaping the souls of your opponents' fallen heroes and heroines and offer them to the Divines - and perhaps you will ascend and finally regain your mortality. But your friends won't be offering their souls freely; only the glorious heat of mortal, clean combat will cleave their anima from their reanimated corpses and wrest you enough power to channel for the divinities to accept your ill-begotten prize. Offer enough and perhaps the Underworld will be a soul shorter come solstice; but let your soul be stolen and you'll soon find yourself a flesh-less skeleton with only the power to chase and maim those who would deal harbor a soul away from your decrepit grasp. As you slice, dice, and slash your way through your opponents' lively (and not so lively) bodies, the environment itself will crumble and break - leaving you scant breath for a prayer, let alone a chant. You have been found guilty, repent and you may be absolved. But the price of absolution is steep; only the souls of the guilty will whet the Divine's appetites.

Game Features:

• 2-4 player-based competitive combat, get ready to duel to the death!
• Hardmode enabled, you may not be alive, but those bodies can't stand more than a slash
• Sometimes your souls may not be worth redeeming, so use them to empower your attacks and reign over your opponents!
• Collect your opponents' souls and channel to redeem them with your Divine and pray for ascension
• Fight back with no soul - if your soul is redeemed your frail body will be blasted apart, so hunt down the monster that lay waste to you!
• Dynamic and shifting arena with environmental hazards (drowning isn't a pleasant way to go but neither is being hacked to pieces)

Unique Selling Points:

• Primarily competitive based combat with short but fulfilling windows for cooperative play (offering souls is not a short task)
• Fight against the environment as much as the opponents and engage with physics-based play around and with the world

Image Source: Austin O'Brien

You, a fresh-faced military consign for the Almighty Nation of Korstovska, have been given the almighty and prosperous task of entering the codes. Every day, you wake up, garb yourself in your correct, formal attire, and march with precision to your small cramped office, where a singular strip of paper awaits you. Upon that piece is a series of codes that you must diligently enter into your state-mandated interface. Failure is not tolerable, the correct code must be entered by the assigned timestamp. Once completed, you must await any and all further instructions by fax. If no orders have arrived by midnight, you are released to retire for the evening. Your job isn't complex, isn't taxing by any means, but every night you wonder, what are these codes? And maybe even more so, what are they for? Explore the facility and try to uncover your true purpose here, while also ensuring that those codes are entered in on time. Who knows what would happen if they weren't entered correctly? As the days go on, the codes become more and more troublesome, and the base more and more troubled, and the question becomes clear. Should you enter the codes?

Game Features:

• A ponderous and difficult task for a unique citizen such as yourself – entering codes!
• Stealth-based exploration of the Korstovska's base – but why are all the guards carrying guns?
• Receive incoming faxes that dictate important commands – you wouldn't sleep on the job would you?
• High levels of interactivity within the environment – yes, you do love the coffee machine and its endless coffee, don't you!

Unique Selling Points:

• Reconceptualise the morality of your actions; is ignorance truly bliss?
• Engage and explore what role you have to play in the operations of your base, and investigate where a citizen's duty truly lies

Image Source: Austin O'Brien

Ferried to the Underworld by the impassionate Charon, you find yourself amidst a dark and ruined plain, soon to be just another lost soul wandering in endless agony. But you refuse to be conquered – as the ground trembles and the very air begins to shake, you grab your burial sword and stride outwards into the swathes of dead. Aghast, they turn to you with dread upon their broken faces - in fear of the weapon in your hands. With a single strike, their essence is reaped and you feel a sudden burst of energy. An unearthly scream echoes out from deep beneath you, and the ground begins to crumble at your feet: someone isn't happy with the disturbance you've made. Not waiting to find out their plans for you or your soul, you cleave aside more hapless ghouls, before diving head-first into a soul-well. Rather than stripping the bone from your flesh and reducing you to ash, your harvested souls surround you, slowly tearing away from your skin. Before you find out if there are enough to keep you unharmed, you exit, and stumble to your feet. Any reprieve you glimpsed is shattered instantly; the Underworld around you is falling apart, and the beast behind you sounds no further away. There's only one path ahead of you – descent.

Game Features:

• Isometric-style world with running, jumping, dashing and slashing
• Randomly generated planes with several exits and objects of interest
• Use those souls you've harvested to power your way through the environment and your enemies – but remember, you need them to escape too!
• Hardmode enabled – you're a frail mortal in the land of the dead, expect your immortal enemies to be tougher than you, and for them to not stay dead

Unique Selling Points:

• Force you to consider souls as an integral resource for both your immediate and long-term survival
• Chase after the meek as you flee from the larger denizens of the dead, or turn and fight them to gain a soul worth reaping
• Create memorable duels where every dodge, parry and hit counts; until they come back for seconds

Image Source: Austin O'Brien

Note: This game deals with heavy themes of suicide and depression.

Sometimes, the shortest breaks from our own mind can feel the longest. In Fall, you take on the role of a depressed office worker, and after extenuating circumstances, you've decided that this will be your final day. Brought to the rooftop, you are left standing on the edge, contemplating the fall beneath you. But when you step out and plummet, rather than disappearing past the ashen fog forever, you reappear at the top of the world and merely drop down again - this time landing squarely on a platform that wasn't there before. A broken, dilapidated bridge leads off into the distance, and you follow it to explore a dream-like reality. Jumping from building to building and using your new found ability, you solve puzzle after puzzle, climbing higher into the clouds above. Finally, the clouds break as you ascend the final staircase, and you stride onto a building; the very building you began from. With your otherworldly entrance crumbling behind you, you're stranded at the beginning again – alone and cold on a rooftop with a horrible decision. The door leading downstairs is wide open, but the ledge is still there, as open and inviting as it was before. But this time - if you so choose - your fall will end.

Game Features:

• Basic platforming mechanics with added complexity of teleportation from falling
• Simplistic puzzles involving pushing and pulling blocks; with deathly traps
• Short gameplay length – this isn't intended to be a long, or a mechanically intensive game

Unique Selling Points:

• Engage with the thought process of suicide in a new, unique, and less direct manner
• Strong reinforcement of narrative themes through gameplay mechanics
• Sympathise and rationalise with the struggle of attempting to escape harmful lines of reasoning

Image Source: Austin O'Brien

Cookie Clicker whetted your appetite for idle games, but left you pining for your true desire - medieval mercantile? Worry no more friend, Medi-Idler Magnate has you covered. You, the newest shop-owner in all the lands, must manage the process of resource collection, item creation, and product selling to ensure that your trusty adventurers know they're getting only the best at Insert-Name-Here's Shop. Through utilising an idle-based system, your workers will be bringing in those hard-earned gold coins to improve your business at all stages of your pipeline – it's not just enough to have your trusty miners bringing you high-quality ore, you need your expert blacksmiths to keep your gear finely tempered, and the sharpest salesman to ensure that every adventurer leaves with less in their purse. To pursue true financial domination, you'll have to ensure your subordinates are well-trained, well-equipped, and well-dressed. And that there's plenty of them! However, it's not simply enough to employ and deploy the right people – you'll have to be making smart business decisions about which resources you track down, what pieces of gear you make, and how you order and sell your stock in the shop. Outside of your shop the adventurers you supply will go off and do battle with fierce creatures and dungeons – they'll certainly earn a lot of gold coins, but they won't be returning if they're not well-equipped!

Game Features:

• Complex stock-based resource system, with a variety of tier-based operators that interact and transform basic pieces into more complex ones (nobody wants your Cruddy Copper Ore, but they definitely want your Cruddy Copper Chestpiece)
• Tier-based workers at every task with exponential scaling costs
• Array of interesting upgrades that influence the capacity and skill of your workers
• Character-based adventurers that have preferences and will certainly die to a Dragon if not cared for
• Plenty of heavy micro-management to achieve optimisation, or just sit back and idle

Unique Selling Points:

• No more being the adventurer! You're a shop keeper now
• Reforms and reinvents the idle game – visually see not only your workers bringing in stock, but also the effect of adventurers living and dying by your prices and wares

Image Source: Austin O'Brien

Saviour is a sidescroller platformer that follows the descent of an innocent, hopeful, saviour into their own worst nightmare - something unrecognisable - something they never intended or planned on becoming - a cold, heartless monster. Awakening to find yourself stuck in a rotten, broken-down cell – you are released from your chamber, only to clamber out and realise you've been stranded in a testing facility. Exploring the dangerous ruins is no easy task, and you soon find and free prisoners like yourself: innocents caught up in the maddening events transpiring. However the world takes a turn for the sinister when it becomes clear that sometimes not everyone gets to continue on. Confronted by the awful choice of choosing a victim for execution, you must come to grips with your own internal questions of morality as you send hapless prisoners to their death, to forge a route onwards for the others. All may be permitted in the name of survival, but who are we truly saving?

Game Features:

• Basic platforming mechanics (jumping, running, climbing), with potential for more complex inter-character mechanical interactions (giving another character a leg up, etc.)
• Multiple character control (swap what character is being controlled to choose their fate!)
• Dialogue based character interaction and narrative exposition (those characters aren't going to talk for themselves!)

Unique Selling Points:

• Subverting common tropes of heroism to explore a unique moral quandary in a personal light
• Explore the grey morality of choosing a sacrifice, and dealing with the fallout from that decision

Image Source: Bedrich Narcis

In the era of crazy online multiplayer between friends comes Invisistab, a top-down game based around being an invisible assassin sent out to murder another invisible assassin. Despite your cloaking being perfect, both your weapons and the environment will betray you, leaving behind small signature clues that will help the enemy find you - those sniper rifles leave shells you know! With a variety of weapons and tools at your disposal, you must outsmart, outmanoeuvre, and outplay your opponent to ensure that the only body bleeding out is your enemy's.

Game Features:

• Invisibility-based stealth gameplay
• A variety of weapons and tools to take out your opponent (machine guns, grenades, knives, shotguns, traps, etc.)
• Heavily interactive environment (puddles splash, doors opening/closing, gas vents conforming to invisible bodies, etc.)
• Prey and predator styled mechanics (taking damage results in blood occasionally dropping, making you easier to hunt)
• Minimal room for error: only being able to take a few bullets means no going ham

Unique Selling Points:

• Entirely stealth-based gameplay (get used to being invisible!)
• Incredibly focused on mind-gaming your opponent, with epic outplay potential

Image Source: Austin O'Brien