Escape By Spoon gives you one tool and makes it carry everything

You are a prisoner in a strange prison with a spoon and a plan. You dig beneath your cell, uncover hidden paths, gather resources on the way down, upgrade the spoon, and keep pushing until you are out. By day you work as the prison chef, which means finding ingredients, chasing the ones that are still moving, and cooking them well or making a mess of it.

The spoon doing three jobs is the design. A game that gave you a shovel, a knife and a ladle would be the same game with less character and less pressure. One object that has to stretch is a constraint the player can feel every time they use it.

The two halves also feed each other in the only way that matters: escaping on an empty stomach is a bad plan, so the kitchen is not a minigame bolted on the side. It is the thing that pays for the tunnel.

We went through this in The secret of Mario’s jump and other versatile verbs. A single action that means different things in different contexts gives you more design space than three actions that each mean one thing. Jump is movement, attack and puzzle solution. A spoon can be dig, fight and cook.

Ico, and design by subtraction is the discipline behind it. The temptation with a joke premise is to add: give the prisoner a pickaxe at hour two, then a drill. Every addition makes the spoon less special, and the spoon was the reason anyone looked.

So the question for this one is whether the upgrades keep it a spoon. A better spoon is still the bit. A spoon that has quietly become a jackhammer is a different game wearing the poster of this one.

Escape By Spoon is by Paiband Game Studio, self-published, listed as Coming soon on Windows. Action, Adventure and Indie, and the art leans openly on classic cartoons, which is the right register for a game about tunnelling out with cutlery.

The loop as listed is dig, gather, upgrade, cook, fight, repeat, with the tunnel as the thing that measures your progress. That is a small set of verbs, which is the correct size when one of them is doing most of the work. A tunnel is also an unusually good progress bar: it only goes one way, you dug all of it, and you can turn around and look at how far you have come.

If the appeal is a game built out of one input, Scarlet Skips is the other one on this list — an entire roguelike played with press, hold and release on a single button.