15) NetHack

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An ASCII dungeon trawl from yesterdecade, with a complete lack of graphics that forces your imagination to do the work. Create potions, train your pet, and find a cunning way to rob the shopkeeper blind - the sheer number of options available to you is mind-numbing. By the time you get to the final boss, you’ll be shit-scared of capital Ds.

14) Duty and Beyond

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If an adventure game about delivering a pizza seems slightly obscure then you’d be right. The sheer, bewildering length of Duty and Beyond makes it an exercise in needless complication unseen since Douglas Adams’ Infocom adventure, Bureaucracy. No spoilers, but you end up in Egypt.

13) Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns

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Spell the main character’s name backwards and you get this round-faced platformer’s theme - evolution. Puzzles are solved either by regressing to your ancestral simian state (to jump higher and farther) or by evolving to a psychic being (to attack bosses with your psi-powers). Noitu Love is extremely polished and brimming with character.

12) Knytt

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A small creature, in a world that’s not only without boss battles, but with most characters seemingly completely uninterested in killing you. How such character can be contained in so few pixels is a mystery. If Knytt bears a passing resemblence to Within A Deep Forest (#9), that’s because it’s made by the same Swedish musician, Nicklas Nygren.

11) Narbacular Drop

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The fairy tale story of a princess who created a way of getting from one place to another very quickly. That princess was Kim Swift, and she teleported from university to Valve’s development coven with this puzzler that was to inspire The Orange Box’s quirky Portal. 

10) Seiklus

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A charming and magical platformer, Seiklus merges puzzles with simply drawn yet immediately loveable locations and landscapes. A great change of pace from the more manic Cave Story-style platformers, Seiklus also features some fantastic chip music - the sort of thing you could unashamedly slip on to your MP3 player.