Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people's witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It's a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.

Tactical Breach Wizards

It's made by the Developer who made Gunpoint and Heat Signature (also amazing games if you somehow haven't heard of them BTW).

It's a turn based tactics/puzzle game where you command a squad of wizards with different magical abilities to dispatch a room full of enemies. A bit like Into the Breach but hand crafted scenarios, not procedurally generated.

It also has a fun story, character customisation, and ability unlocks. Almost every scenario has a bunch of optional extra goals, so you decide how hard you want to wreck your brain. Highly recommend it!

Edit: It seems people are aware of this one, I really thought it was a bit niche.

Chex quest. I got this game in a cereal box back in 1996. It defined my childhood.

Now they have an HD version on steam. 10/10 good times.

https://www.chexmix.com/chexquest/

Space Station 14!

Pizza Tower is a love letter to the Wario Land series, and from my experience, is a drug trip and a half for the sheer absurdity of the game. If you do pick this up, I recomend going in blind :3

Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be "wired" correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.

20 Small Mazes

If you're looking to kill a couple hours and love puzzle games, give 20 Small Mazes a go. I really enjoyed the variety.

Best of all, it's free.

I think this is the only thread where I actually haven't seen any of the games before.

Another game I enjoyed was The Eternal Castle (remastered). It's a remake of a game from 1987. The animation is great and the visual style is really cool.

Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.

Quest Master. Mario Maker meets Zelda dungeons, done well. It deserves way more attention than it's currently getting, and it's pretty fun with huge potential despite being early access.

The Precursors.

A first person scifi FPS-RPG. Developed in Ukraine. Very unique experience wrapped inside of a concept that's been done before. High slavjank tolerance required.

MOTHERED

An immersive first-person horror adventure where you play the role of LIANA - a young girl who arrives home after major surgery and is met with a strange mannequin claiming to be her mother.

This is part of a trilogy which I highly recommend checking out. All three of these are great.

Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There's a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it's now down to $1, and it's a steal at that price.

Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle Game

It's a word-puzzle game that incrementally teaches you how to use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to find & replace text. Some of the puzzles add silly restraints for you to work around, and the game has charming NPC coworkers that introduce each challenge.

Moonlight Pulse (83 reviews)

Metroidvania with character-switching

This 2D platformer metroidvania has memorable characters and very cool worldbuilding. You switch between characters to match their abilities to the right situations. They live on a living, planet-sized creature and are fighting off the parasites that are slowly killing their creature-planet. You'll swim through its blood vessels and explore its organs.

It's not super long—I finished the story in 9 hours. It's just about the right length to satisfy.

Calcium Contract is a boomer shooter with a pretty unique rewind feature. Humorous with old school feels, but for a modern time. It’s a one man project.

Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.

The Masterplan is a true heist game. You know that fantasy of playing out a heist from Heat? This is that game. It's top down, and you control all of the members of the crew. You pick your time to initiate the heist, you hold up people at gunpoint, you prevent them from being a hero, and you try your best to get out with the best score that you can. It's a real bummer that this team never got to make another game.

Evoland 2

Evoland 2 is an unique RPG, with its graphic style and gameplay changing as you progress through a deep storyline based on time travel.

Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it's sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like "the creep" from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.

Pioneer is a great remake of the original Elite Space Sim.
It simulates the entire galaxy (core systems are hand-built, everything else procedurally generated), allows landing on planets, trading, combat, etc.
It features the original game's Newtonian physics, so actually arriving safely at your destination is a challenge in itself, similar to flying in Kerbal Space Program. But the HUD gives you all the info you need for that.

Oh, and it's fully open source and moddable.

This one isn't super new, but Druidstone. It's a story based tactics game with some RPG elements and it's just excellently done. I've never heard anyone else mention it and I think more people should know about it.

I always like to give a mention to Your Spider. There are very few reviews (one of which are mine), but the game definitely deserves more attention.

Tametsi

Simple premise is basically Minesweeper, but all the puzzles are handcrafted with some neat designs and concepts that will stretch your puzzle solving to the limit. Also importantly, no guessing required to solve and it’s dirt cheap for the amount of hours of puzzles you get!

ECHO (2017)! It's an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.

Trailer

You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.

You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I'm really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)

To me, Ctrl Alt Ego is not well known enough. It is an immersive sim in the style of Prey. You play as a robot roaming a station, where your Ego (like a spirit) can pass into and control all sorts of objects to solve puzzles, evade, control or kill enemies. The graphics aren't impressive (it was made by a 2-person team) but the gameplay is so interesting and the story is surprisingly compelling and funny!

Bugvasion TD (9 reviews)

It's a charming little tower defense game where you fight bugs with very fun abilities. I also play tested it so I may be a tad biased but I think it's underated and fun :3

CrossCode, great characters and great story. Really good game.

In Grotto, you play the role of a soothsayer living in a cave who is occasionally visited by members of a tribal society living nearby. They come to you with problems, and they want you to present your opinion, but you can't speak. You have access to constellations of stars, which each hold different meanings, and you must present your answers in the form of a single constellation, which the petitioners are left to interpret.

You'll feel a bit of frustration as your intended message is missed completely in favor of something that the petitioner wanted to hear, and the same constellation might mean different things to different people, but that's just part of the game. The story unfolds around you and its progression is communicated to you only through the explanations your petitioners give for their visit. Each is a uniquely unreliable narrator, so what you believe is for you to decide.

Two endings, and an interesting story with some occasionally unexpected consequences that might make you feel bad, so if a game giving you a case of the sads is unappealing, maybe take that into consideration.