Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition

Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition brought an expanded version of a colorful metroidvania inspired by Mexican folk culture and lucha libre wrestling to Xbox One in 2014. You play as the farmer Juan, who gains a magical mask after his death, along with a wrestler's strength, and sets out to rescue the president's kidnapped daughter. The gameplay isn't built around ranged weapons but around punches, throws, and grapples: you launch enemies into the air, juggle them, and chain combos. Special attacks also serve as keys to progress, since they break color-coded blocks, tying combat and world exploration together far more tightly than in most genre entries.

The second layer is switching between the world of the living and the dead. One button flips the entire scene into a mirrored version with different platforms and different enemies, and in later stretches you have to switch mid-jump. This produces properly demanding acrobatic sequences that rank among the hardest but also most satisfying parts of the game. The visuals are sharp, flat, and vivid, with bold outlines and colors referencing paper cutouts and the Day of the Dead; on Xbox One it runs in high resolution completely smoothly. The soundtrack combines Mexican motifs with electronics and can be just as playful as the game itself, which is packed with references to internet culture and other titles.

Reviewers praised especially the combat, unusually deep for a platformer, and the excellent tying together of fighting abilities with map exploration. The Super Turbo Championship Edition also added new areas, bosses, and abilities compared to the original release, making it the most complete version of the game. Guacamelee! helped show that a metroidvania doesn't have to be grim and atmospheric — it can also be a brisk, funny, and visually rich affair. Today it still plays excellently, especially in couch co-op, and remains one of the standout indie titles of the early Xbox One era.