4. return of the obra dinn
i had tried for so long to beat this game and i couldn't get it to click with me and when it finally did i felt like i was on fire but then later that week i was assaulted and it, along with everything else, unclicked for a while and when i eventually came back to it i got frustrated and no longer felt the Call Of The Hunt so i googled one of the answers and that 1 solution led me to a string of discoveries that snowballed into me finishing the game a short while later and i wonder now if i permanently stole the experience from myself.
this game is really fantastic. kind of crazy to make a game that's only 8 or so hours long and takes 3 hours to get good, but when it clicks, it really clicks. it's intelligent and meticulous and it truly respects your intelligence as a player in a way very few other games do. i imagine, dense as it is, that eventually i'll forget the majority of the details and be able to play it nearly-blind again some day.