This year’s PAX East and Game Developers Conference left a lot of games in their wakes. Really, a lot. Way more than 30. But now that those shows’ hubbub (and resulting illnesses) has died down, we’ve had time to pare down our full lists from what we played to what we're dying to play again.

For this year's annual round up of noteworthy indies, we've settled on 30 gems, most of which we haven’t mentioned in Ars’ pages before. These showcase games have been enjoyed on show floors, at private parties, and between bathroom entrances. These are the up-and-coming games that, once they're available for everyone, we think you'll want to play everywhere, too. (In alphabetical order...)

Dec 19, 2014 The 25 best video games of 2014. Hits to lesser-known indie gems, these are the 25 games that have kept our reviewers glued to their gigantic HD televisions this year. To be released for. Jan 30, 2017 When it comes to personal computers, the Mac has never been known as a gaming heavyweight: Apple doesn't focus on building machines that have the hard-core processing and graphics power you might find in, say, a Razor PC laptop. That said, there are still a number of excellent games available to play on your Mac — especially of the indie variety. Dec 24, 2015 The 10 best indie games of 2015: N, Her Story, Undertale, and more Suriel Vazquez @SurielVazquez December 24, 2015 8:05 AM Downwell is one of the biggest surprises on mobile this year.

Avalanche 2: Super Avalanche

Developer: Beast Games
Platforms: Windows
Available: Beta/demo available now, final release TBD
Website

Before the endless runner genre exploded, countless bus and train riders killed time with the endless jumper. Smartphone games like Doodle Jump and Ninjatown: Trees of Doom aimed casual gamers toward the skies. The genre is getting more sophisticated these days, particularly in the form of this summer’s Knightmare Tower.Avalanche 2: Super Avalanche looks to take the genre even higher.

The overlong name should probably be stricken. The original Avalanche was a rudimentary Flash game, and its sequel blows far past it. This is no casual Doodle Jump-style affair—blocks continually fall from the sky, but slowly enough so that you’re able to hop and climb up them to stay airborne and push your total height as much as possible.

Enemies and obstacles soon appear, including some particularly large beasts. But smart hoppers can find power-ups, like weapons, wings, and sticky gloves to even the battle. Keep on climbing, and customization shops, banks, and missions appear over time to keep the endless hopping interesting and diverse.

Though its colorful, pixelated style may have made it look like the most modest member of this round up, Super Avalanche’s to-the-seams amount of content makes it perhaps the most exciting of the bunch. That is, assuming you can actually hop high enough through the game's brutal upward climb to find all of it.

-Sam Machkovech

Below

Developer: Capy Games
Platforms: Windows, Xbox One
Available: TBD
Website

Throw together the basic exploration structure of The Legend of Zelda games, the art style of Sword & Sworcery EP, the punishing survivalism of Don’t Starve, and the cinematic simplicity of Out of This World, and you’d have something approaching the experience of Below.

The demo I played recently presented a stark, minimalist world where it always seems to be raining until a descent into the dangerous, randomly generated caverns scattered around the island world. There, I scrounged for materials to light my way, gathered weapons to use against natural predators large and small, and tried to piece together a path around traps and hazards. This is not a forgiving game; a few wrong moves sent me back to the beginning of the cavern, forcing me to work my way back to my corpse just to get back all the stuff I had acquired.

It's all presented with a striking art style reminiscent of tilt-shift photography, with a hard focus on the area surrounding your character and a gradual blurring of focus as you go up and down the screen. The general lack of ambient music and text in the demo made it all feel quite lonely and claustrophobic too. Those looking for a good, long wander should keep their eyes out for this one.

-Kyle Orland

Bounden

Developer: Game Oven & The Dutch National Ballet
Platforms: iOS
Available: May 21
Website

A whole lot of iPhone games use the hardware’s motion and tilt sensors to control on-screen characters. Fewer use it as a way to encourage you to move your own body in a specific way. Fewer still do that in such a beautiful and intuitive way as Bounden.

To start a game of Bounden, two players simply place their thumbs on the dots sitting on opposite ends of the iPhone and hold them there. A 3D-rendered globe appears on the screen with a hollow white circle hovering above and small raised dots popping up on the side. The game, such as it is, involves tilting and twisting the iPhone to move the globe so those dots line up with the hovering circle, like a key going in a lock.

As a single player game, this process would be singularly boring. But with two players facing each other, thumbs welded to either side of the iPhone, this basic mechanic essentially forces them into a dance routine designed by the Dutch National Ballet. Lining up those dots involves a whole lot of turning, spinning, and swaying that's loosely tied to the music coming out of the iPhone speakers (though the timing is not all that strict).

It's an elegant and intuitive interface that results in some amazing experiences. Some of the patterns require twisting under the opposing player’s arm or otherwise contorting yourselves into difficult positions that can't help but bring a grin to your face. The closest thing I can compare it to is Dance Central, but Bounden is much more free-flowing and abstract, not to mention it's intimate thanks to the requirement of a second player facing you. This is the kind of game I can see pulling out as a great icebreaker at parties, and it's wholly unlike anything else on the iPhone.

-Kyle Orland

Buffalo

Developer: TiltFactor
Platforms: Cards
Available: Now
Website

A card game? What gives? Forgive us a rare dalliance into the printed side of gaming, but Buffalo took this year’s GDC by storm. It sold out at the fest’s official merch shop, making a bunch of tacky GDC ’14 hoodies jealous in the process.

The game appears pretty simple on the surface. One player is a judge and lays down two cards at a time, a combination of an adjective and a noun—“South American” and “twin,” perhaps, or “masculine” and “psychologist.” The rest of the players then shout whatever fitting name, real or fictional, matches that combo, and the judge gives cards to the earliest correct answer. Whoever has the most cards at game’s end wins.

Unlike recent card-group games like Cards Against Humanity and even Apples to Apples, Buffalo’s instant appeal is in freeing players from their own limiting hands of cards. Shouting and pleading become the default mode, and it’s always nice to shout the name of someone in the room to win a quick pair. (“Redheaded” and “journalist,” here!)

Beyond that surface-level fun, the game has some secret sauce. A few card combinations can prove head-scratchers, especially when they touch on gender and ethnic stereotypes; players can always grab a few more cards if the group blanks, but these moments were intentionally built into the game by its creators, a research team at Dartmouth College. Once you’ve played the game a few times, check out this PDF that touches on why the team made particular design decisions. (But definitely play the game first.)

-Sam Machkovech

Crypt of the Necrodancer

Developer: Brace Yourself Games
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Available: TBD 2014
Website

Rogue-likes are all the rage among in-the-know gamers these days, but it wasn’t so long ago that rhythm games were the brave new genre taking the world by storm. If those gaming trends happened simultaneously, we’d have likely seen a game concept like Crypt of the Necrodancer much sooner.

On the surface, it’s your basic randomly generated, top-down dungeon crawler, with plenty of little bad guys to fight and loot to collect. Where it sets itself apart is in the persistent beat that drives every action in the game—everything, from movement on the square grids to attacks to the enemies’ patterns, has to be entered using directional inputs on these downbeats, matching the spooky driving dance music in the background. You can stop and collect yourself, but there are bonuses associated with keeping a flow of inputs on every single beat, meaning you have to plan ahead to keep things moving smoothly.

Like the best Rogue-likes, you start out weak but unlock new abilities as you go. These include ranged attacks and magic spells that can heal you or hurt the opponents, all activated with diagonal combinations of directional input. Also in true genre tradition, you only have one life before you have to start over, forcing a good tug-of-war between careful planning and quick action.

Things are overwhelming enough with the keyboard, but the game always seems to draw a crowd at shows thanks to the USB dance pad support. The game is an incredibly good workout in this mode, and it requires quite a bit of coordination to pull off. Still, Crypt is definitely possible to beat with your feet after some practice.

-Kyle Orland

Darknet

Developer: E McNeil
Platforms: Oculus Rift / Windows, Mac, Linux
Available: Demo available now (Max/Windows)
Website

For the most part, the Oculus Rift demos and in-development games released so far have been conversions of the kind of standard, first-person experiences you’d expect to see displayed on a TV screen or monitor, simply made more immersive by the use of a head-mounted display. It's interesting, then, that the developers behind Darknet are using the headset to power a puzzle game that usually wouldn't need any sort of first-person viewpoint to begin with.

After an intense trip down a tunnel of light at the beginning of the demo, Darknet places the player in front of a vast lattice of laser-light nodes meant to represent cyberspace in true '80s hacker movie fashion. The light puzzle gameplay involves hacking these nodes with a cascading virus while avoiding “eater” nodes that propagate out from node to node to thwart your efforts.

The short early demo I got to try didn't really have enough meat to sell me on the overall gameplay concept, but being able to crane my neck to glance around the vast wall of virtual Internet nodes was a heady experience, especially when everything around me descended into a wall of chaotic light during a cascading failure. Regardless of how the game itself turns out, its development seems important for proving that virtual reality games can be about more than wandering around virtual spaces.

-Kyle Orland

When it comes to personal computers, the Mac has never been known as a gaming heavyweight: Apple doesn't focus on building machines that have the hard-core processing and graphics power you might find in, say, a Razor PC laptop.

That said, there are still a number of excellent games available to play on your Mac — especially of the indie variety. Two-person development teams and small studios shine on Apple's laptops and desktops, building stories with smart twists and heart-wrenching endings.

There have been many great indie titles for Mac over the years, especially with the advent of the Steam Store, but here are our all-time favorites.

Braid

I'm not generally the type to get overly invested in a game — I'm more of a book and movie person. But when I picked up Braid in 2009 after an off-hand recommendation from a friend, I found myself completely captivated by its mechanics and story.

On its face, Braid is a simple puzzle platformer: You play a man named Tim searching for a princess across the landscape of a strange world, encountering puzzles as you progress through each level. But the true delight of the game is in its controls: Not only can you run forward, jump, and the like — but you can rewind time at any moment, reversing your decisions and movements. It's a simple but beautiful mechanic and quickly becomes one of the primary ways you can solve the hardest puzzles; all the while, it makes you think about time and movement in a completely different way.

Years after its release, Braid is still considered a masterpiece — and it's not hard to see why. (If you can't — just rewind.)

Firewatch

We've said a lot about the magic of Firewatch on iMore over the last year, but the Campo Santo/Panic collaboration continues to merit praise. The 3D mystery and exploration game, which places you as a firewatch in a national park around the late 1980s, captures the essential beauty of being alone in the U.S. wilderness — and the eerieness factor, too. The voice acting here is also top-tier; this is a game that demands headphones and a wistful spirit.

Gone Home

Another entry in the first-person mystery genre, Gone Home puts you in the shoes of a student recently returned from a lengthy overseas trip to her family house, only to find it empty — with her younger sister apparently vanished. It's a wonderful example of the mystery and exploration genre, providing just enough of a creepy flair to keep you on the edge of your seat with just a few major jump-out scares.

For all of its intrigue, however, the game's core centers around family, ambition, and love — and paints those feelings with wrenching truths.

Transistor

Modern RPGs are a dime a dozen, but none are painted in quite so stunning a manner as Transistor. Supergiant Games's sci-fi/action game sets you on a path through a futuristic electro-punk city with a mystical weapon and enemies to outwit and defeat. Though shorter than your average Final Fantasy entry, Transistor nevertheless captivates and offers great replay value with its quests and power-ups — though I'd settle for just exploring its beautifully rendered environments.

Stardew Valley

This was an outlier pick for our indie games list courtesy Mobile Nations video producer Justus Perry, but I have to admit that I quickly fell in love with it myself after a few hours. If you're a fan of simulation games but want a little more quirk and a little less 'send your Sim to work for the fortieth time' monotony, Stardew Valley offers you the chance to run your own pixelated farm, interact with the locals, defeat (or join forces with) a possibly evil corporation, explore caverns, and create all sorts of endless weird cooking experiments.

In a month where it's been hard to regularly read Facebook or Twitter, Stardew Valley is an appropriately delightful escape from the real world.

Indie Game Websites

FTL: Faster Than Light

If you've ever dreamed of captaining a starship, it's hard not to love FTL. Subset Games's tactical strategy title puts you in the captain's chair on your way to save the galaxy — if you can make it through any number of insane and sometimes impossible challenges. And those, honestly, end up being the heart of the game: You become attached to your ship and crew — even when you end up accidentally killing them and having to start over.

Your favorite indie games for Mac?

What are your favorite indie games for the Mac? Let us know below!

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