A yummy arcade shooter, this one! You play as a squid (not an octopus) trying to survive being beseiged by jerks. Honestly, nothing beats the writeup Robert D. Ferson himself gave in the above link. Give it a shot!
As Croatia is home to Jure Grando, the first real person described as a vampire in Europe, it is perhaps appropriate for this title to come to us from Cateia Games. Based on a fairy tale of the same name, you play Tibor, a lovesick painter of modest means who gets turned into a creature of the night by a commissioner. It's a very traditional platformer game in which your goal is to collect all the gems in a level while dispatching villagers, black cats, and rodents of unusual size. You can defeat most enemies by jumping on them Donkey Kong style, but you also have a projectile attack of green liquid that I assume is some fascimile of linseed oil. You complete a level by hoisting a flag of your own face. While getting 100 percent on levels isn't necessary and time-consuming, you get a decent amount of lives in exchange for getting 90 percent of collectables or higher. All the music and visuals are really cozy and comforting, and aside from a few mean traps towards the end of the campaign, the difficulty is generously player-balanced. Can you help Tibor reverse his vampirism?
Archive.org Link | Flixel Port
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: GameMaker 7 
; Ported to Flash in 2010 
Brought to us by Justin Stander and Askiisoft, Tower of Heaven made a huge splash in the indie game scene for being a remarkably hard and poignant title. You play Eid, an otherwise nondescript who's hell-bent on climbing the Tower of Heaven against the wishes of God. The game is rendered in a classic Game Boy color palette that's carried to dizzying heights by the musical work of flashygoodness.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Jeffrey Ouellette has been making successful ZZT Worlds for over half a decade at this point in time, and alongside him for that journey was his elderly cat Nick II. The feline passed away sometime in 2007, but they are immortalized as the title screen for CAT, CAT, THAT DAMN CAT. The story is direct enough, you're a red cat and your owner has been gone for two days at this point, so you'll either need to find your owner or find a food source. The ZZT game mechanics are turned into a rudimentary adventure game with the cat moving in certain ways on the screen according to your character in the bottom left. Shooting with thecharacter activates a text prompt that can let the cat interact with some parts of the the environment. The early game is easy enough, using light puzzle elements to do cat stuff, and then the puzzles take a strange turn as your adventure takes you across the expanse of space! This one is a short but sweet title, and cute as a button!
As the name implies, Doom II: Reloaded is a retelling/reimagining of the plotline of the Doom games and mainly follows the plot of Doom II. It is the only WAD by Doom speedruner Andy Stewart, and for a solo work it is magnificent. Every level can be pistol started, as the ammo and health is plentiful if you're cautious about how you spend it. Normally I hate trudging through WADs on Ultraviolence but this particular example is an excellent balance of health items for the levels of enemies you're being asked to face. The level design is excellent, working overtime to put interesting setpieces together with challenging areas and corridor combat. You don't get the rocket launcher until map 5 and it's given the level of pomp and circumstance a weapon like that affords, charging you with a bevy of Revenants and the spare Pain Elemental causing trouble for good measure. The set design is top-notch for the creative use of stock Doom assets to make a cohesive re-imagining of Doom 2. Of obvious improvement is the buildings in the halfway point of the game actually looking like buildings, which was a major complaint about the original Doom II. MAP15 is called "South Central", so it would appear this WAD is following from the novelizations where Doomguy was born in California. MAP18, "Warehouse Siege", is a neat stealth level in which citizens are trapped on the other side of a warehouse surrounded by monsters, and any sound of violence you make will cause them to be killed, and so in order to protect the innocent you have to play around enemies and figure out how to progress without getting trapped into a choke point. I had a really phenomonal time with this WAD, and I believe you will too!
Those of you that were around for when Let's Plays were bigger might remember this game as a memorable one played by Raocow. You are crazed - but like in a cartoon sense rather than a real life sense. This is a platformer game that has a lot of strange things to observe and explore as you dodge bullets, hop on multi-colored enemies and pop balloons to gain verticality. The darling character you play as has a "sanity meter" that's functionally just a health bar, but losing that meter just makes odd things happen before restarting you at the last cross you saved at. It's cute, it's fun, I believe you will like it!