You have to feel for any child forced to navigate the foster care system, so Pathos is a thoroughly appropriate name for the recently-released mobile puzzler that metaphorically tackles just such a scenario. 

While tangible story details are few, Pathos stars a young girl named Pan, who finds herself "on a journey of discovery through an unknown world." Players must help Pan traverse 36 unique environments across 6 different chapters, solving puzzles to build paths, overcoming obstacles, and making friends along the way. 

Loosely based on a true story and created in their spare time by Fixed Update, a group of British students at the University of Bolton, Pathos features a minimalist art design and isometric perspective, along with a simple control scheme to move and interact. During development, the game garnered a number of impressive acknowledgements, including the "Design in Action" award at Dare to be Digital 2015, and a Duke of York award for Young Entrepreneurship. 

If you feel compelled to help a little girl work her way through trying times, there's no need to wait, as Pathos is available for download now on the App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android devices.

Love is a heartfelt, puzzling thing, so it should be perfect subject matter for the artistic indie adventure Secret in Story, which was recently released on Steam.

Secret in Story is a dialogue-free "love journey" featuring "pictures intertwined with montage techniques" and accompanied by piano. While no specific story details have been revealed, leaving players to discover them on their own, the journey promises to be filled with challenging puzzles to unlock in order to "open every door of memory, to find the youth that [had] been missing."

The creation of indie developer Luo Zhi En, Secret in Story features a largely black-and-white hand-drawn presentation. But though it has simple point-and-click controls, it is no ordinary adventure. The gameplay video details the three main types of player interaction in order to move the story forward, including finding the right object before a timer run out, discovering the correct order of a group of items, and clicking on the correct places in the environment to avoid imminent danger. The big catch, however, is that if you fail you die, beginning again from the start. The full game should take less than an hour to successfully complete, but may require many attempts in order to finally reach the end. 

Available for Windows and Mac, Secret in Story is available now for download on Steam.

While many quaint little towns are inviting and friendly and warm places to visit, in adventures you can be sure they're all concealing something they don't want you to know. That's perfect for the prying eyes and minds of gamers, and would-be detectives will get the chance to unearth another town's hidden secrets in The Grimsworth Reports: Woodfall, coming later this summer. 

Players assume the role of Chuck Grimsworth, a down-to-earth special government agent who is "tasked with investigating reports of bizarre, unexplainable, and assumptively paranormal events." When called in by the deeply troubled sheriff of Woodfall, Chuck soon discovers a "bloody crime scene with gory, horrifying cult symbols left on each wall." But the deeper he probes, the more questions arise out of the "personal revelations about the lives and mannerisms of Woodfall’s denizens." It appears that "there’s more than just one mystery to solve in this town, and each decision you make and conversation you carry on brings with it the opportunity to open new game paths – and close other doors forever."

The Grimsworth Reports is a side-scrolling mystery that can be controlled either by mouse, keyboard, or gamepad, although in all other respects it promises to play like a traditional 2D, hand-painted point-and-click adventure. There will be puzzles to solve, items to find and use, and even side quests to complete, the latter depending on how you choose to approach the game. Players will need to converse with the local townsfolk, with branching dialogue options that determine which story path you take, ultimately culminating in one of three different endings. 

Though the final PC release of The Grimsworth Reports: Woodfall is not due until sometime in August or September, you can catch a first-hand sneak peek of the game through its downloadable demo while you wait. 

Music is often a vital part of a game's presentation, but usually it's a background element, designed to enhance mood without drawing attention to itself. Not so in Worm Animation's upcoming Beat the Game, which puts music directly at the forefront of the player experience.

Beat the Game stars a young man named Mistik, who crashes his motorbike and now finds himself on a journey to "uncover the mysterious, abstract universe" around him. As a music producer always in pursuit of the "ultimate track," this means exploring the "beautiful, dream-like environments" to discover and record a catalogue of interesting new sounds. Then you can fire up your "portable holographic music mixer complete with volume faders and effects," allowing you to "use your samples in any combination you like. From mellow, dusty rollers, to upbeat, acid house, Beat The Game’s intuitive sequencer ensures every combination sounds good—it’s just a case of creating something that fits your mood."

It's unclear what, if any, story exists beyond the music-creation element, but with indie designers Cemre Ozkurt and Yesim Demirci Ozkurt inspired "as much by twentieth century surrealists, Dali and Ernst, as modern European techno," the game promises a surreal desert world to explore with a "cast of warm, funny characters and a visual style that draws on classic animation." A scanner will help you to track down sounds, and while Mistick is controlled in third-person, at times you can "rapidly hunt the desert for hidden objects by remote controlled 'Roboball' with its first-person camera." 

There is no firm release date for Beat the Game just yet, but it's in the final mixing stage itself, with completion scheduled sometime this summer on Windows, Mac, Linux and Xbox One. To learn more about the game in the meantime, check out the developer's website for additional details.

Lack of replayability is a fact of life for most adventure games, but the opposite is true for Vidar, a randomized, story-driven adventure that has just come out of Steam Early Access. In Vidar, it's the inevitability of death that makes it so replayable. 

The people of the eponymous small town are dying, one by one. Caught in the middle of a blizzard, Vidar is also at the mercy of a beast who kills a villager every night, forcing the remaining inhabitants to "confront their impending deaths." The townsfolk have "heavily interdependent relationships," so "when one person dies, everyone else’s stories change." In order to save as many people as you can, it is up to you to enter a "puzzle dungeon" and "use your tools and your environment to help navigate to the center of the cave before everyone in town is dead." 

The exploration of themes like "grief, community, nostalgia, [and] loss" is a little darker than usual, and the bird's-eye RPG-style presentation is less common in the adventure genre, but what really makes Vidar stand out is its randomization – not just of the story but the gameplay as well. An arbitrary narrative path is predetermined each night, and "because the order of deaths is random, the story and quests you receive will be different every time you play." What's more, the environmental puzzles encountered throughout the four distinct "biomes" (each with "new takes on classic mechanics") will be randomly selected as well, chosen from a "bank of hundreds" to provide new challenges each time you play.

In Early Access since January, the final version of Vidar is available now on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A playable demo is available to download on Steam as well, and you can learn more about this highly ambitious project through its official website.

Elijah Wood may be best known as Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but lately he's become more invested in interactive experiences. After lending his voice to Double Fine's Broken Age, now Woods has turned his sights to a VR project called Transference, which was revealed by Ubisoft at this year's E3.

Promising to bridge the gap between movies and games, Transference stars Macon Blair (Blue Ruin, Green Room) and thrusts players into a digital recreation of a "deranged" man's mind in order to investigate the "secrets of a home concealing a corrupted truth." As you navigate surreal household environments, you will encounter the various members of a dysfunctional family, each with his or her own story and a "unique perspective on events buried in their memories." As you begin to find clues to the family's history and "learn the rules of a place bent on breaking them," you will also make choices that determine their fate. This is no small responsibility, as "the choices you make from every angle ripple through time and space" and create a multi-branching narrative.

Despite being a renowned actor himself, Woods' involvement is behind the scenes, as he and his company SpectreVision are collaborating with FunHouse, a division of Ubisoft Montreal, to produce the game. Transference is being developed specifically with virtual reality in mind, offering "full interactivity for touch control on all VR platforms through PlayStation Move, Oculus Touch and HTC Vive Controller." However, the game will also be playable on traditional PC and console platforms.

There is currently no firm release target for Transference, but for now the game is on track for completion sometime next spring. In the meantime, you can follow its progress through the official website.

Poor Tehran, the city that just can't keep its alleys safe. To be fair, most big cities can't, but the Iranian capital keeps having its serial killing sprees made into adventure games. The first was 2013's Murder in Tehran's Alleys 1933, which is back in the news with an updated re-release, and now there's a murder mystery sequel out called Murder in Tehran's Alleys 2016.

As its title suggests, 2016 is a modern-day sequel starring the grandson of the original protagonist. The game focuses on the crimes committed by Jamshid Farrokhi, a crystal meth addict. While badly hallucinating under the influence of the drug, Jamshid "ruthlessly kills his whole family – his wife, 12-year-old daughter and newborn son." Upon sobering up, he realizes the heinous acts he has committed, but rather than turn himself in, he "decides to avenge those who were responsible for his decadence and for turning him into a human less worthy [than] an animal." Not only does he savagely murder anyone he deems guilty, but he records the "unimaginable violence" inflicted upon them and the "heartbreaking" confessions of his victims. Assigned to investigate the case is 32-year-old detective Faramarz Afshar, who soon finds himself caught up in "the most difficult challenge of his life."

Described as a "tribute to David Fincher’s Se7en," Murder in Tehran's Alleys 2016 follows in its predecessor's footsteps in presenting a traditional third-person, point-and-click adventure. Promising a wide variety of environmental obstacles and more than 15 minigames to complete, players will also encounter 34 different characters to interact with across more than 25 locations. Along the way, there will be many documents to find and read, a user-friendly PDA to use, and 25 minutes of motion comic cinematics to drive the story forward. All this is expected to add up to over five hours of gameplay.

But 2016 isn't the only Tehran alley news. The first game, though stylish and authentic to the culture (no surprise as the developers hail from Iran), was beset by crippling translation problems and bugs, turning an otherwise promising game into an exercise in frustration. Fortunately, 1933 has been updated and re-released with improved translation and performance fixes, plus reworked puzzles and redesigned in-game documents, promising a much-improved gameplay experience. 

You can find both the enhanced Murder in Tehran's Alleys 1933 and the new Murder in Tehran's Alleys 2016 on Steam, exclusively for Windows PC.