By posting another question here I realized, that I really enjoy games which are ‘short’ (Play start to finish in around one hour) and have lots of replay value.
My favorites are Street Fighter 2, Contra (NES), Slay the Spire, Guilty Gears, etc.
Any recommendations? I am looking especially for games that are hard but fair and have super tight controls (like Contra)
Hades probably fits.
Spelunky is a wonderful roguelike platformer which avoids a lot of escalation problems that “action roguelites” tend to suffer from.
Besides that, I’m partial to the Megaman X series (and the sequel series Megaman Zero and ZX). X4 in particular is always fun to put in and replay.
Downwell is a good one, very addictive too.
Balatro, hands down. Near intimate replayability for me.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is the definition of tough but fair for me. It’s a turn based game though, so not much controls to speak of. In fact because it traces it’s lineage back to the 90s it’s kind of clunky. But since it’s turn based you can pick up and drop any time you want. Depending on my luck and skills a run lasts from 5 seconds (lol) to an hour ish.
If you don’t mind an older recommendation, StarFox 64. You could beat the story in about 30 minutes, but there’s lots of secrets and challenges that unlock new completion paths, harder boss variants, etc.
No worries, I love the classics and never played StarFox64, put on my backlog!
I would look towards rouguelike/ rouguelite games. Hades, dead cells or binding of isaac for example can be played through in around an hour each, but also have overarching progression systems
Thanks, especially the Castlevania DLC for Dead Cells caught my eyes and there is no excuse not to play it for me! :-)
Binding of Isaac would fit the bill. A single game takes between 30min-1hr, but there are dozens of endings, about 30 characters and about 900 unlocks (every ending with every character unlocks a new item, and then there are many unlocks that aren’t tied to that). It took me about 1500hrs to 100% the game and I still boot it up fairly often.
I think general you are looking for roguelikes.
Just off the top of my head: Noita, Battlezone Gold Edition, and Risk of Rain 2
Dead Cells is amazing. It’s a side scrolling, action-adventure, RPG-ish Rogue-like game. I’ve spent so much time playing this game.
The player takes the role of an amorphous creature called the Prisoner. As the Prisoner, the player must fight their way out of a diseased island in order to slay the island’s King. The player gains weapons, treasure and other tools through exploration of the procedurally-generated levels. Dead Cells features a permadeath system, causing the player to lose all items and other abilities upon dying. A currency called Cells can be collected from defeated enemies, allowing the player to purchase permanent upgrades.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588650/Dead_Cells/
I personally played it on my phone with a controller, but it’s available on all major consoles iirc
Tetris?
I raise to Tetris Attack vs. mode (SNES) ;-)