Procedures that decide things, increasingly without being asked.
Bubble Shooter is a 2002 puzzle game by Absolutist, later expanded by Ilyon Dynamics. It asks players to clear marbles by matching three or more of the same colour before they reach the bottom line. It has four difficulty levels and two scoring modes: Classic (no limits) and Sniper (fewest shots wins).
The Witness is a first-person puzzle game developed and published by Thekla, Inc., released in 2016 on Windows and PlayStation 4. It is an open-world island filled with natural and human-made structures, where players solve over 650 puzzles by drawing paths on grids or across environments.
Bejeweled is a browser-based match-three puzzle game developed by PopCap Games and first released in 2000. Players swap adjacent gems to form lines of three or more identical gems, clearing them and triggering cascading falls. Swaps that fail to produce a match revert automatically. It features untimed and timed modes — the former ending when no moves remain, the latter requiring point accumulation to stall a depleting timer — and later introduced competitive multiplayer with special gems.
Borderlands (2009) is a role-playing shooter developed by Gearbox Software. It combines first-person shooter action with RPG systems—including four distinct Vault Hunters, branching skill trees, mission-driven progression, and a procedural loot engine generating over 15 million weapon and gear variations. Its cell-shaded-like art style gives Pandora a comic-book appearance. Players fight hostile wildlife and human forces on the fictional planet while seeking a fabled Vault.
Candy Crush Saga is a match-three puzzle game where players swap adjacent candies to make lines or columns of three or more identical colours. Matches remove candies, trigger cascading falls, and generate points — with bigger matches producing special candies that clear larger board sections. Each level imposes a specific goal — like collecting a number of candies or clearing jelly-covered tiles — within a fixed move limit. Lives are lost on failure and regenerate over time or via purchase. The game introduced saga-based progression and cross-platform sync, with mobile versions built for touch and offline play.
Boulder Dash is a deterministic puzzle game built on gravity, grids, and consequence. It gives you Rockford, dirt, boulders, time, and diamonds—and nothing else. Its rigour is its reward.
Monster Rancher is a PlayStation life simulation RPG by Tecmo (1997) where players acquire, raise, combine, and battle monsters — with CD-based generation as its defining input method.
Crypt of the NecroDancer is a rhythm-gated roguelike released in April 2015 by Brace Yourself Games. All movement and attacks must occur on the musical beat. Enemies follow fixed rhythmic patterns — some on every beat, others on subdivisions. Missing the beat resets scoring and risks damage. The dungeon has four zones, each with four levels. Input supports dance pad, keyboard, or gamepad.
Pokémon Gold and Silver refine the series’ core loop with a real-time clock and expanded Pokédex, but offer no structural departure from the top-down, random-encounter, EXP-driven RPG formula established earlier.
Torchlight is a single-player action role-playing game released for Windows on October 27, 2009. It was developed by Runic Games and published by Perfect World Entertainment and Encore, Inc. The game is set in the fictional town of Torchlight and the caverns and dungeons nearby. Players control a lone hero who explores randomized dungeons built from hand-designed modular chunks. Combat is point-and-click on PC. The loop is clear: descend, kill monsters in large groups, collect loot, return to the single town hub to sell, buy, and accept quests. Quests drive progression through unique boss battles. Side and random quests offer optional detours. The modular chunk system creates dungeons with intention—not randomness for its own sake. Levers open secret doors. Bridges move. Rooms connect meaningfully. The isometric-like overhead perspective gives spatial clarity. Loot drops frequently and visibly. The town hub is lean: one place to sell, buy, and take quests—no filler. It does not support co-op or multiplayer. It offers no character customisation beyond class choice. There is no endgame beyond completing the main questline and replaying with new classes. The town hub is static and unchanging. No lore depth or worldbuilding beyond functional exposition.
No Man's Sky is a lean, deterministic simulation of scale — not story, not society, not persistence. It asks you to verify reality, not inhabit it.
Path of Exile is a systemic ARPG that trades narrative continuity for procedural depth, instanced purity, and build-driven replayability.
Civilization IV is a 4X turn-based strategy game built on the Gamebryo engine. It uses the empire-building model: players construct, expand, exploit, and exterminate across a procedurally generated square grid map.
Dwarf Fortress is a procedural simulation that demands reading over reacting, patience over progress, and interpretation over instruction. Its strength is systemic coherence—not accessibility.
RimWorld is a construction and management simulation game developed and published by Ludeon Studios for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It functions as a story generator driven by procedural 'storyteller' algorithms that select events to shape narrative experiences. Players oversee stranded colonists on a procedurally generated planet, forming and sustaining a colony while managing survival needs, mental stability, and external threats. Colonists are task-driven rather than directly controlled, and the game ends via spaceship construction, AI-assisted ship recovery, or DLC-specific endings. Events scale in difficulty and are influenced by configurable storyteller modes and difficulty presets.
Super Mario Bros. establishes a foundational platforming loop: move right through side-scrolling stages, avoid hazards and enemies, collect coins and power-ups, and reach the flagpole. Core mechanics include dynamic size-changing via Super Mushroom (granting temporary invincibility and brick-breaking), precise jump-based enemy defeat (with varied responses per enemy type), and life management through coin counts, hidden items, and chaining actions. World 1-1 functions as an embedded tutorial, teaching mechanics through repetition and escalation rather than explicit instruction. Hardware constraints shaped design decisions—e.g., Goombas were made with a flipped sprite to save memory, clouds and bushes reuse the same tile, and background tiles are algorithmically generated. The game’s scrolling engine, adapted from Excitebike, enables smooth acceleration from walk to run—a technical departure from constant-speed movement in earlier platformers.
Tetris (1985) is a puzzle game where tetrominoes descend one at a time from the top-centre of a rectangular field; players move and rotate them horizontally until they land, aiming to form complete horizontal lines that vanish and cause blocks above to fall. Line clears grant points and increase descent speed; the game ends when pieces stack to the top ('topping out'). The original version ran on the Elektronika 60 and IBM PC, and its core design remains consistent across versions.