When I was growing up, in the South London of the early nineteen-nineties, my local video-game store, Mad Andy’s, had enough space on its shelves to stock every new release. We young patrons may not have been able to afford more than a game a month on our paper-round wages—this was before the coffee-shop plague, when “barista” was merely what people from Birmingham called lawyers—but we were allowed to try them out on Andy’s fourteen-inch television, which dangled in a corner. If we wanted to splurge and take one home for the weekend, there was always Blockbuster. By December, we had played most of the annual crop.

No more. Anyone who claims to have sampled a majority of this year’s new games is either a liar or a shut-in. Each day, new titles appear on Steam, the foremost digital shop for P.C. games. On the equivalent stores for smartphone systems, experimental gems jostle for attention beside Candy Crush knockoffs and Clash of Clans wannabes. Who has time to pan these releases, especially when today’s games so often eschew traditional endings for the steady I.V. drip of new chapters, characters, and upgrades?

The democratization of game development, hastened by the availability of tools such as Unity and GameMaker, has swelled the number of annual releases to unchartable proportions. This is theoretically positive, in that it encourages a diversity of both creators and creations, broadening the medium’s scope and variety. And yet video games remain, principally, conservative and iterative. They advance mainly along the narrow axes of graphics and technology, rarely in theme. Expanding bulk has not been matched with expanding variety. Critics and players, in the main, go along with the pretense of progress. Here, instead, are what I consider the year’s truly inventive offerings.

1. Sunless Sea (Mac, Windows)

Failbetter’s wistful adventure, in which you assume the role of a succession of ancient mariners, is the most memorable release of 2015. You roam the Unterzee, a twilight archipelago beneath London, choosing a crew, buying rations, plying a trade, and helping out those you come across (or, when you’re lost at sea, eating them). The balance of risk and reward is built into the geography: How far will you stray from your home port, in search of wealth and glory, when, with limited supplies, you can become so easily stranded? The story is broken into discrete chunks and strung together according to your choices. When you die, abruptly or in old age, you bequeath your gains to your offspring, who become the next characters in the generational journey. The result is a collaboration between player, writer, and designer—one that awakens our elemental longing both to explore and to seek home.

2. Metal Gear Solid V (PlayStation 3 and 4, Windows, Xbox One and 360)

The arc of big-budget game-making has, in the past few years, bent toward uniformity of design—an open world, freely explored and filled with busywork (collect five of these, kill ten of those, etc.). Metal Gear Solid V, perhaps the last game in the series that Hideo Kojima established, in 1987, is no different. This is still a game about sneaking through the tall grass and rendering armed guards unconscious with a tranquilizer dart to the neck, still a game punctuated with ludicrous boss fights featuring quipping maniacs who pilot bipedal robots. But the structure is new and exhilarating, allowing you to flit between core and supplementary missions. It is, at times, a tonal mélange, and clearly the game has been affected by publisher politics: it ends abruptly and incompletely. Nevertheless, this is the final and full realization of a vision, if not a story, that Kojima has been working toward for decades.

3. Her Story (iOS, Mac, Windows)

It is June of 1994, and a British woman has reported her husband missing. The case becomes a murder investigation. In Her Story, you’re given the opportunity to view nearly three hundred video clips, culled from police interview tapes, but you cannot get hold of them in chronological order. Rather, you must use search terms to query a database. You’d expect the resulting narrative, cut and pasted together in this curious manner, to be bewildering. Instead, it enthralls, delivering unscripted revelations that subvert your understanding of what has happened. The full story emerges only after you’ve uncovered every clip through informed guesswork. The result is a deeply novel piece of interactive fiction that applies the flexibility of video-game structure to the classic TV thriller.

4. Splatoon (Wii U)

The division between video games that follow the rhythms and structures of sport and those that ape cinema becomes ever more distinct. Splatoon falls squarely into the former camp. There are two teams, each equipped with “Bugsy Malone”-style splurge guns, which fire paint rather than custard and are fed from “Ghostbusters”-style backpack canisters. The teams compete to cover the majority of the pitch in paint of their color. Like football, Splatoon is a game about the acquisition of territory from one’s opponents. Unlike football, it is played by children who can turn into cephalopods.

5. Bloodborne (PlayStation 4)

Hidetaka Miyazaki’s latest finds treasure within cliché. The aesthetic is familiar gothic horror. The diseased town of Yharnam, with its blood-slicked cobblestones, flickering oil lamps, and spindly iron fencing, is inhabited by assorted eldritch monsters—rabid Dobermans, hoe-wielding peasants, fat Hitchcockian crows—which you attack using a Victorian blade-cum-blunderbuss. The game’s structure, however, is idiosyncratic. As in Miyazaki’s earlier games, Yharnam pieces together like a grand and elegant contraption, interlocking in unexpected but pleasing ways via corridors and ladders. The director’s interest in arcane storytelling, told in half-whispers by the characters you meet and the props you find, captivates, as does the game’s combat. Bloodborne subverts the prevailing wisdom that contemporary video games must mollycoddle their players and quash mystery.

6. Kerbal Space Program (Linux, Mac, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Windows, Xbox One)

The dream is borrowed from the twentieth century: build a rocket ship that can land on the moon. Your chosen configuration may explode on the launch pad or rise hearteningly, only to arc into the sea moments later. But Kerbal’s cutesy design softens the blow. Unlike with, say, Microsoft Space Simulator, you’re unlikely to hammer the off button when your carefully planned creation explodes in white-hot failure. Beneath the blaze of primary colors, though, this game is a serious proposition. When you finally pierce the stratosphere, perhaps you will have learned something authentic about what it takes to make it to space.

7. The Beginner’s Guide (Linux, Mac, Windows)

Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide builds on a technique that he developed with his earlier game The Stanley Parable, juxtaposing onscreen action with spoken narration and commentary. Here Wreden is the narrator, speaking in the amiable tones of a “This American Life” presenter about a game-developer friend of his known only as Coda. You explore a series of half-finished games made by Coda between 2008 and 2011, 3-D environments that range from a cabin in snowy woods to the corridors of a futuristic spaceship. As you explore, Wreden talks about what you’re seeing, and the genius that he perceives in Coda’s oeuvre. It’s a game about the things that art reveals and withholds about its makers, about meaning and interpretation. Wistful and strange, The Beginner’s Guide offers a thoughtful and wholly alternative way to tell a story.