Old Classics and New Voices Share the Spotlight
The indie game space rarely sits still, and the latest wave of releases pulls in opposite directions at once – backward toward beloved puzzle adventures and forward into territory shaped by personal struggle and unconventional design. Myst and Riven, two of the most recognized names in the puzzle-adventure genre, are back in remade form, arriving alongside a roster of smaller titles that have their own distinct ideas about what games can do.
Among those smaller titles is a puzzle platformer built directly around mental health challenges, using failure not as a setback but as a mechanic woven into forward progress. It is an unusual design premise, and one that sits in sharp contrast to the polished nostalgia of the Myst and Riven remakes.
Myst and Riven Return, Rebuilt
Myst has been remade, remastered, and re-released more times than almost any other game in the medium’s history, yet the demand keeps surfacing. The original 1993 title defined what a certain kind of solitary, atmospheric puzzle experience could look like, and the new remake attempts to honor that identity while updating the presentation for players who have never touched a CD-ROM in their lives. The environments retain the eerie, deserted quality that made the original so memorable – a place that felt abandoned mid-thought, where every object seemed to carry a function that wasn’t immediately obvious.
Riven, Myst’s 1997 sequel, follows close behind. Where Myst was contained and intimate, Riven spread across five islands and introduced a density of interlocking puzzles that frustrated and absorbed players in equal measure. The remake preserves that sprawl. Navigating Riven still requires sustained attention and a willingness to sit with confusion long enough for patterns to emerge – an ask that runs against the grain of most modern game design, which tends to guide players with markers, hints, and minimal friction.
Bubsy also makes an appearance in this roundup, a franchise whose return is notable given how thoroughly it faded after its mid-1990s peak. The platforming cat with a penchant for one-liners was never as sharp as its marketing suggested, but it built a following anyway, and its revival – however modest – signals continued appetite for digging up mascots from gaming’s more chaotic commercial era. Whether the new entry captures anything worth preserving from the original run is a question the game itself will have to answer.
When Failure Is the Feature
The puzzle platformer built around mental health challenges represents a different kind of design ambition. Rather than treating failure as punishment – the standard model, where dying or losing sends the player backward – this game incorporates failure into its progression logic. Getting things wrong moves the experience forward in some way, which mirrors a therapeutic idea: that working through difficulty, including the moments when things fall apart, is itself part of progress rather than a detour from it.
This approach puts the game in conversation with a small but growing body of indie work that tries to use mechanics, not just narrative, to engage with psychological subject matter. Celeste is the most cited example of a game that used its difficulty and its story in dialogue with each other – the climbing metaphor made literal, the struggle to reach the summit mapped onto something internal. The mental health puzzle platformer in this roundup takes a different mechanical angle, but it operates in similar territory: the idea that how a game is played can carry meaning, not just how it’s written.
The Indie Space as a Design Laboratory
What ties this particular roundup together is less genre than attitude. The Myst and Riven remakes are commercial projects with established audiences and clear market logic behind them. The puzzle platformer addressing mental health is something else – a smaller bet on the possibility that games can hold difficult subject matter without softening it into metaphor so vague it loses contact with the real thing.
Indie development continues to function as the part of the industry where this kind of experimentation is most visible. Large studios rarely take structural risks with mechanics because the financial exposure is too high. A game that makes failure feel productive is easier to build and ship when the budget doesn’t require a million units sold to break even. The economics of indie development, for all their strain on the developers themselves, create conditions where an idea like “what if losing was also winning” can actually be tested.
The return of Bubsy sits somewhere between those two poles. It’s not a high-budget franchise revival with a major publisher behind it, and it’s not an experimental design statement either. It occupies the middle ground that indie publishing has carved out – familiar enough to attract attention, small enough to exist without needing to be a cultural event. That particular lane has become increasingly crowded, which is part of what makes the standout titles in any roundup like this one worth separating from the noise.
Across all these releases, the most interesting design question isn’t about graphics or length or price. It’s about what role the player’s relationship with difficulty is meant to play. Myst and Riven ask for patience and observation. The mental health platformer asks for something closer to self-recognition. Bubsy, presumably, asks you to jump and not die. The gap between those three requests says more about the range of what games currently are than any single release could on its own.
The puzzle platformer’s specific approach – wiring failure directly into forward progress – will either feel revelatory to the players it reaches or go entirely unnoticed. Games built around internal experiences tend to land hard with the audience they’re made for and leave everyone else unmoved. Whether this one finds that audience, or whether it gets buried under the weight of a release calendar that never stops moving, is not a question the game’s design can answer.
