Pepper Grinder is an amazing little retro-style 2D platformer that took the burrow ability from Ori 2 and made a whole game around it. It’s novel, fast-paced, and surprisingly polished! Made me wish the demo was longer than 3 levels.
There’s been a recent boom in retro-style 3D platformers, so there’s no shortage of good options to choose from:
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Lunistice
Pseudoregalia
Toree 3D and the rest of the Toree series
Frogun
Corn Kidz 64
Cavern of Dreams
Upcoming:
Toree Saturn
The Big Catch
DoubleShake (technically 2.5d)
There are more, but these are the ones I can think of.
The real message being sent is that you can release a $40 always-online PVE game with MTXs and rootkit anti cheat and gamers will tolerate all of it if they think it’s fun…