Hyper Light Drifter

Heart Machine's 2016 action game was made by Alx Preston while managing a congenital heart condition, and that is not incidental - the game is about a drifter with an illness that is killing them, and it says so entirely through imagery. There is no dialogue. Directions come from pictograms, the world is explained through murals, and the plot is assembled from what you notice. Combat is fast and unforgiving: a dash that cancels almost anything, a chain sword that rewards being at the exact right distance, and a gun with ammunition refilled only by landing melee hits, so aggression is the resource loop. Four regions can be tackled in any order, and their bosses are pattern-recognition tests that will kill you a great many times before they read as fair. The pixel art is unusually saturated and unusually precise, and Disasterpeace's score does the rest. It is short, difficult and coherent in a way very few games this abstract manage.