Title really says it all, what games do you absolutely adore that are not widely known/talked about, and what makes you love them so much?

Panzer Dragoon Orta. It’s the best rail shooter ever made, with really well done levels, snappy, pitch perfect game play, graphics that have aged insanely well, and a beautiful soundtrack.

It’s a shame it hasn’t gotten any real ports, outside of Xbox One backwards compatibility.

Oh man, so many. Okay so to start off, I'm a HUGE fan of the Two Worlds series, I know it's super shitty and just a clunky game all around, but man, from the lore, to the enemies, to the characters, it all just has this certain charm to me. Not to mention the soundtracks, especially the second game, are on freaking point. Honestly, I'm a huge fan of clunky open world games in general, absolutely loved Elex, the Risen games, especially the second. Other obscure games I enjoyed, Venetica, X Blades, Clive Barker's Jericho, Timeshift, Legendary, Devil's Third, White Knight Chronicles 1 and 2. 

This is kind of old by now, but I must say Imperium Galactica 2.

Fly trough space, colonize starsystems.
Once in a starsystem switch to a sim cityesque colony building simulator.
Once you have a couple of colonies start building your starfleet and upgrade gear for it.
Then go on and eraticate other space traveling species.
Space battles are RTS with different classes of spaceships from smaller nimble ships for delivering a pay-load to big ass star destroyers releasing swarms of tiny fighters.

God I loved that game, it had it all except a FPS portion.

EDIT:// I just discovered that it is available from the mac appstore so this I will buy (yes my computer is a mac)

Both the first and the second game are available at GOG for whatever platforms you may own.

But yeah, both games are also part of my list.

I'll go even further back in time: Super Solver: Challenge of the Ancient Empires. We played that game at school (our teacher gave it to us) and trained our brains pretty well on thinking ahead and problem solving. It being educational and not kiddy simplistic in terms of gameplay and difficulty meant we had great fun with it.

Speaking of such old games, Battle Chess, anyone? Always funny to see how your figures got maimed to death from their opponents.

Also, the first Dune title. It's a genre mix pretty difficult to explain (it's simulation, adventure, RPG, economics and wargame rolled into one) and largely forgotten compared to it's successor. It's also pretty easy once you know what you're doing and how the Harkonnen will react. It's the first game I finished.

The whole Exile/Avernum series. It's getting remade yet again btw. Pretty deep RPGs - in every sense of the word.

Stars! is an 4x title, but with vastly different, abstract, fully customizable races. Despite being an obscure Windows 3.x game, it has an active community to this day.

Speaking of old games with an active community, One Must Fall. A beat-em up with giant robots on PC with a pretty deep fighting system for just using two buttons. Also has an extensive career mode where you upgrade your robot and pilot more and more, making the combats super-fast at the end.

There are still plenty more on my list (most titles I play actually fall into these), but I'll leave it at this for now

I wouldn't say I love it to bits, but Tom & Jerry in Fists of Furry is probably the most fun I've ever had with a fighting game.

Speed Punks! Omg I had so much fun playing with my brother on this game as a kid. It's funny I owned Mario Kart and CTR at the time but for some reason I played Speed Punks a lot more even though it wasn't as good as those. I loved the characters, items and tracks, it was a really quirky game but it appealed to me. I bought it again about 3 years ago, it aged pretty badly but I still love it. I play it from time to time.

I think Pikmin is one of the best games ever made, does that count?

Archibald's Adventures, it is very fun platformer/puzzle/action with a lot of content (over 200 unique levels), great controls, great atmosphere, great 2D grafix, great music, I can't recommend it enough.

Probably Audiosurf. I will always champion Audiosurf. It's just pure and simple fun, plus you're listening to your favorite music at the same time. It can also be intense as all hell with fast or complex songs, which gives you that old-school rush that arcade games used to give you decades ago.

I've told this story before, but one year my sister and niece were staying at my house over Christmas. That was at the crest of the Wii craze and that's what she got for Christmas. My family was here, about 10 people for our annual party. They started on the Wii, but I had my PC in the living room at the time and I fired up Audiosurf as an extra activity. Within a short period, everyone was gathered around the PC and taking turns on Audiosurf while Wii Sports sat there unused.