Haven't seen these mentioned, Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters by Jump Over the Age are incredible games, beautiful artistically and really great world building

Signalis just affected my fucking life it was really something else.

Untitled Story was by the person who made Celeste. It's old and looks like it was made in mspaint, but it was such a good metroidvania.

IDK if this counts, but I loved SPACEPLAN.

Orwell, the first one

Fall Guys, back before the vaulting fiasco

Salt and Sanctuary and Hollow Knight.

Rodina is a very cool space game. You fly a starship - which you can completely design and walk around inside - around an open solar system. You land on planets and asteroids ( seamlessly in real-time) and collect pieces of the very awesome scifi novel-like story. I believe there are now enemy alien bases you enter, but when I played the real draw was the incredible lonely atmosphere of space. It has some of the best newtonian space flight/combat I've played to this day, and the gun play is kind of like old school Doom. I'm sure it's come quite far since I played years ago, but it was literally a one man project at the time.

Graphically, it's very low-poly, and it's not the most varied game, but what's there is 👌

Anyone who likes space scifi should play it. It's incredible, and it came before No Man's Sky released.

There's a lot I could list here, but I'll focus on a few that I've played recently, that don't seem to be getting as much mention.

Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There's not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.

OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There's really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.

Vampire Survivors - It's super cheap, it's super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you're telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).

Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don't actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It's rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated "city" (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age... And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You're a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 ("The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia"), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say "solve crimes" I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There's no Arkham "Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues" going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it's all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you're the brains. It's on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I'm slightly scared of the people who made it.

Shadow Empire without a doubt. Practically a one-man team, and yet a better logistics and supply system than any other game out there.

Hollow Knight

Hyperlight Drifter

Ori series

Dead Cells

Banner Saga series

Into the Breach

Bastion

Monument Valley

Child of Light

Gris

Limbo