Small teams, specific ideas

C

Celeste

Maddy Makes Games

A hard platformer with an assist mode that lets you finish it, which is the most confident design decision in the genre. The difficulty is the subject rather than a filter.

SV

Stardew Valley

ConcernedApe

Made by one person over four years and it is the most complete farm-life game there is, because nothing in it is there to keep you playing. It politely lets you stop.

PP

Papers, Please

Lucas Pope

A bureaucratic puzzle game where the difficulty is moral rather than mechanical, because the rules keep requiring you to reject sympathetic people. It has never stopped being relevant.

B

Balatro

LocalThunk

Poker hands turned into a roguelike deckbuilder, which sounds like a joke and turns out to be one of the best-balanced games of its year. Made by one person who had never shipped anything.

I

Inscryption

Daniel Mullins Games

A card game that keeps revealing it is also something else, and the reveals are structural rather than twist-shaped. Impossible to discuss without spoiling and impossible not to.

I

Inside

Playdead

Two and a half hours of a boy running left to right through something terrible, with nothing explained and no dialogue at all. The most controlled art direction in any game.

T

Tunic

Andrew Shouldice

The in-game manual is written in a language you cannot read, and learning to read it is the actual progression. The most original take on old adventure games in years.

AW

Animal Well

Shared Memory

Looks like a small metroidvania and turns out to have layers of puzzles underneath that a whole community spent months on. Made largely by one person.

TC

The Case of the Golden Idol

Color Gray Games

You assemble sentences out of collected words to explain what happened, which is a deduction system that respects the player instead of guiding them. The best puzzle mechanic of its year.

D

DREDGE

Black Salt Games

A fishing game that slowly turns into a horror game without ever announcing it, and the two halves reinforce each other rather than sitting side by side.

VS

Vampire Survivors

Poncle

The cheapest-looking game on this list and one of the most compulsive, because the build-up is the game and it costs nothing to try. Started as a browser game and swallowed a year of everyone’s life.

PT

Pizza Tower

Tour De Pizza

A platformer built entirely around momentum, with animation that looks hand-drawn frame by frame because it is. Exhausting to watch and thrilling to play.

NW

Neon White

Angel Matrix

A speedrunning game where the levels are short enough to replay twenty times without resentment, and the story between them is far stranger than the premise suggests.

C

Cocoon

Geometric Interactive

Worlds inside worlds used as a puzzle mechanic rather than a setting, with no words at all and no wasted rooms. From the designer of Limbo and Inside.

ST

Slay the Princess

Black Tabby Games

A horror visual novel where the loop is the structure and the narrator is not on your side. Written with a great deal more care than the premise suggests.

L

Limbo

Playdead

Monochrome, silent, and one of the games that made independent development a viable proposition. Its first ten minutes are still a masterclass in teaching without telling.

UG

Untitled Goose Game

House House

A checklist of petty vandalism performed by a goose, and it is genuinely funny because the game never acknowledges how funny it is. Short, and the right length.