Celeste is pure. Each room offers new challenges, but the solution is always the same: jump. Jumping is remixed in dozens of different, exciting ways. Celeste is the very soul of simplicity, and that’s what makes it such a beautiful game.

Watching this brutal Super Mario clone spring hilarious, unexpected traps on a poor player is hypnotic.

Sometimes you need to punch a skeleton and use their severed arm to smack a ghost in the face. Long Live the Axe is an exciting action platformer about exploring crypts and finding keys. It mixes the sensibilities of Metroid with an arcade brawler, and it’s this week’s Indie Pick.

Super Lucky’s Tale is a delightful take on Nintendo 64-era 3D platformers. The titular fox hero wanders through a mix of free-roaming 3D and 2D platforming levels, searching for coins, letters and other collectibles in a very pretty game with responsive controls. It could use a bit more personality, but otherwise it’s…

You know that feeling you get when you ride a roller coaster? The breathless anticipation, followed by the shrieking joy and terror as you plummet down to the bottom? That’s the feeling I get when I ride the pen in Super Fancy Pants Adventure, an action-packed sidescrolling platformer.

In Mushroom Heroes, I’m looking at a fast-moving platform over a bed of spikes. Timing my jump is one thing, but figuring out which character should jump first is another. There could be a monster on the other side of the ledge, and there’s only one person who uses arrows. There might be blocks to push around,…

2 is an experimental platformer by hubol that seeks to combine curiosity and platforming. Full of wild visuals, tense boss fights, and cute mini-games, it’s a playful experience that’s a perfect choice for this week’s Indie Pick.

Slime-San is the type of twitchy, lighting-quick platformer I‘m happy to spend hours dying in.

Standby is hardcore platformer by Noclip. Blazing a trail through technicolor obstacle courses, players slide along walls, dodge lasers, and leap massive gaps. It is demanding, technical, and beautiful in motion. We rush our way through in this Kotaku Plays.

Gonner is a roguelike-inspired platformer that does not care if you think it’s too hard. When you’re playing, you tend not to care, either. It’s so damn cute and smart that every punishment, even the ones you might not deserve, is easily forgiven.

Those are some wicked lighting effects. The GIF comes from the devlog for MegaSphere, an action-RPG-roguelite-platformer currently being developed for PC, and is one in a series of GIFs demonstrating a newly introduced weapon, Storm. Lots more info here.

Pleasant. If I had to sum up Ori and the Blind Forest in one word, that would be it. The new Xbox One and PC platformer looks like a magnificently drawn kids' fantasy book sprung to life. It has the lush, magical aesthetic and inoffensive charm that gamers have come to accept—and expect—from indie games.

The inspirations for Fossil Echo include not just Ico, but also Shadow of the Colossus, the Oddworld series, and Studio Ghibli's work. With influences like that, really, the beauty is pretty much a given.

This is Timespinner, the next big PC indie platformer (I'd say metroidvania, but people don't like that word). It's being developed by Lunar Ray Games, a studio headed by an ex-Bungie employee, and it looks quite excellent.