Appreciate you not jumping down my throat. You’re right, it is a low bar, and HD2 does clear it pretty easily. But you and I both know that publishers won’t hear the part about the game being fun (or they won’t care). My point isn’t that HD2 is bad, just that publishers will see its success and completely misinterpret why it’s successful. They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.

The real message being sent is that you can release a $40 always-online PVE game with MTXs and rootkit anti cheat and gamers will tolerate all of it if they think it’s fun…

Pepper Grinder is an amazing little retro-style 2D platformer that took the burrow ability from Ori 2 and made a whole game around it. It’s novel, fast-paced, and surprisingly polished! Made me wish the demo was longer than 3 levels.

There’s been a recent boom in retro-style 3D platformers, so there’s no shortage of good options to choose from:

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Lunistice
Pseudoregalia
Toree 3D and the rest of the Toree series
Frogun
Corn Kidz 64
Cavern of Dreams

Upcoming:

Toree Saturn
The Big Catch
DoubleShake (technically 2.5d)

There are more, but these are the ones I can think of.