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The Impossible Lair is a much more enjoyable experience than the first game in the series, keeping the same slick controls and using the smaller overall scale to its benefit. Even the most annoying gimmicks never overstay its welcome, the smaller-but-in-greater-quantity levels keep things fresh, and the world map being a top-down Zelda adventure gives you a nice change of pace between levels, preventing the gameplay from becoming stale despite the lack of unlockable special moves. To a trained eye, it's clear corners has been cut in some places (the achievements being the most obvious) but very few of the cut corners impacts the feel-good-ness of the core gameplay.

The companion spinoff game to Ritual of The Night is pretty good in its own right. It's very short, probably can be beaten in ~2 hours by a player of average skill, but that's true to the source material of NES games that get longevity by being difficult. The game's main mechanic is that you control a party of up to 4 characters at once, and can switch between them at will, each one with their own special quirks and abilities. If someone dies, you don't lose any progress, but that character can't be used again until you clear the level or game over. Combined with how the special abilities lets you take alternate paths through the stages, this adds a lot of tactical thinking to the action-focused moment-to-moment gameplay.

There's no need to play the main Bloodstained game to understand this game, since the plot events are not related, but playing Ritual of the Night first has the added bonus that you'll recognize essentially every song, boss, and even mook enemies.

Baba is You is a the personification of a meta game. You change rules to be able to solve puzzles, but as you progress through the game, you will transcend the definition of a level and fall down a rabbit hole where all the meaning of the world dissolves as you learn more and more ways to manipulate things you once thought were core mechanics innate to the world.

At first, you will stumble blindly, trying to make sense of what you see. You experiment, you make mistakes, you're forced to take a step back (with the handy undo function) and rethink your solution. But the pieces gradually fall into place as you figure out the trick, and armed with the new knowledge, you can solve the puzzle. But as you gain mastery over the game's mechanics, you will manipulate not just pushable blocks, but concepts, core mechanics of the game, and at the end, you will push around entire levels to your liking as just a simple step in solving an even greater mystery. (That's not just me being poetic, that's an actual thing you do later on in the game.)

You will learn to appreciate the beauty of a puzzle solution in a way that somebody that has not gone through the same acute pain and riveting revelations can never understand. You will learn to open your mind in a way that is essentially zen meditation. You will learn to see all things as the meaningless empty vessels they are, think about how to fill them with meaning, and use them to achieve your goals. And you will emerge on the other side as a better person, albeit with a melted brain.

Kero Blaster is a short arcade game by the guy that made Cave Story (and essentially revived the metroidvania genre all by himself, a major reason why they're still one of the most popular genres for indie developers!), that alone is all the reason you need to play this game. But hey, you probably wanna know what the game is about. You walk and jump around shooting things in a series of stages, each one has light metroidvania elements (hidden paths with money for upgrades) but the game is mostly linear. It's a very hard game, especially the boss fights, but since you don't lose anything on death, you can get more and more upgrades each time you fail until you're strong enough to handle the challenge. And despite just being a simple arcade game, it manages to tell a story about being too absorbed in your work and not thinking about what's important in life.

Axiom Verge borrows its visual style from Metroid 1, but its exploration mechanics are modernized so that you don't get lost in the same confused walking-for-hours way. The placement of obstacles you can't overcome until you get another powerup leaves big ugly holes in your map, and getting back to cover them is as cathartic for your sense of neatness as it is genius level design. Most weapons are optional and has no progression utility, letting you stick with your favorite gun instead of having to constantly switch to blast blocks. The game being set inside a digital world that can be corrupted and hacked creates a lot of new ways to solve problems, and a lot of the new powerups you get felt completely unexpected for a Metroid veteran such as myself. The fact that it's all made by just 1 guy is even more amazing.

I got this game knowing it was really good, having seen a fair chunk of LPs/streams of it, but I still got blown away by how good it is. Heavenly music, moody visuals and a set of mechanics that makes aimless exploration fun and engaging, with bosses, upgrades and other core loop mechanics really polished... but intentionally taking a back seat as something just there to facilitate, reward and enable exploration. The result is that the game feels really mysterious, and you just wanna dig deeper and learn more.

This game can't decide whether it wants to be Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, or a normal action RPG that's not brutally difficult, so you gotta decide for it. If you're just prepared to try different playstyles a lot (and try both with and without the NPC companions) you'll probably find something you like with this game. A bit cutscene-heavy (and often at the worst possible moments, like the moment before you get to activate a new bonfire) but I'm not really playing it for the story so eh.

After 6 games, the series has finally figured out how to play to its strengths and get rid of its weaknesses. Everything in Disgaea 5 has an use, there's very little downtime, and if you're the kind of person that can have fun spending 1 hour straight micromanaging things in menus watching your numbers go up, this is the game for you.

If you're actually reading this, here's some details on what sets this apart from standard SRPGs/tactics games:
-Almost every map has special magic effects called Geo Panels, which stacks the odds against you in some unfair way and requires some puzzling to deal with.
-You can lift and throw units, speeding up traversal across the map and letting you reposition enemies so you can hit them with your best skills.
-Lifting units can be used to create towers that act as a single unit, with special combination attacks. Not super good if you're surrounded, but lets you overpower a single strong enemy that's out of your league normally, and a good way to share EXP with a weak character without putting them into danger.
-The equipment system is super in-depth, letting you go into random dungeons to strengthen an item. These random dungeons are home to the strongest enemies and the best loot in the game, leading to cycles of getting better and better stuff.
-There's essentially no level cap, so if you're into random dungeons just for the heck of it, you can do that for ages once you're through the main story.

Disgaea 5 brings a bunch of new stuff, like the ability-equip system from Fire Emblem Awakening, a passive grinding mode that lets you send characters you don't need to do stuff in the background over time so you don't need to manually level them up, and a squad system that lets you give characters tasks that affects team/base operations based on their skill. Rebalances in how money, mana and skill experience works makes you constantly be short in supplies and having to think about what to do next instead of the answer to everything being "grind and things automatically get better". Overall changes for the better, and when bundled with new faster and snappier skill animations, there's almost no dead time. (Though some of the menus still get a bit painful to navigate and makes you wish they could fit more information in so there'd be less scrolling...)

This game reached an unattainable level of hype through one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever, developed by the guy that invented the Metroidvania genre, with the express goal of being the biggest, bestest metroidvania ever created.
The game isn't even fully finished yet, but it still lives up to every bit of the hype. You're doing yourself a disservice reading this review instead of playing it.

Pretty good metroidvania! It's short, but makes up for it by being brutally hard - if you thought being able to stop time whenever you want was gonna make things a cakewalk, you're sorely mistaken. The second area has an enemy type that moves so quickly you can't even hit them if you don't slow down time before you shoot, and it all goes upnhill from there. The game rewards you for using the time abilities judiciously by letting you recover ammo, so the optimal playstyle involves complex manoeuvers where you freeze time to land cheap hits, then unleash special abilities using all the MP you just recovered, clearing the entire room in seconds, having fun AND being an effective warrior at once!

You probably won't enjoy the story a lot if you don't know a bunch of stuff about Touhou lore before you start, but it's mostly there to glue the gameplay together and pretty easy to zone out if you're not invested in it.