The Sentinel

The Sentinel is one of those games that seems simple for about five minutes, right up until you realize the entire landscape is part of the puzzle. You control a Synthoid moving across strange 3D landscapes, absorbing energy, creating objects and gradually climbing toward the Sentinel himself. There is very little hand-holding, which was a perfectly respectable design philosophy in 1989 and a fairly brutal one for everyone else. The game rewards observation and careful planning rather than reflexes, with each landscape presenting a compact strategic problem. Its abstract visuals may look primitive today, but they create an oddly hypnotic atmosphere. The Sentinel feels less like a conventional action game and more like being dropped into an alien geometry exam where the examiner is quietly trying to destroy you.