By now, just about everyone has heard of ICO. A year ago, I would' ve agreed but ICO is such a high-profile " look what everybody missed" game. But now, with the reviews and every forum on the planet talking about how people missed it...well, it doesn' t really qualify as a game that " nobody has ever heard of before." Still a great game, though.
I' ll throw in Shadow of Destiny to start things off. It came out only a month after the PS2' s release, and it was an adventure/puzzle game that had an absolutely wonderful and ingenious story. You needed to solve the mystery of your own death. At the start of every chapter, you would be killed, and the Homunculus (philosophy buffs might now what I' m talking about) resurrects you. Your mission is to find out how and why you were killed, and then find a way to stop it. You would travel through time in all kinds of increments; a few minutes, or 150 years. It got extremely complex later on, but here' s just a small example-
You wander into the park in the center of town, and you are killed by a run-by knifing. So how to stop it? Well, you first travel back in time about an hour before your death. There was nobody in the park at the time, so the murderer had a clear and open shot. So you arrange to get people to come to the park to watch a street performer. You also know he was hiding behind a tree, so you travel back in time 20 years, and you find a man in the center of the park (where the tree will be), and he asks you what he should put there as a town landmark: a bed of flowers, a statue, or a tree. Clearly, nobody can hide behind a bed of flowers, so you choose that one.
When the moment of truth arrives, you have a bunch of people in the park with you, and no cover for your assailant. He recedes into the shadows, and you have solved your first puzzle. The story gets so twisted and awesome, that your brain will probably fry when you find out the truth about everything...