I used to sing Sub Terrania’s praises long before it was cool. That game is a gem. The development team was a bunch of demoscene madmen who were able to wring miracles out of the Genesis and eventually created IO Interactive, which went on to make Hitman and the upcoming 007 game.
Their later game, Red Zone, is a technological flex like nothing else.
Valve did the same thing for the Index VR kit. They create these little brief but fully produced games to demonstrate the functionality when they release new hardware, and they’re delightful.
If you like Horrified, you should try and track down the Ravensburger Wonder Woman game. Similar style but has an awesome mechanic to prevent coop quarterbacking.
Players strategize using a set of face up cards, but receive some face down cards afterward and have to program 3 actions using the whole set without communicating, adapting plans based on the newly revealed cards. Then each action plays out simultaneously for all players. It makes sense in action and is really quite elegant. I’m a big fan.
Cottage Garden is very satisfying. You Tetris together garden pieces to fill plots and you can cover a single spot with a sleeping kitty. There’s scoring and competition, but it’s not antagonistic in any way.
I’m also a big fan of cooperative games in general.
It’s hilarious and incredible how we still haven’t made a Metroidvania game that solidly and undeniably bests the game that added the -vania in the first place.
Max Payne 2 is one of my favorite games of all time on any platform. Great memories. I don’t like how Remedy went so far down the artsy unintelligible plotting road after that, but they’re still one of the best developers out there in my opinion.