SUPERHOT - uzzy
SUPERHOT is a first person shooter, developed by SUPERHOT Team. Playing as an unnamed agent fighting against enemies bent on killing you, you must work your way through a series of minimalist office blocks, fighting your way through your enemies with limited ammunition, with time as your only ally. Time moves only when you do.
SUPERHOT (and yes, you need to use all caps for this) looks really unique, using a fantastic minimalist aesthetic to great effect, and a colour pallet limited to red for enemies and bullet trails, black for guns and bullets, and white for everything else. But it's the defining mechanic that most makes the game interesting to me. As the developers succinctly put it, 'Time moves only when you do.' This turns what would otherwise be a straight forward FPS into a puzzle or strategy game, where you have to carefully plan out your movement to dodge bullets and take down your foes. SUPERHOT is the Matrix's bullet time, mixed with Mirror's Edge's colour style and Braid's puzzle mechanics. SUPERHOT is super hot.
Universe Sandbox ² - jshackles
The original Universe Sandbox was great but really limited in scope. Essentially, it was a gravity simulator - which is cool because it let you do some amazing things and load some really cool cosmic "what if" scenarios. Universe Sandbox² expands on the original by adding in other factors such as plantary climate simulation, chemical simulations, stellar evolution, terraforming, dark matter simulations, and greatly improved collisions. If you were a fan of the original Universe Sandbox, you're going to want to pick this up.
While not a "game" in the traditional sense, the original game was fun to play around with. Even if you only have a cursory knowledge of planetary and stellar physics, there's a lot to do here as well. If you're like me and have a love of science and a deep understanding of astrophysics, you'll still find that Universe Sandbox² is a great way to concoct amzingly elaborate "what if" scenarios that produce detailed and visually stunning simulations. On top of all of that, Universe Sandbox² seems to be an even better teaching tool than the original game, which was released to schools for free. I found the original Universe Sandbox to be a great teaching tool for my high-school aged children, and with the bredth of content available in the new release it's easy to see how this could be used effectively in a classroom setting.