Bound

The player controls an unnamed princess and ballet dancer as she makes her way through surreal, dreamlike environments. She must complete platforming challenges and has the ability to repel enemies with her dancing.

The game uses an "Edge Guard" to prevent the player from falling off certain platforms. This was because the developer believed that being able to fall off detracted from the game experience by forcing players to pay closer attention to the character's legs than to the world. There are some places where the princess can fall and die, but she will respawn nearby.

The game takes place inside the mind of a pregnant woman who is revisiting her childhood home and memories. In the woman's mind world, the main character is a Princess who is following the orders of her mother, the Queen, to vanquish a monster that is destroying the world. According to the game's creative director, "everything in the game is a big metaphor", and there are scenes in the game that show real life and not the game's world.

Bound was developed by Plastic, a Polish former demogroup who previously worked with Sony on Linger in Shadows and Datura. It was the third and final collaboration between these two companies, as Sony's Santa Monica Studio stopped assisting on other independent projects to focus on the God of War series, while core members of Plastic was hired by Epic Games from 2022 to 2024.

The creative director of Bound, Michal Staniszewski, said that the game took three and a half years to develop. The game was designed to be best played in a single sitting, and he suggested that investigating too much of the game before playing it would cause the experience to be spoiled, comparing it to the games Journey and Firewatch.

Bound received "mixed or average reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Chris Carter of Destructoid said that its graphics are "gorgeous" and "stunning", but calling the movement "stiff" and combat too easy, believing the game leans "too hard" on the platforming aspect. Matt Peckham of Time said that while the game is fun to watch, it is boring to play because it is so easy to navigate the world. James Stephanie Sterling of The Jimquisition said that, while beautiful, playing it is a "messy, obstructive hassle" with poor controls and camera movement, as it is unable to commit to either being a walking simulator or a fully realized puzzle platformer and is instead a hybrid of both.

Justin Clark of GameSpot said that while its gameplay is "rudimentary", this is made up for by the graphical details of the game, calling each stage a "cubist marvel" and the idea of a dancing main character deserving of praise and saying that it "displays immense amounts of contemplation and ambition in every aspect except gameplay". He claimed that "[to] decry it for its overly simplistic mechanics is to ultimately miss the forest for the trees", and that "Bound is digital art installation" whose full impact is only evident in its final moments.