Glowfall

Glowfall is a ten-room precision platformer set in a dark vertical shaft. You run, you jump, and you cling to walls to leap off them. That is the whole moveset, and it has been tuned until it feels right: a held jump goes almost four tiles, a tap goes two and a half, and there is coyote time and a buffered jump underneath so the game reads what you meant rather than what you pressed.

The twist is the lantern. It burns down the whole time you are in a room, and its pool of light shrinks with it. Running out does not kill you — it blinds you. Spikes, saws and fire are simply not drawn once they fall outside the light, and the shaft does not care whether you can see them.

Embers scattered through each room top the lantern back up, and they are the only things that glow in the dark, so they double as beacons. They are also almost never on the quick line. That is the decision the game keeps asking: detour and stay lit, or commit and run a stretch you have only seen once. Death sends you back to the start of the room in under a third of a second, so learning a room in the dark is a real strategy rather than a punishment.

The rooms teach in order — moving and jumping, then wall-jumping, then the light itself, then teeth, saws, blind running, a long wall-jump chimney and fire that lights the room and burns you in it — before the last one asks for all of it at once, downward. Each room keeps your best time and your death count, and the fastest times belong to people willing to run dark.

About twenty minutes to finish, considerably longer to finish quickly.