21) Poyo

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Freeware’s littered with great platformers - the genre absolutely thrives in this non-commercial environment - and Poyo is one of the best of its kind. Rather than a sprawling adventure, Poyo is broken into challenging levels. Death resets the level, forcing you to master every nuance before being allowed to move on.

20) Blocksum

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If Tetris was an exercise in spatial awareness, then Blocksum has you adding up dozens of combinations of numbers to match and remove similar sums. With an exponential difficulty curve that quickly rips open your false sense of security, Blocksum is like Brain Training for people who actually enjoy playing video games too.

19) Death Worm

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Imagine you’re a big bloody worm. You’d be pretty annoyed, and if you were big enough, you’d want to mess up some cattle and trucks. Now you can, with this simple but addictive game, in which you play a massive sandworm that uses his forward momentum to bring down biplanes and scoffs animals to stay alive.

18) Off-Road Velociraptor Safari

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Take one jeep, one spikey ball on a chain, and put loads of velociraptors a little too far apart, and you’ve got Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. Using the Unity Web Player - a browser plug-in that, unlike Flash, is specifically made for games - ORVS looks shockingly good in a Firefox window, and is solid, uncomplicated fun to boot.

17) Frozzd

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Frozzd merges the planetoid-navigating of Super Mario Galaxy and the minion-gathering of Pikmin, while filling in the gaps with some highly original design. The objective is to rescue the frozen Mubblies, who join your side as you fight to free all their mates.

16) The Blob

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Sometimes the sheer graphical friendliness of indie games makes you wonder why all the big companies are chasing after some gory bullshit version of reality. Instead of all of that nonsense, The Blob sees you painting a dull grey planet all the colours of the rainbow, and has more than enough charm to force you to overlook its adorable flaws.