Buried Treasures (≤150 reviews)

Breakout: Recharged

• It's Breakout made modern. Has standard modes, as well as individual challenges.

Mekabolt

• A short puzzle platformer with bite-size levels. Feels like a game jam game that got made into a full title. Would be great for young kids.

Oxytone

• Like single-player Tsuro for anyone who's played that. Chain long paths through hexes to get a high score. Ultra chill. I played it more on my phone than I did on Steam though.

Pru the Pigeon

• Credit goes to @EsteeBestee for putting this on my radar. It's a cute little bite-sized (and very inexpensive) 3D platformer.

ROTA: Bend Gravity

• This one's free! It's a very bright, well-made, and surprisingly challenging puzzle game based on rotating gravity 90 degrees at a time. It's also available on Flathub if anyone prefers getting it from there.

A Simple Garbage Sorting Game

• One of those games like The Stanley Parable that plays with your expectations. Other games have done what it does better, but it’s hard to beat its price.

Underrated Greats (≤500 reviews)

Cozy Space Survivors

• It's cute; it's short (2.3 hours to 100%); it's made in Godot. Doesn't do much to innovate on the survivors formula, but it also doesn't drag itself out for dozens of hours of artificial grind. Great for audiobooks/podcasts.

Mask of Mists

• A first-person exploration game. Feels like an open-world escape room where you're progressively opening a series of locks and keys. The game's combat isn't great, but it doesn't take away from the exploration, which is much more enjoyable.

Orb Tower

• A Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move/Frozen Bubble/Snood roguelike. Simple and elegant in both scope and execution.

Paradise Marsh

• Short, cozy creature collector where you catch bugs and fish. Great sound design. Short.

Pinball Spire

• It's not exactly a metroidvania so much as it is one big contiguous series of pinball tables, but I had fun with it. It did humble me a bit by making me realize just how genuinely bad I am at aiming my shots.

POOOOL

• 2048 using billiard balls. Fun but, like 2048, frustrating when you're near the end.

Regular Factory: Escape Room

• Soft recommendation on this one. It's a decent first-person escape room puzzle game. There was one puzzle that I looked up the solution to, and, after seeing it, I'm still not sure how I was supposed to know it, but that was an outlier. All the other puzzles felt accessible.

Roundabout

• An open-world collectathon and time trial game where you play as a constantly spinning limo. Has FMV cutscenes with bad acting and sapphic intrigue.

Cult Classics (≤1000 reviews)

BORE BLASTERS

• 2D brick mining game with an airship and guns. Satisfying but very repetitive. A great mindless audiobook/podcast game.

Keep on Mining!

• Simple incremental game that doesn't go on forever (I beat it in 5 hours). Great for podcasts/audiobooks.

Voyager-19

• Iron Lung but you're in space. Credit goes to @WrathOfTheHydra for recommending it.

Gem Graduates (>1000 reviews)

Hotshot Racing

• Reminds me of the original Ridge Racer. It has some issues (ignore Expert difficulty, and know that it has rubber-banding), but drifting and boosting is very satisfying.

Inkbound

• It’s like if Slay the Spire were crossed with an ARPG. Made by the Monster Train devs. Works great solo or co-op. There are so many different viable builds that I’m still having fun over 50 hours in. My absolute favorite of everything on this list.

SPRAWL

• A fast-paced parkour FPS with a high skill ceiling. If you get good at this game, you will feel UNBELIEVABLY powerful. Great soundtrack.

Sunderfolk

• A co-op RPG where people play with their phones (think Jackbox, only serious). My multiplayer group streamed sessions of this to play together and we utterly adored it. It deserves so much more attention than it got. It’s pretty much a digital tabletop campaign-in-a-box.