Dealing with backlog: Three short games

The Silent Age: A classic point-and-click game with a classic sci-fi story. You play as Joe, a janitor from the 1970s, who gets a visit from a dying old man claiming to be from the future. He asks you to get a message to his current self and Joe sets about doing just that, and what unravels is a big plot about time travel, cryogenics, pandemics and the apocalypse, and while you play you slowly start to get the nagging sense that somehow Joe might actually be the cause of the apocalypse he's trying to prevent.

The game was short and straight-forward, but the story more than made up for that. I also really enjoyed the simplicity of the graphics.

A Story About My Uncle: When I first saw this game my thoughts went like this:
"Ooooh this game is pretty."
"But it's a platformer. A first-person platformer. I'm going to hate myself playing this."
"But it's so pretty."
"But I suck at platformers and this is first-person, it's going to be even worse!"
"But it's pretty."
So I bought it. Because it was pretty. And I was right, I did hate myself for putting myself through this game. I didn't finish it. I got too sick of bouncing off the same floating rock several dozen times. But the game is incredibly pretty, and flying over the long distances felt amazing those few times I timed it right.

The story is very sweet. It's about a father telling a bedtime story to his child, and he tells the story of his explorer uncle Fred, and how he (the dad) one time went looking for uncle Fred after he had been gone for a long time, and how he ended up in a mystical land inhabited by frog people and getting on a quest to help them while searching for his uncle.

The gameplay is amazing when timed right, but it never looked as beautiful when I did it as it does in the trailer.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: This is a walking simulator with a clever story and beautiful graphics. You play as a private investigator of the supernatural. You're hired via a letter from a boy named Ethan Carter to come and find out what's wrong in a small town. The story takes you down some decidedly Lovecraftian roads (but there's also one part that seems to be taken from 2001: Space Odyssey, and one puzzle that seems almost taken from Amnesia: The Dark Descent). The end of the story was a major wtf moment and I'm not going to say anymore about it. The game is short and it's great. It's worth 3 hours of your life.