Games

A Robot Named Fight! https://www.arobotnamedfight.com/

"A Robot Named Fight is a Metroidvania roguelike focused on exploration and item collection. Explore a different, procedurally-generated labyrinth each time you play and discover randomized power-ups to traverse obstacles, find secrets and explode meat beasts."

It's such a good game, almost everything is perfect IMO, I have over 200 hours in it and still go back to it every now and then. The lone developer also made the source code public a while ago, so there are mods, forks, spinoffs etc. being worked on.

Everhood is really unique and id recommend it to anyone who enjoys Undertale.

I also want to shout out just shapes and beats which is a good time and I pray it'll see a sequel

I was mildly a Borderlands fan, but then I played Tales from the Borderlands and fell in love. It's such a great game with amazing writing and music that I'm always surprised to hear that most people, including fans of the main Borderlands games, have never heard of it.

Are visual novels allowed? If they are I strongly recommend you:

Hotel Dusk and its sequel, Last Window. Time Hollow.

All these three games are for the Nintendo DS.

Deathkarz 1999.
Had more Hours in that game than in iRacing now

Environmental Station Alpha is a good metroidvania IMO, and it has just over 1000 reviews on Steam. It has good platforming, combat, sound design, and chunky pixels. Not the most expansive or complex metroidvania, but it’s surprisingly polished and costs less than $10.

If you like Soulslikes The Surge is a really good sci-fi take on the genre. It succeeds in the vagueness, the atmosphere, and the combat. It has a bit of a gimmick with how you obtain parts by targeting and dismembering limbs which is really fun. However the story kinda goes off the rails near the end and the last few areas of the game are arguably the worst designed levels of the game. Plus the boss fights can be a PITA despite being super cool design wise.

I don't see it brought up as often as things like Nier or Mortal Shell though, and IMO it's better than both of those.

N64 Timesplitters, had tons of fun with friends in that

I really liked Unsighted and didn’t feel like I saw a whole lot of hype around it at the time.