Minit

If you played Half-Minute Hero, you know there’s loads of potential in bite-sized reimaginings of traditionally epic genres, so it should come as no surprise that Minit is great. For everyone else, imagine Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask combined, squeezed through the filter of Undertale, and played on fast-forward, and you have Minit, which you will be unsurprised to hear is great. The Undertale part comes from the too-retro-for-its-own-good aesthetic and the puzzles, which are formed by twisting accepted genre conventions in every conceivable way. It didn’t inherit the narrative significance of its influences, though; it’s mostly nonsense, but it’s extremely entertaining nonsense. The timed nature of the gameplay enforces economic level design and sharp writing, and the puzzles usually provide clever hints that occupy an agreeable middle ground between obscure and trivial. There’s technically combat as well, but even that is more of a staging area for puzzles.