Spirits

Spirits is a puzzle game about moving small characters through dangerous spaces, and it is aimed at players who enjoy planning routes more than reacting quickly. By our assessment, its nicest feature is the way it turns simple movement rules into a steady chain of little decisions, so each stage feels like a tidy logic problem with a visual personality. The trade-off is that the game depends heavily on patience and on reading the layout carefully, because a wrong move can waste time and the challenge is not built around speed. In practice it has the calm, slightly delicate feel of solving a paper puzzle that happens to animate while you work. Compared with loud action games, Spirits sits at the quiet end of the spectrum and asks for concentration instead of reflexes. That narrow focus is also what makes it easy to recommend to puzzle fans and easy to ignore if the idea of careful route-finding does not sound fun.