1000 Amps

There’s no point in a list like this if it doesn’t offer at least one game you’ve never heard of before. Then to double-down, let’s have it be 11 years old (although on PC, so still perfectly functional), and almost entirely in black-and-white. But oh wow, this is the Metroidvania game you didn’t know you were missing.

A huge number of interlinked rooms exist in darkness, until you show up. By exploring, you light up a tiled room’s walls, floors, doorways, weird one-way passages, and most importantly, the light tiles that get lit when you touch them. That’s the base concept, but it gets so fantastically elaborate and challenging.

The more lights that are lit in a room, the higher you can jump, which makes every screen into its own micro-Metroidvania. But it also operates on a larger scale, with new abilities gathered as you play, offering the genre-essential requirement to return to previous rooms to reach previously inaccessible exits.

This is a game I was so desperate to convince people to play in 2012 that I cosplayed it, and I remain just as convicted that it deserves your attention in 2023. It’s so clever, so delightfully presented, and it’ll make you feel so damn smart as you solve its increasingly tricksy levels.