I quite liked Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara that I played recently but to call it a gem is maybe a bit much. It's more polished than the average indie platformer though.
I was surprised by how good Pikmin 2 was but ... idk. It feels like the ideal Pikmin has yet to happen, each episode has some elements of it though. The really great games I played are all but hidden.
But thanks for putting a word for Cereza, I may fish her out of the backlog next.

My biggest surprise of the year was Your Only Move is Hustle, a turn based stick figure fighting game. It is completely brilliant, breaks down fighting games to their simplest form and then makes it into a crazy game of chess where at the end you are given a fast paced stick figure battle as good or better than the stick figure animations of old, that you made while battling your opponent one turn at a time. I became OBSESSED with it. I even briefly was trying to learn how to mod so I could make my own characters. But unfortunately I fell off of it cause the player base got a bit too serious for my liking and, since I was in the Steam Deck, I couldn't really type in chat and so that started to get a bit awkward. Really wish there was a way to play against the computer, I don't think I ever would have stopped playing haha.