Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove

This is an indie darling for a reason: it's a great throwback to retro platformers like Mario 3, the Mega Man series, and Castlevania that manages to blend and iterate on said influences to the point where it so much more its own thing. Stages are sprawling, tricky (yet never overwhelmingly difficult), and have just enough unique mechanics/setpieces so that everything you see feels fresh while still allowing you to build skill from previous encounters. Boss fights are fun and frenetic, the music is excellent and really helps set the tone and mood for the stages, and the story, for what's otherwise a very simple "beat the evil Dr Wahwee and his eight robot masters" setup has a surprising amount of pathos and a genuine focus on failure and righting your wrongs. I do have misgivings, and they do pull the game down from being excellent — the controls for the pogo attack (which most platforming relies on) are uncomfortable and makes it easy to whiff and die, there's an overuse of bottomless pits and enemies appearing in front of you and knocking you in later on which made those stages really feel cheap — but ultimately... yeah. This is a really well-known-and-loved game for a reason and if you're a fan of this style of platformer at all you're really going to dig this.