This year’s PAX East and Game Developers Conference left a lot of games in their wakes. Really, a lot. Way more than 30. But now that those shows’ hubbub (and resulting illnesses) has died down, we’ve had time to pare down our full lists from what we played to what we're dying to play again.

For this year's annual round up of noteworthy indies, we've settled on 30 gems, most of which we haven’t mentioned in Ars’ pages before. These showcase games have been enjoyed on show floors, at private parties, and between bathroom entrances. These are the up-and-coming games that, once they're available for everyone, we think you'll want to play everywhere, too. (In alphabetical order...)

Avalanche 2: Super Avalanche

Developer: Beast Games

Platforms: Windows

Available: Beta/demo available now, final release TBD

Website

Before the endless runner genre exploded, countless bus and train riders killed time with the endless jumper. Smartphone games like Doodle Jump and Ninjatown: Trees of Doom aimed casual gamers toward the skies. The genre is getting more sophisticated these days, particularly in the form of this summer’s Knightmare Tower. Avalanche 2: Super Avalanche looks to take the genre even higher.

The overlong name should probably be stricken. The original Avalanche was a rudimentary Flash game, and its sequel blows far past it. This is no casual Doodle Jump-style affair—blocks continually fall from the sky, but slowly enough so that you’re able to hop and climb up them to stay airborne and push your total height as much as possible.

Enemies and obstacles soon appear, including some particularly large beasts. But smart hoppers can find power-ups, like weapons, wings, and sticky gloves to even the battle. Keep on climbing, and customization shops, banks, and missions appear over time to keep the endless hopping interesting and diverse.

Though its colorful, pixelated style may have made it look like the most modest member of this round up, Super Avalanche’s to-the-seams amount of content makes it perhaps the most exciting of the bunch. That is, assuming you can actually hop high enough through the game's brutal upward climb to find all of it.

-Sam Machkovech

Below

Developer: Capy Games

Platforms: Windows, Xbox One

Available: TBD

Website

Throw together the basic exploration structure of The Legend of Zelda games, the art style of Sword & Sworcery EP, the punishing survivalism of Don’t Starve, and the cinematic simplicity of Out of This World, and you’d have something approaching the experience of Below.

The demo I played recently presented a stark, minimalist world where it always seems to be raining until a descent into the dangerous, randomly generated caverns scattered around the island world. There, I scrounged for materials to light my way, gathered weapons to use against natural predators large and small, and tried to piece together a path around traps and hazards. This is not a forgiving game; a few wrong moves sent me back to the beginning of the cavern, forcing me to work my way back to my corpse just to get back all the stuff I had acquired.

It's all presented with a striking art style reminiscent of tilt-shift photography, with a hard focus on the area surrounding your character and a gradual blurring of focus as you go up and down the screen. The general lack of ambient music and text in the demo made it all feel quite lonely and claustrophobic too. Those looking for a good, long wander should keep their eyes out for this one.

-Kyle Orland

Bounden

Developer: Game Oven & The Dutch National Ballet

Platforms: iOS

Available: May 21

Website

A whole lot of iPhone games use the hardware’s motion and tilt sensors to control on-screen characters. Fewer use it as a way to encourage you to move your own body in a specific way. Fewer still do that in such a beautiful and intuitive way as Bounden.

To start a game of Bounden, two players simply place their thumbs on the dots sitting on opposite ends of the iPhone and hold them there. A 3D-rendered globe appears on the screen with a hollow white circle hovering above and small raised dots popping up on the side. The game, such as it is, involves tilting and twisting the iPhone to move the globe so those dots line up with the hovering circle, like a key going in a lock.

As a single player game, this process would be singularly boring. But with two players facing each other, thumbs welded to either side of the iPhone, this basic mechanic essentially forces them into a dance routine designed by the Dutch National Ballet. Lining up those dots involves a whole lot of turning, spinning, and swaying that's loosely tied to the music coming out of the iPhone speakers (though the timing is not all that strict).

It's an elegant and intuitive interface that results in some amazing experiences. Some of the patterns require twisting under the opposing player’s arm or otherwise contorting yourselves into difficult positions that can't help but bring a grin to your face. The closest thing I can compare it to is Dance Central, but Bounden is much more free-flowing and abstract, not to mention it's intimate thanks to the requirement of a second player facing you. This is the kind of game I can see pulling out as a great icebreaker at parties, and it's wholly unlike anything else on the iPhone.

-Kyle Orland

Buffalo

Developer: TiltFactor

Platforms: Cards

Available: Now

Website

A card game? What gives? Forgive us a rare dalliance into the printed side of gaming, but Buffalo took this year’s GDC by storm. It sold out at the fest’s official merch shop, making a bunch of tacky GDC ’14 hoodies jealous in the process.

The game appears pretty simple on the surface. One player is a judge and lays down two cards at a time, a combination of an adjective and a noun—“South American” and “twin,” perhaps, or “masculine” and “psychologist.” The rest of the players then shout whatever fitting name, real or fictional, matches that combo, and the judge gives cards to the earliest correct answer. Whoever has the most cards at game’s end wins.

Unlike recent card-group games like Cards Against Humanity and even Apples to Apples, Buffalo’s instant appeal is in freeing players from their own limiting hands of cards. Shouting and pleading become the default mode, and it’s always nice to shout the name of someone in the room to win a quick pair. (“Redheaded” and “journalist,” here!)

Beyond that surface-level fun, the game has some secret sauce. A few card combinations can prove head-scratchers, especially when they touch on gender and ethnic stereotypes; players can always grab a few more cards if the group blanks, but these moments were intentionally built into the game by its creators, a research team at Dartmouth College. Once you’ve played the game a few times, check out this PDF that touches on why the team made particular design decisions. (But definitely play the game first.)

-Sam Machkovech

Crypt of the Necrodancer

Developer: Brace Yourself Games

Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux

Available: TBD 2014

Website

Rogue-likes are all the rage among in-the-know gamers these days, but it wasn’t so long ago that rhythm games were the brave new genre taking the world by storm. If those gaming trends happened simultaneously, we’d have likely seen a game concept like Crypt of the Necrodancer much sooner.

On the surface, it’s your basic randomly generated, top-down dungeon crawler, with plenty of little bad guys to fight and loot to collect. Where it sets itself apart is in the persistent beat that drives every action in the game—everything, from movement on the square grids to attacks to the enemies’ patterns, has to be entered using directional inputs on these downbeats, matching the spooky driving dance music in the background. You can stop and collect yourself, but there are bonuses associated with keeping a flow of inputs on every single beat, meaning you have to plan ahead to keep things moving smoothly.

Like the best Rogue-likes, you start out weak but unlock new abilities as you go. These include ranged attacks and magic spells that can heal you or hurt the opponents, all activated with diagonal combinations of directional input. Also in true genre tradition, you only have one life before you have to start over, forcing a good tug-of-war between careful planning and quick action.

Things are overwhelming enough with the keyboard, but the game always seems to draw a crowd at shows thanks to the USB dance pad support. The game is an incredibly good workout in this mode, and it requires quite a bit of coordination to pull off. Still, Crypt is definitely possible to beat with your feet after some practice.

-Kyle Orland

Darknet

Developer: E McNeil

Platforms: Oculus Rift / Windows, Mac, Linux

Available: Demo available now (Max/Windows)

Website

For the most part, the Oculus Rift demos and in-development games released so far have been conversions of the kind of standard, first-person experiences you’d expect to see displayed on a TV screen or monitor, simply made more immersive by the use of a head-mounted display. It's interesting, then, that the developers behind Darknet are using the headset to power a puzzle game that usually wouldn't need any sort of first-person viewpoint to begin with.

After an intense trip down a tunnel of light at the beginning of the demo, Darknet places the player in front of a vast lattice of laser-light nodes meant to represent cyberspace in true '80s hacker movie fashion. The light puzzle gameplay involves hacking these nodes with a cascading virus while avoiding “eater” nodes that propagate out from node to node to thwart your efforts.

The short early demo I got to try didn't really have enough meat to sell me on the overall gameplay concept, but being able to crane my neck to glance around the vast wall of virtual Internet nodes was a heady experience, especially when everything around me descended into a wall of chaotic light during a cascading failure. Regardless of how the game itself turns out, its development seems important for proving that virtual reality games can be about more than wandering around virtual spaces.

-Kyle Orland