Genesis Noir by Fellow Traveler

This is either a murder mystery or it's about the creation of the universe. The ambiguity is fun. The murder isn't really the mysterious part, the time stopping and interdimensional travel is. The art style is amazing! Flowing, wild, and abstract. The soundscapes are especially well-done and provide haptic feedback for the more obscure puzzles. Rather than point-and-click, there are point-and-drag mechanics that make it play unlike any adventure game I've ever played.

In Other Waters by Jump Over The Age

This game is so good at environmental storytelling even though you never directly interact with the environment. You see a map of the medbay and a read-out of life signs, see clusters of shining, pulsing dots twist in unexpected ways, and know you're witnessing something strange and eerie and beautiful. You map vectors between pieces of rusting metal scattered across the ocean floor, take shelter in bubbles of life and oxygen in a toxic sea, and come to slowly understand the creatures that passed this way before you.

THE OCEAN WELCOMES YOU by acd love when an omniscient narrator starts talking directly to you in a spooky way video games allow you to inhabit other perspectives, and they're also really good at flipping that perspective and making you question your own role as a player the switch from 'you' to 'us' is even more unnerving, the implication that you and the voice have some shared identity you're not aware of. but we all share the identity of beings that are going to die. and clicking through scenes of death in a murder mystery is just another way of killing the time, confronting the image of death over and over until it arrives for us. so is writing a murder mystery, inviting others to share the same reflections. I believe in my soul that the creator of this game has played Umineko and if they haven't I don't want to know. (CONFIRMED) in the end credits. Either way, the vibes are immaculately Umineko-like, with a shout-out to seagulls and foresdhadowing right in the opening, and a sharp awareness of the same murder mystery tropes Umineko loves to roll around in. It's all very Agatha Christie, very Glass Onion. That said, the writing is good, but it's not just good visual novel writing, it's good self-aware video game writing. The use of CAPSLOCK, the rhythm of choice prompts and expository prose, it gamifies the mystery (a genre of novels that's already called the Great Game) in a really interesting way. And then that same writing, delivered with its cheerfully neutral tutorial voice, gets flipped around on you in a wonderfully spooky way.