This is something really special, the work of solo Finnish developer Antti Tiihonen (one of the creators of the mighty Legend Of Grimrock), and for $10, you’d be a loony not to get this. Stuffo captures that perfect sweet spot of puzzle difficulty, where you’ll sit and stare bemused at the screen for minutes at a time, but always with a solution within your reach.

This is a massive undertaking, and seemingly the work of just two people, which is mindblowing. The story didn’t hit at all for me, but I’ve found myself absorbed in that hypnotic ARPG space where I am delighted to just keep attacking and looting, while the other half of my brain listens to podcasts. And as much as I might wish for a world where indie developers are pushing the Diablo-like into entirely new directions, that world doesn’t exist, and I’m just so grateful that there’s anything else at all in the space that’s soon to be filled by the entirely standard arrangements of Diablo IV.

This comes from Adamvision, who not only has a back-catalogue of similarly hooky arcade games, but has reimagined a bunch of licensed Atari games. (Oh, and he made Lewdle.) Poosh is his triumphant return after a couple of years of doing the latter. And for the rest of this week you can pick up this latest title for almost half price, and his previous arcade games for just 50c each.

Shiner is primarily this concept, the surrounding story rather slim (although kudos for the ranch dressing-based religion), and it would be lovely to see such a mechanic built into a larger, more established RPG. Of course, this is a student thesis project, and as such is an excellent proof-of-concept for an idea that merits further realisation. Also, it’s free, so if it sounds interesting you’d be a right berk not to check it out.

This is a wisp of a game, but I just had fun playing it, and that’s the real criteria for inclusion.

More than anything else, Loop is a dollar. In fact, it’s 90 cents this week, during the sale, just in case you needed 8p for something more important. That’s completely daft, and I’d have been delighted to have spent a fiver on this. This is very smart, very nicely designed, and gorgeously presented. The only negatives are the boring name, and the peculiar developer name of “Lofi Robot”, the trademarked name of a popular Polish robot construction kit.

Melon Journey is also the very essence of “wholesome gaming”, without feeling puritanical or pallid. It’s entirely family-friendly, extremely cute, but not saccharine. It has an edge, even if that edge is entirely about melons.

What makes this work for me is a light narrative that doesn’t overly get in the way, alongside its willingness to step outside of the immediate meme’s boundaries to provide entertainment. And that it scared the bejesus out of me over and over.

Well worth grabbing! It’s tremendous fun, is a dramatically different game the second time you play it (in a way that really shows off Benard’s talent), and looks and sounds wonderful.

Most of all, Lumencraft makes busywork feel fun, the core drilling always satisfying, especially as it speeds up with more powerful drills, and it’s sweet to sit back and watch as your constructed defences take care of a wave of enemies. Or even, watch as your base just survives until the final wave is complete, and you scrape that success. I love an RTS for the rest of us, stripped down and then given more life with twin-stick combat and mining.

A twin-stick action game that crams in everything I want from the genre, into a few-hour vignette.

Oh, and it’s FREE. Presumably a requirement of being a student project, but damn, these devs need to be making money from this fantastic game. It’s so great, so smartly put together, and also the St Peter pigeon has a moustache.

As ever, the art is exceptional, and it makes great use of music. The sound effects, however, are perhaps a little cartoonish in places, somewhat tempering the tension. Overall, it maintains an excellent level of spookiness, and even managed to make someone as jump-resistant as me feel startled at one point. For its tiny price, it’s a definite pick for fans of creepy tales.

There’s so much love and detail poured into Lucy Dreaming. That this was written and drawn and developed by one guy, Tom Hardwidge, is mindblowing. This is an enormous game, both in terms of length and sheer detail. I thoroughly recommend you give it a look.

It's mystifying that something so free, so open, is the work of two people, total. I have managed to break it a couple of times, through some outlandish actions, but the majority of the time I've just been delighted to find out my cockamamy plan has worked out. It also offers that most crucial of immersive sim elements: the bit where a great plan goes to crap, and you're flailing to survive. It's a joy that Ctrl Alt Ego rarely has me wanting to reload in such moments, but instead to scramble, to try to improvise my way out of a sudden and overwhelming jam.

This is tremendous stuff, a game that could absolutely have been released alongside Raven Software’s mid-90s fantasy shooters and held up. (Although people would have been mystified by the lighting tech.) Hands Of Necromancy is a welcome addition to that fold, and HON Team have become a team to follow.

It’s been done! After thousands of years and countless deaths trying, someone has finally made Chess 2! Shotgun King: The Final Chronicles, winner of Ludum Dare 50, is the vastly improved version of the dated, low-violence game of Chess. It removes most of the pieces from the board, and gives one side a shotgun.

The game, essentially, plays like the first chapter from a larger project. This hour-and-a-half of levels ends in a satisfying boss fight, and then runs its entertaining final sequence. Which left me with an odd combination of feeling delighted at such a neat morsel of a game, and saddened that I wasn’t going to carry on playing something so fun and well made.

There’s a co-op mode, even, so you can be trapped in these escape rooms with a chum, which sounds absolutely fantastic. But on my own, Escape Simulator offers a far more tangible sense of the feeling of playing a real-world escape room, one spaceship aside, keeping things within the realms of possibility. Ooh I can’t wait for that DLC.

I’m a fair way into its puzzles, but have an awfully long way to go. As the complexity increases, the need for calm, careful exploration of each new section’s possibilities becomes more pronounced. It can look overwhelming at first, until I methodically break it down, start pulling at threads. And then when it all works, I feel frankly magnificent.

This really is one of the best Metroid-likes I’ve played, and its lower-than-usual difficulty is something I have found incredibly welcome. And I feel certain I’ll be playing it all over again when it comes out on Switch. There’s a lot here, and it entirely justifies its $20 tag.

I’ve had a great time with this, and am currently somewhere in the mid-60s of floors. The farther I’ve progressed, the more lovely details have slipped in, bits of storytelling either through prophetic dreams at campfires, or from overhearing conversations among the enemies. And the puzzles keep getting smarter too. There are lovely twists, sections where returning to the previous floor becomes necessary to progress further down, or moments to recognise how you can amend the next floor before you get there.

Nightmare Reaper is a procedurally generated retro FPS, with fresh levels every time you play. Levels that are of such high quality they often feel deliberately composed, only every now and then giving themselves away with an errant dead end. For the majority of the time, these chunk-based designs are fantastic, and then surrounded by so many clever ideas.

My unfair complaint is I want so much more of this. I think it really gets going around puzzle 19, and then you’re just six from the end! However, this is £2, and a really lovely collection of puzzles, so at this point I’m just being greedy. Yet, by puzzle 25’s fantastic sprawl, I really felt like it had found its groove. Perhaps if everyone just buys this, it’ll incentivise developer Molter to make some more! I thoroughly recommend you do.

This is a fascinating creation, brilliantly unsettling and uncanny, that plays its cards with enormous subtlety. It’s so interesting to see Southern Gothic depicted so effectively in a video game, and leaves just the right amount of mystery by the end.

I wept for Mara here. The precision with which creator Meredith Gran recreates that time, both the millennial world and the coming-of-age within it, is astonishing. It’s an incredible feat of storytelling, of recalling the deep truth of being 15-turning-16, without ever patronising. Of clinging to the security of childhood, yet desperately fighting to escape into the possibility of adulthood. It’s also lovely, very funny, beautifully written, and let’s not forget, a really decent point-and-click adventure. This is breathtakingly good.

This is one of the most compelling, consuming games I’ve played in so long. I just cannot recommend this enough.

This is all just such a great idea, so well executed, and the best digital jigsaw game I’ve played by a long stretch. That you can play a significant amount of it for free is almost silly.