Verge

4 On the Verge of a Dream
Verge is one of those games where a simple mechanic becomes all-encompassing, to the point of you wondering how other games might incorporate it. To wit, your character is blessed with the ability to bounce between Death and Life. A pit of spikes is a sure game over in other games; here it just teleports you past the floor to the mirror-world of Death, so you can find an ankh block and reincarnate above again.

This sounds fairly mundane on paper, but in the game it’s all that’s needed to set up some fiendishly clever puzzles. Add in gorgeous pixellated graphics, a unique soundtrack, and the fact that this little 2-D platformer is more atmospheric than most movies released nowadays, and you’ve got a sure winner.

Fair warning, though – Verge is hard. Very hard. Oh, you’ll get past the first few puzzles okay, lulling you into a false sense of security, but then the real difficulty kicks in, and you start staring endlessly at the screen, trying to figure out what the smeg you’re supposed to be doing to get past THAT thing!

It’s a thing of schizophrenic, quasi-euclidean beauty.