Hollow Lantern

Hollow Lantern is the game that surprised us most this month. You play a wanderer with a dim lantern, exploring an overgrown forest full of quiet ruins and gentle puzzles. There's almost no text — the story is told through what you find and the way the world shifts around your light.

The controls are minimal: move, interact, raise or lower the lantern. That last one becomes central, since light reveals paths and scares off shadows. It never felt fiddly, and the pacing gives you room to just look around.

Atmosphere is the whole point, and it nails it. The art is hand-drawn, the sound is sparse and eerie, and we finished the roughly three-hour journey in two sittings because we didn't want to stop. Short, but it stays with you.

What we liked

• Beautiful hand-drawn world
• Light-based puzzles that stay clever
• A short story that lands emotionally