Stranded (2014)

Stranded is less of a game than it is a short visual novel, and less of a visual novel than it is a neat spacey soundtrack with a godawful clicking experience attached. The game's premise is simple: you are an anonymous astronaut whose ship has crash-landed on an inhospitable planet, and you must find some means of salvation before your life support runs out. Gameplay is also simple; click on a part of the screen to slowly walk there, and click on the edge of the screen to slowly move to the next area. As you explore, events will unfold, and eventually an ending will smack you in the face.

Stranded makes the peculiar mistake of homaging old school point-and-click adventure games by removing everything fun from them (goofy humor, engaging puzzles, clever writing), and leaving only the prehistoric limitations of the SCUMM engine. The whole experience won't take you more than an hour to complete, and the majority of that time will be spent watching your silent spaceperson march across the same tiny patches of landscape again and again. I can't say for certain that there aren't some secrets hidden here that I haven't discovered, but the experience was drawn out enough to kill any interest in doing so. The ending is a neat little twist, admittedly, and the soundtrack is rather excellent, but beyond that Stranded is a fairly miserable experience.