Light

Photon Baby is an excellent puzzle platformer, with NES-ish graphics and an interesting puzzle style. You play a little fellow with a sort of gun; while babysitting, the child you were caring for was kidnapped by a vampire bat, and you evidently have to fight through thirty platform levels featuring vampires and bats to get the brat back.

Vampires wear differently colored capes; some surfaces of each level are colored lines. You bullets are gray when fired, but take on the color of one of these lines; and a vampire can only be killed by a bullet the color of his or her cape. This is where the puzzle aspect comes in; you must figure out how to slay each vampire, given the organization of the level, and the positions of the colored lines.

L!ght Delux is a simple, grid-based puzzle game that uses a laser metaphor. In each level, you have to get light from one or more emitters to one or more targets. Light can be reflected, broken into colors with prisms, have color inverted with color-changing lenses, and so on. In addition, there's a Sokoban-like element; some items on the grid are in fixed positions, while others can move but, as on ice, moving something moves it as far as it can go in the direction of motion until it runs into something. Thus, solving a puzzle both involves figuring out how to use the level's elements to get the correct light into the correct receptors, but also solving the motion puzzle of getting everything where it should be -- and getting light-blocking obstacles out of the way.

2010 IGF Nominee for Audio, Technical Excellence, and the Nuovo Award

Closure is a stark, black-and-white and rather mysterious platform puzzler. On the first level, you walk away from a burning car -- but into an unexplained world of levels, with the typical exit at some location. Controls are typical -- arrow keys to move, up-arrow to jump, and down-arrow or space to pick up.

The gimmick is that while each level has a fixed layout, only illuminated areas exist. That is, if you pick up and carry one of the balls of light that exist on each level, you may find yourself walking along a continuous platform. But if you drop the ball and walk out into the darkness, the part of the platform you passed previously in the light no longer exists, and you fall through it.