It's finally getting to the time of year where all the big games are out and I can sit down and think for more than five minutes, so my thoughts are naturally turning from 2012's huge releases to the other stuff - the smaller, often more interesting games that have stuck in my mind as the months have gone by. For me it's often these games that give the year personality; where the schedule of big releases is pretty much the same every year (a few in January, a few in April/May, maybe one in summer, and an avalanche from September onwards), these games pop up unexpectedly, brightening a weekend or a lunch break or a cold February afternoon. The evolving nature of game narrative, particularly, has been a theme for me this year - games from The Walking Dead to Dear Esther have been ignoring the conventions of interactive storytelling, often with huge success.

Thirty Flights of Loving

Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

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Dear Esther

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Slender

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Hotline Miami

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Okami HD

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If you’ve got hours to fill as the year putters out, these are 18 games well worth your attention that you might not have heard of before, ranging from 15-minute indie experiments to console games that perhaps came out at the wrong time or slipped by under the radar. Got any more suggestions? Leave them in the comments, and we might have enough for a follow-up.Thirty Flights of Loving is about 15 minutes long, as minimalist in its visuals as it is in its storytelling, and drops you straight into a linear, first-person narrative about love, betrayal and grand heists. It progresses at breakneck pace, bombarding you with imagery and incidental detail that might fly straight over your head the first time through. It tells a story almost entirely without words, written or spoken; this is the videogame equivalent of punchy, avant-garde short fiction. You can buy it for $5 on Steam, or direct from creator Brendan Chung . You won't regret it.Platforms: PC This one came out right in the middle of big-game frenzy in the US and is out this week in Europe, and so almost nobody has played it yet - which is madness, as it's apparently very good indeed. It's a visual novel (an interactive story with puzzles, excellent voice work and lovely 3D animation) about a prisoner's dilemma: give up your accomplice and reduce your own time, or keep quiet and risk betrayal. It's a complex maze of intersecting timelines, actions and consequences. It's a hell of an interesting alternative to a holiday novel.Platforms: PS Vita Yet another fascinating experiment in interactive storytelling, Dear Esther is a stunningly beautiful four-hour tale told through a combination of desolate, Scottish-island imagery and florid, ambiguous prose read out by an invisible narrator. It is exactly as pretentious as it sounds, but also really very good if you like this sort of thing, and even if you don't, you should give it a try. It's usually about $10/£7 on Steam, but it's in the sale until November 26th.Platforms: PC Slender properly messed up my mind (and my sleep pattern) for a good few weeks earlier this year. It's the most deeply frightening game I've ever played. You' are alone in a very creepy, dark forest full of mysterious, abandoned structures with just a torch for company, and as you walk around and find increasingly disturbed pages of scribbled notes lying around, you become aware of a menacing presence following you. Sometimes you'll see him out of the corner of your eye, sometimes you won't be able to shake the feeling that he's right behind you. It's perfect example of economy in game design. Winter's drawing in, so now it's dark enough outside to play it at its scariest. It's free, and you can download it from slendergame.com Platforms: PC Hotline Miami is a stylish, subtly disturbing neon murderfest that assaults your eyes with extreme pixellated violence and your ears with mind-scrambling, fantastic 8-bit tunes. The premise: you turn up at a building and kill everything in it whilst wearing an animal mask. It's one of the most challenging twitch-games of recent times; you succeed or fail in an instant. But it's challenging in other ways, too - its story is dense and cynical, and as well as being an arrestingly excellent video game, it's also a brutal parody of the nature of games and what they express. It's pretty stunning. It's $10 from Steam or Good Old Games. Platforms: PC The only game ever to out-Zelda the Zelda series - in my estimation, anyway - Okami is a gorgeous artefact steeped in rich, intricate Japanese mythology. It is one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful games ever made, and where the original PS2 game employed an the ink-on-papyrus filter that was both a visual signature and a way to compensate for the console's limitations, in HD the game's art is crisp and gorgeous. It's not a great time for the Japanese games industry, but this extraordinary game reminds us of what the country's best developers have achieved.Platforms: PS3