#1: Astro Bot 

Astro Bot combines the best of 3D Mario platforming and Crash Bandicoot’s arcade-y death gauntlets into a gorgeous, whimsical, and fun adventure through an elaborate, sci-fi amusement park. It feels like a much bigger game distilled and refined down into its most important, impactful, and revelatory parts. Each moment is designed to spark joy, from the simple pleasures of pulling on a string and having what it’s attached to explode into a cloud of confetti to elaborate, multi-stage boss fights against giant octopuses and robot genies.

Platformers are an old genre born of the limits of long forgotten hardware, and they aren’t always breeding grounds for surprise and innovation. But even constrained by familiar frameworks, Astro Bot works tirelessly to insert clever ideas and extract maximum satisfaction from them before quickly moving onto the next carefully crafted setpiece. The results can sometimes be so effortless, it almost feels like you’re gliding through the game rather than actually playing it. And that’s when Astro Bot gets smashed, zapped, or popped, waking you from your comfortable slumber so that you can experience the delight of eventually slipping back into the game’s well-worn grooves like a marble gliding through a Rube Goldberg machine made from bubble gum plastic and fond memories. — Ethan Gach