Atomic Heart is an "everything and the kitchen sink" type of adventure that feels like it should explode from the weight of its ambitions, yet keeps it together through a combination of good pacing of new elements and a deeply likeable world.
Radiant Silvergun is considered a classic for a reason, and it holds up today as strongly as it did on release.
Minishoot Adventures is an excellent twin-stick quest in a wonderfully-illustrated 2D world that's equal parts shooting and poking about to see what might be hiding under a bush or between the rocks. The story isn't particularly deep, but it gets the job done, and at the end you'll have an energetic little village filled with a number of different friendly ships that have each helped the adventure along in their own way. Fighting through the enemies also feels like an achievement, especially seeing as the number and variety of encounters means that few fights end up similar to each other. Zipping and dodging through enemy firepower while sending back a fan of bullets, deciding when to use the overdrive and when to hold back, and getting ready to figure out the pattern of the next barrage never gets old, and interspersing the encounters with a secret or two is the best way to cool down between one burst of intensity and the next. Minishoot Adventures is a fantastic little game that deserves all the love it can get, and a great fusion of two genres that don't get to play together anywhere near often enough.
Titan Souls is a quietly beautiful little epic. The contrast of the boss fights with the peaceful exploration works to create a world of contrasts, broken but not dead.
We Are Doomed was a great twin-stick shooter last year and it's only gotten better with the year's worth of upgrades. The enemy types and challenges are carefully tuned to allow massive destruction, but still require good planning and split-second decisions as the safe areas gradually disappear.
That's not as negative as it might sound, though, because huge AAA games with massive production and marketing budgets have come out and been completely forgotten in the seven years since Super Stardust first landed on the PS3, but the advantage of a great arcade game is that it's timeless. It's just as much fun today to blast through massive fields of rocks and dodge-y, twisty, explodey enemy waves as it was in the early days of the PS3, and if the rumored (but incredibly likely) Morpheus compatibility works out then it will be great in VR, too.
Race the Sun was a load of good arcade-style fun on PC and the PS4 version is a near-perfect port. The heart of the game made it intact and, while it's a shame to be missing the player creations, the daily challenge is always worth returning to.
Don't Starve is a fantastic, huge, deadly ball of entertainingly gothic survival. It requires a self-motivated player to get the most from it, but once you start to learn its systems, each game lasts a bit longer than the previous one, and the ability to experience more of the world reveals more secrets and avenues of exploration.
I have to admit that I wasn't easily sold on Not A Hero. It was difficult to figure out how it wanted me to play at first, and even the easiest levels saw a lot of dead BunnyLord minions due to arguing with the combination dash/cover button and forgetting to keep an eye on my ammo count.
Life Goes On could use a last pass in a aspects of its controls, but the puzzle design is what makes the game work so well. Spiked conveyor belts carry bodies to pressure switches, but only if you can figure out how to turn off the flamethrowers to avoid incineration.
Spectra is a fantastic little track-racer with a killer beat and instantly accessible gameplay. Each song is long enough to provide a good challenge as the track gets more cluttered the longer you play, and the percentage bar showing how much song is left means you're never left wondering if it's ever going to end.
Neon Struct isn't a perfect game, and technically its main gameplay focus of stealth is fairly simplistic. Enemies aren't that smart, darkness is overpowered and once you've learned its rhythms it's very easy to remain undiscovered, or at least not get caught if you're seen.
While The Road to Gehenna may not be as expansive as its parent game, it provides exactly the kind of devious challenges its fans are wanting more of. The difficulty starts at the same level The Talos Principle had in the latter half of the game and doesn't let up, although it doesn't get much harder either.
Trackmania Turbo is a giant, gorgeous world of arcade stunt-racing action.
Anarcute is a warm and fuzzy, utterly adorable game that plays with mob violence and social unrest.
Eschatos merges the classic vertical shooter with a modern style of action while avoiding bullet hell, making for a fast, accessible and incredibly fun dose of pure arcade goodness
While the PC port of One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 is weak in technical terms, the game itself is very playable. The Dynasty Warriors formula has been honed over endless iterations to be great fun, and if it's a bit on the easy side that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Planet of the Eyes is a short but memorable trip through a weird-worlds sci-fi alien landscape. The strange creatures and fantastic environments create a nicely bizarre landscape to platform through, and the audio logs give a concise, well-acted story of a ship worker whose only friend is the AI he created.
Death Ray Manta is pure '80s arcade, but the way we'd like to remember it rather than how it actually was. Quick, accessible gameplay with not an ounce of fat on its bones is backed up by an art style that's more about design than intricacy.
Whether it's figuring out how to land on a platform so that, when it starts swinging, you don't get dumped into the acid below, or guiding a rocket up an angled shaft so it carries you to the plants above, or sacrificing a chunk of mass so that it can get fried carrying electricity from generator to door, Mushroom 11 demands each area be looked at with the lessons learned from previous sections. The wasteland of the corpse of civilization is not a forgiving place, but with a little care and a huge amount of perseverance, the fungus' journey may let it see what lies at the conclusion of the unforgettable journey of Mushroom 11.