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VALIANT HEARTS: THE GREAT WAR (PC, PS4, XBOX ONE, PS3, XBOX 360)

BY UBISOFT MONTPELLIER

A poet once asked, “Do you think love can bloom even on a battlefield?” Valiant Hearts says yes. The WWI-set adventure combines a rough-hewn animated aesthetic with simple puzzles. Think the tragicomic grotesques of Jean-Pierre Jeunet rather than the straightforward shootin’ of Call of Duty and you’ll be in the right mindset. Also, there’s a real cute dog who’s totally not an emotional timebomb, right?

Perfect for: Fans of Wertmuller’s madcap Seven Beauties, gentle warmongers, Tintin

Playtime: A few hours in the trenches.

ALPHABEATS (IOS)

BY RAD DRAGON

Tired of Scrabble, but still love wowing your friends with words like muzjiks or quixtory? Then maybe Alphabeats is for you. Show off your first-grade-spelling-bee-winner skills with Alphabeats, an anagram game where you pick letters falling in the rhythm of the beat in order to make either short, boring words, or long, risky words that grant more points.

Perfect for: People that like words and rhythm, i.e., everyone reading this, probably

Playtime: The length of a song.

THE NIGHTMARE COOPERATIVE (PC, MAC, LINUX)

BY LUCKY FRAME

The Nightmare Cooperative is a dungeon roguelike puzzler that takes the phrase “There’s no ‘I’ in team” to the extreme. In the game, you play as not just one brave adventurer, but four unique heroes united under the quest to save their village from poverty. The catch? Well, with unity comes unison. Because each move you make is carried out by all four of your adventurers simultaneously. Basically, in this cooperative you live as one—and die as one, too.

Perfect for: Team players, people who don’t mind crowds, roguelike fans

Playtime: As long as you stick together.