Animal Well - A pleasant surprise
I recently finished playing Animal Well -- an indie game developed by Billy Basso and published by BIGMODE, the publishing company owned by YouTuber videogamedunkey.
Animal Well is great and the story behind its making is admirable. The game was apparently developed over the course of 7 years and the entire engine was written from scratch. The executable that's provided is a tiny ~34 MB. Billy did all the music, sounds, art, and programming. At first, during the after hours from his day job, and later full-time. It all seems to have paid off quite well.
At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to play this game in order to get out of my comfort zone. Typically my time gets dedicated to a handful of genres: survival horror, RPGs, and what I'll call "general story-driven AAA games". Part of this was motivated by me complaining about not having any indie game ideas. I spend plenty of time writing tools (as a job and hobby) and I understand the technical aspects of game development -- but I've felt creatively bankrupt when it comes to trying to execute on some kind of actual vision.
So getting some fresh ideas from a genre I'd normally never engage with seemed like a good idea. I honestly can't recall the last time I played a metroidvania if at all. It's not that there's something inherently bad that I don't like about them, I've just never been immediately struck by the appeal of one until now. Maybe it's the idea of being limited to a 2D canvas that felt like a turn-off. A subconscious thought that you couldn't possibly make an interesting game under those constraints (despite common advice telling you otherwise). I'm happy to have been proven wrong!