Gaming

I'll pick the two that I think are the most criminally overlooked:

Vagante is a co-op roguelike platformer that combines Spelunky and Dark Souls. The Spelunky influence is obvious right down to a few of the biomes, and the combat is committal in the way that Dark Souls combat is. Really, you could replace Dark Souls with a lot of different RPGs inspired by D&D, but Dark Souls also captures the combat and the way the difficulty is tuned, as well a slight nod to the series with a bonfire between levels. Due to the way loot drops over the course of a run, it actually scales remarkably well between 1-4 players, as the loot is finite, and you're finding ways to split it among your party or, as a solo player, stack yourself with the best stuff so that you stand the best chance alone.

Cannon Brawl is a side-perspective RTS that combines StarCraft and Worms. Everyone has a buildable area that you expand with balloons sort of like expanding the creep as Zerg, but like Worms, you can destroy the ground beneath your opponent's feet. Each player controls a blimp that moves at a set speed, and that blimp needs to manually move to the structure that you want to use, such as the titular cannons. This keeps the game from being dominated by fast RPM while still allowing for controller-friendliness and plenty of depth. It's got same-screen and online multiplayer, and every time I break this game out, we're glued to the screen for hours, swapping loadouts and commanders for different strategies.

Superflight

Really engaging game with a short, easy to understand mechanic. It's fun just to put on and fly around for a bit every now and then.

I'd personally recommend Rain World, although it has a reputation for being hard, and you'll probably die a lot so this game has to be approached with patience

If you were ever a fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon, check out Parkitect. It's a phenomenal and fun themepark game!

Pyre by Supergiant - You have likely heard of Hades by this studio, but Pyre is a whole different beast. It's basically fantasy basketball set in the underworld, with a variety of magical species with different abilities in the game. It also has (as is this studio's habit) absolutely stellar writing, music, and 3 dimensional characters.

Some games I recommend:

Alina of the Arena: A roguelike deckbuilder game. It has turn based tactical battles. There are lots of cards and builds you can try, but there is a fair amount of randomness to it. So you have to go with what you get.

Unreal Life: A really strange, surreal adventure game with a talking traffic light. Great visuals and music.

YumeCore: Just a short little game where you beat up people in a hospital. Why? Why not?

Flood of Light: Great little game with pretty much one core mechanic (direct lights). The Engliah translation isn't the best, but I really liked the atmosphere.

Brotato: Is it a hidden gem? I don't really know, but it is a fun "Vampire Survivor"-like game and a huge time sink. Great shop mechanic and large amount of characters and items.

I’ll say CrossCode. 2D hack-and-slash set in a futuristic MMO. Way too good, way too unknown for the genre that it is.

The Westport Independent is a censorship simulator, in which you play as the editor of a newspaper, choosing which stories to run and how to edit them in order to avoid angering both the authoritarian government and political radicals who want to take them down, while also appeasing your journalists, who may get angry and quit if you censor their stories too much.

As a big metroidvania fan, I'd like to introduce a few of my favorites that go beyond the obvious choices like Hollow Knight and Ori (which of course are excellent). All of these are straightforward and while difficult, they don't focus on confusing menus or min/maxing statistics.

Astalon: Tears of the Earth: If you play one game on this list, play this one. You play as 3 characters, each with their own abilities, and can switch at certain save points. You die a lot and have to start over from the entrance every time, but the game gives you plenty of shortcuts and upgrades that you can quickly go back to where you were. The map is great to explore and there's a lot of content to keep you busy like a boss rush and new game+ modes with different characters.

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is a short but sweet experience. It's difficult but not unfair enough that you want to stop playing, the world map is well designed, and the pixel art is great.

Rabi-Ribi: This game looks like it was made for a very specific (horny) crowd, but there's a surprising amount of depth to the world and the bullet hell boss girls that inhabit it. It's an interesting mix of bullet hell and platformer that somehow makes up for the nonsensical story.

Ctrl Alt Ego

It's like a System Shock or Prey 2017 that has even less emphasis on "conventional" combat and more general problem solving. In some ways I feel like it's what you get if you grow an "immersive sim" out of a "puzzle" game like Portal instead of out an FPS or RPG.

Ooh, I love finding obscure indies. There are an awful lot of games on Steam and Itch and other platforms that are amazing experiences, but that almost no one has ever played or even heard of for one reason or another.

One of my recent favourite zero-budget indies is Sally Can't Sleep, a strange first person platformer with a lot of focus on fun, versatile, and exploitable movement mechanics. The dev sacrificed visual polish for quantity and style, so the game has a lot of interconnected levels with a big variety of different mechanics and visual styles - it's a really good example of how much a solo developer can accomplish.

Another one is Worlds, which is a 3D stealth-shooter-platformer-adventure? I like it for the same reason as Sally Can't Sleep, it's ambitious and creative, and you can really feel the developer pushing against their limitations to release something that punches far above its own weight.

Also, both these games are very cheap, even at full price!

Narita Boy is a really cool glitch aesthetic sidescroller

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is a 2D top-down space shooter with RPG text-adventure elements outside of the combat scenarios. I found it a super fun game with an insane amount of content. Probably over a hundred hours worth. There's a bunch of weapon and defense customization when it comes to combat, and there's probably thousands of varieties of ship you can build for whatever duty you need it to do.

It's admittedly gotten a lot of shout outs with Diablo's release, but Grim Dawn. Just a super great old school ARPG with a fun multi class system. I think I made a mistake by letting it be one of the first in the genre I really got into, so it's kinda tough to find another one that competes.

Spelunky HD

A roguelike platformer. While it lacks any meta-progression (like the similar Rogue Legacy games), the core platforming keeps me coming back again and again. The systems-based nature of the game keeps things fresh through many play-throughs.

Umurangi Generation

A photography game that's more cyberpunk than the game titled Cyberpunk. It gradually introduces you into its neon-soaked, Neon Genesis Evangelion-inspired world where humanity fights the good fight against kaiju.

Florence

A story of love, loss, and moving on.

Hyper Light Drifter is a really pretty game with tight controls, fair difficulty, excellent music, and some of the best atmosphere of any game I've played.