Superhot

Time moves only when the player moves, with costs that keep it hard. In Superhot, time flows normally when you step and nearly freezes when you stand still. To stop that from making the game easy, time never fully stops, firing a gun jerks it forward, you must wait between shots, and enemies swarm from every angle.

You have to predict where enemies will be, so the game plays like planning yet stays tiring. Mark Brown found its battles often more intense than shooters played in real time.

Frozen time lets players stage movie-style action in tight spaces. Fights happen in cramped rooms such as an elevator and a bar. Players punch an enemy, grab the gun mid-air and throw it across the room, trick enemies into shooting each other, or line them up for a chain kill.

Superhot cut everything that did not serve its one mechanic. The designers removed exploration and realistic textures to build the whole game on time moving with the player. Two other major games used time manipulation for a single level each; Superhot used it for everything.

Mark Brown called it the most innovative shooter he had played in years and listed it among 2016's top design innovations. "The game's designers say they removed everything that didn't speak to this core idea."