Wade by Optillusion: A game about navigating a barrier. Your character moves from being fully submerged in water to being entirely surrounded by air. (Perhaps it’s the opposite?) In the process, they circumvent obstacles to resolve the transition from one binary state to another, perhaps the transition from life to death. A modest little rumination with a single mechanically annoying moment that’s especially unwelcome given its brevity.

We Are Poems by Fern Goldfarb-Ramallo: An exploration game through abstract space. It ostensibly explores queerness and pleasure, although I can’t say that really registered for me. It’s openly reminiscent of Tale of Tales’ contribution to the previous volume of the Triennale Game Collection, but more elliptical.

Nonno’s Legend by Nina Freeman/Star Maid Games: A game about exerting the power of imagination on the world. You’re a young girl whose grandfather has just given you a magic globe where the land can be rearranged as you see fit. There’s no goal, just an invitation to indulge the childlike fantasy of influencing empirical reality–the shapes of the continents themselves– with your mind. Like the developer’s earlier Cibele, it’s drawn from personal experience and feels true to life.

Mine by Akwasi Bediako Afrane: A game about traversing an environment and learning its dark secrets. The whole game is a corridor, reminiscent in that way only of Half-Life, and it takes place under the ground, reminiscent in that way only of Colossal Cave Adventure. The setting is a mine shaft, though what is being extracted here and for what purpose is not immediately obvious. Very mysterious and compelling.

Contact by Llaura McGee/Dreamfeel: An interactive story about something weird that happened once. A narrator tells the story of a youthful encounter with aliens, but really it’s about queer community. It’s all couched in the aesthetics of zines and early internet culture: points of intersection for marginalized communities and outsider creatives. Very lovely.