Kessrel Line
A Total War-scale last stand in a dusk canyon: ten regiments, three thousand troopers, seven waves of alien Vesh, and one evacuation ship still loading behind you. Post the line, spend the Lance, and hold the Gate of Harrow.
Hollowbell
An isometric action RPG in a drowned crypt: three chambers of the risen dead, a lantern-headed warhammer, and the Bellwarden waiting under a cracked bell. One descent, five to eight minutes.
Red Dot Rising
You are the night keeper of a three-floor cat cafe and a laser pointer is your only tool. Park the red dot on a pressure plate, a cat sits on it, the lift wakes. Get all three cats to the rooftop bed before dawn.
Wick
A one-button climb up a flooding lighthouse. You are the keeper's cat: kick wall to wall up the shaft, stay ahead of the sea, and light the lamp for the ship on the rocks.
Helsinki Life
A pass-and-play board game for 2 to 4 players on a toy model of Helsinki: spin the wheel, ride your tram south from Pasila to Suomenlinna, and make a life on the way. The Konduktööri reads every card aloud, and happiness counts as much as money.
First Light: Lucina
A lighthouse puzzle game. Lay uranium crystals and cut brass masks on a glass plate to burn tonight's signal into it, and finish before dawn crests the window and fixes the glass. Five plates, five nights, and every crystal out of the case is dosing you.
First Light: Henter of the Glew
An hour before dawn, a moorland hill is thick with glew — night-light that cannot survive the sun. Snatch what you can into your lantern before first light burns the hill clean, and mind the hoggies, who want it too and will butt it straight back out of you.
Blockbuster 767
Wind the key three times, call your target, and throw a toy 767 into a city of painted wooden blocks. Three planes, one score, and physics does all the scoring.
Greasepaint
1931, the last night of a travelling circus. The company has gone back on in greasepaint, and you play a deck of gags, guards and tricks at them from the front row while the tent fills up with laughter. Lose the house and it starts taking your cards. A short roguelite deckbuilder — one run is one night.
First Light: Betocsin
A one-button tower-stacker on a heraldic lozenge. Rebuild a fog-drowned town's bell tower course by course and ring the tocsin before the sun crests the estuary — every wide seat is trimmed off into the fog and the error carries all the way up.
First Light: Lavic Odyssey
A helmed pilgrim climbs a basalt spire out of a filling caldera to reach the rim before the lava does. The great helm keeps the embers off — and blinds you. Take it off to see the way, and the heat starts killing you.
First Light: Nearside
Drive a cargo hopper north across the Moon at sunrise, riding the thin warm band at the line of first light. Fall behind and the sun cooks your saplings; run too far ahead and the dark freezes them. One run, 90 to 150 seconds.
First Light: The Three Fires
One hour of night on a Parthian ridge, and three sacred fires that must all still be burning when the sun clears it. Carry heat from the Eternal Well in a censer that scorches you the fuller it gets, and drive the daevas of the dark back over the rim before they smother an altar.
First Light: Sabaean Madcaps
A 150-second uphill sprint against the sunrise. Carry the sacred fire up the seven terraces of the temple of Almaqah at Marib and light the summit altar before the sun clears the eastern ridge — shoving past seven increasingly smug priests on the way, and keeping the censer alight while you do it.
First Light: Goura
You are Tawpy, a Victoria crowned pigeon alone on the New Guinea forest floor in the last hour before dawn. Answer the flock every time it calls, keep to the dark, and reach the roost tree before the light — and the harpy eagle — find you.
First Light: Resown
You keep a terraced hillside and a bronze face-plate. Every night a luminous ferment climbs the terraces toward the shrine; at dawn you turn the plate to the sun and burn it off — and burn your own soil with it. Five dawns to survive.
First Light: Crowfeet
A crow too old to fly climbs a sea cliff on foot through the last hour of the night, eating what glows on the ledges, to reach the roost before the flock leaves at first light. One climb, three minutes.
First Light: Luteway
A rockhopper penguin climbs one volcanic cliff at dawn, hopping ledge to ledge ahead of the rising tide. The ochre clay seaming the rock cakes onto its feet: sticky feet grip ice and cling to the wall, but every sticky hop is a short one.
The Eighth Ketyl
You are a ketyl radical — a deep blue-violet spark that dies the instant it meets water — alive inside a sealed eight-plate distillation column that has started to grow something. Burn the growths off every plate and climb, or drown like the seven before you.
First Light: Vagant
A stealth-survival night on a drowned English fen: relight seven abandoned lamp standards before dawn, while the things that come toward light close in — and the only way to hide is to pull one of their enormous white wigs down over your own eyes.
The Hernsew Lingster
The tide is coming into Yowe Fen and your flock is on the wrong side of it. Five young herons bar the causeway, each one until it is answered — and you are the last person alive who can understand what they say.
The Acceding
Twenty-nine metres of verdigris brass stands in a flooded crypt and grants nothing until it is asked correctly. Nine gates, eight words, three slots — and a machine that remembers every word you have ever said to it.
Fire For Effect
Saddle 3400: four crewless howitzers fire through an unbroken cloud deck, and the sky-floor tears open. A 104-second, 16-shot cinematic on a fixed-step film clock.
Deadlight
A 96-second dive film. One crewed submersible drops onto the bow of a liner a century on the bottom, and the only light in the world is the one it brought.