20-26+ hours to complete, Sonic Frontiers is an open world adventure game built around exploration, obstacle courses, platforming and gathering collectables. Sonic and friends discover and crash land on the Starfall Islands, five regions that used to be home to an ancient civilization older than anything they’ve ever known, now just ruins and host to an evil being who trapped Sonic’s friends in a Digital Dimension. While Sonic once again goes on an adventure to free his allies, uncover what was the catastrophic event that abruptly ended the civilization here and try to make nice with Sage, Starfall Islands weirdly hostile sentient AI who’s goals are, apparently, drastically different than your own… probably!

As a deeply casual player who’s never finished a Sonic game before, the only other game I’ve played being Sonic Adventure, which storyline abruptly came to a tragic end after I discovered the Chao Garden, I had a great time. Much of Frontiers gameplay is optional, and it simultaneously accommodates both speedrunners and people who’ve never encountered a time trial in their lifetime as there are multiple ways to gain the items needed to progress the storyline, from speedrunning, casual exploration, to fishing them up. The bosses were really fun to fight, the storyline about the first civilization and it’s destruction were pretty interesting and I particularly loved all the music that you could swap out and change anytime. While overall Sonic Frontiers was really good, I do have a couple tips! First, a controller is highly suggested, as while there are very few button mashing events, you can instead rotate the left joystick in a circle if you’re not too keen on carpal tunnel. Second is that this Sonic has various status you can upgrade, and I recommend not maxing them out early unless you want to beat all bosses within twenty seconds, before the music has a chance to play.

2-3+ hours to complete, enjoy a cute and surprisingly interesting mystery detective game! Play as Duck Detective Eugene McQuacklin, investigating a serious lunch theft case at BearBus and it’s elusive culprit, The Salami Bandit! Question your suspects, snoop through their office, and comb through forgotten memos and abandoned post-it notes to piece together the evidence and deduce who would have committed such a terrible crime.

Duck Detective was a good surprise, it’s short, but very well made; every character has a simple first-impression sprite and a more detailed version once you start properly investigating them with the magnifying glass which was a fun touch. It’s fully voice acted, there is a dedicated quack button, and the actual mystery you are investigating has a fair amount of misdirection that feels satisfying to catch. The only part I got confused with, was when I had to figure out a number code, which I sadly had to end up brute-forcing as I didn’t understand the acronyms to get the actual numbers. I also recommend turning the hint system off, since it’s really easy to give up and just use it. Highly recommended, I’ll be playing the second game, The Ghost of Glamping, this month for sure!

1–9 hours to five years to complete, The Stanley Parable is an absolutely delightful narrative-driven game about a completely normal office worker named Stanley, who suddenly finds himself unsupervised after his manager and co-workers all seem to have mysteriously taken the day off. Saying much more would spoil the experience, but it’s a game I’d recommend to almost anyone — even someone who has never played a video game before.

Going into this game completely blind is absolutely the best way to experience it, if possible. It’s funny, packed with numerous endings, and has ridiculously high replay value. The narration is easily one of the game’s strongest aspects, especially because the narrator reacts to your shenanigans in such entertaining ways. While the game itself is fairly short, it’s also very easy to spend nine hours in it uncovering… things I won’t mention, ahaha. Anyway, if you haven’t played it yet, please do. The Broom Closet ending in particular has to be a fan favorite!!!

4-22+ hours to complete, Librarian is a mindless and relaxing finding and sorting game, where you play as a librarian under the great Principle Merlin, at the University of Celesthall. Fairies often cause mischief, and one has recently unshelved all the books and thrown them all over the floor; it’s your job to find, sort and re-shelf them, your reward being one of the greatest of honors – a pizza party of one with your name on it. Get to work!

“how could this game possibly be fun, you’re just shelving books.” you ask, and while I would like to agree with you, reading all the book titles and hunting them down to put in their proper spots and slowly recovering scarce floorspace was incredibly entertaining for me. I chose to do the no-major magic run first and it took me a lovely seventeen hours re-shelving the 3,072 titles, the magic run took me two hours since by then, I knew where everything went, and the special stage you unlock after your first run was an absolute treat. As for cons, I didn’t find any bugs or issues but it would be nice to have the ability to gently set a book down and stack them on the floor, instead of tossing them. There was a complication where I had a single book missing, but when you have ten books lift, you can summon them back to their original spawn position, even if they’ve escaped the library through the floor, somehow. I’m under the impression there will be more content in the future, as there is a greyed out “extra” mode I’m unable to access, but I look forward to finding out what that is and highly recommend this game to anyone looking to turn their brain off and just organize entertaining books.

3-5+ hours to complete, Hidden in my Paradise is a cute, fun, and well designed HOG that even lets you create and share your own levels with a huge variety of items, characters, and furniture. There are four areas and twenty five levels, as well as additional free extra holiday areas. Inside each level there are additional optional tasks, such as finding treasure chests, faeries, and moving items around to set up scenes to take cute photographs, although sometimes I found it didn’t work well, and I had to zoom out more or mess around with it.

Overall, it’s a fine game. It’s not too long, not too short, and I actually enjoyed making a little HOG map of my own then poking my steam friends to go play it – everyone who has this game can also play what you make and give it a rating, so you can get some little gold stars for your efforts. There are only two cons; one is that the looping background music gets too repetitive and the search function did not work for me when I was looking for my friends created areas, so I had to sort by newest to go hunt them down. I’m pretty sure that last bit will eventually get patched, so it’s worth checking out if you are a Hidden Object Game Enjoyer and/or have a friend group to share hidden object levels you make.