Which indies did you discover and would love more people to know about? I’ll start: The Pale Beyond. Not sure if it’s a hidden gem tbh, but it’s such a good story rich game. I laughed, I cried and felt the characters struggles. If you like story rich games/ choices matter, check it out.
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Parkitect - an amazing RCT spiritual successor with cute graphics, some new mechanics (covering operational buildings and logistic routes). I have 100+ hours in it with my wife. It’s such a chill experience.
Nine Parchments - its a dual stick isometric shooter with wizards and elemental spells from the creators of Trine. Great co-op, unlockable characters/spells and creative mechanics. You can combine elements and the spells affect everyone, so for example a poorly placed healing spell can restore enemies health, or a misplaced fireball can hurt fellow players. Great fun!
Wildermyth - turn-based rpg with multiple characters and bite-sized modular quests and random encounters. The storytelling is simply amazing and each campaign plays out over a certain amount of time. The heroes age, retire, their kids can become adventurers as well. They can fall in love, compete, or based on the player’s choices even become other creatures or die heroic deaths which will also change how the story plays out. The art style is really nice and unique. I had many hours of fun with this one.
I’ve had so much fun in Wildermyth. Definitely recommended.
I love Wildermyth. I really need to check it out again :)
Gunpoint. Story based detective game where you solve a murder. Gameplay mechanics make you feel like a badass. You can pretty much finish it in a single sitting but its great.
Heat signature. A stealth based top down bounty hunter game with roguelike elements. Really well done. Made by the same guy that made Gunpoint.
Neo scavenger. A murder hobo roguelike with a surprisingly long storyline.
Super house of dead ninjas. Great fast paced platformer where you’re a badass ninja. Great to pick up and play in short bursts.
Fez. 2D exploration platformer with to change the perspective. Pretty chill and has a cool art style
More well known games that I’ll list anyway in case someones looking for some awesome ones:
Super meat boy
Project zomboid
FTL
Celeste
Crypt of the necrodancer
Enter the gungeon
Spelunky
Noita. Saw it mentionned in this thread and I am seconding this. Great game. But brutal as fuck.
Cave story. A classic. And it’s free.
Owlboy. Took the developer like 10-15 years to make. I’ve heard good things but I’m only just starting to play it.
Also pro tip: if you want more recommendations go look at what speedrunners are playing. People that spend that much time playing a single game over and over generally choose very good games to play.
I haven’t played nearly all of these but the ones I have played are absolutely dynamite. I suspect this is a killer list
Thank you. I will say that I listed a lot permadeath roguelikes and not everyone is into those. They can be very frustrating.
Good list. Also by ftl devs, into the breach
I remember doing a rather long play session of Fez, and by the end of it I had a massive headache from all the camera changes lol. 10/10 game tho
What a great list!
Distance - an arcade racer that plays like a good 3D sonic game, has a cryptic story, and has elements of horror. Completely bonkers combination but it works super well.
Thumper - another very fast paced game, but also a rhythm game. The devs label it as “rhythm violence” and it fits. The music is percussive and ambient, mostly consisting of the sounds of you slamming through turns and hitting the a button with ferocious intensity. Levels can take well over 30 minutes.
The Beginner’s Guide - might be more well known but imo this is a must play for anyone who does anything creative. It’s a two hour walking sim, but I feel like it’s a story best told as a game.
The Beginner’s Guide
Definitely a gem. So meta
DUDE did you also attend Digipen (camps or real classes)? Nitronic Rush was the fuckin shit and Distance was a massive graphical upgrade. Also hard to deny how great multiplayer is as an addition.
Nah I just found nitronic rush back in the day, and found out they were working on a follow up.
Antichamber is hidden gem or simply forgotten? I don’t know how much attention it got in its time.
It’s a puzzle platformer but I was feeling my brain bend the whole game. And at the same time I never felt like the new mechanic was explained too little or something was artificially dragged out. Very good design.IMO it was better than Portals
Antichamber is great. Feels like a completely different universe with its own set of rules you need to discover. Also really interesting to see a puzzle game with an almost metroidvania-like progression, with the gates being your own knowledge of the mechanics.
I need to be in the right mood for it. But man is it a blast to play through
Starsector: It’s an Elite style open world space game. What makes it special is that it’s been in constant development for over a decade and has a crazy number of ships, weapons, lore and features. And a vibrant modding scene.
Also the devs are vehemently against DRM, so the only place you can buy the game is their own website. Or not buy. They put the full version up for anyone to download.
I’ll have to check that out. An indie game in a very similar vein is Evochron Legends. It’s available on Steam, too. I have a couple of hours in it, but it’s been a while since I last checked it.
In decreasing popularity (estimated by me):
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Creeper World: A mix of tower defense and rts (with pause function) against a ever expanding goo called creep. The fourth installment is 3D and the next one will be a side-view spinoff.
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Tales of Maj’Eyal: Quite popular among the people who are into traditional roguelikes, but I very very rarely see it mentioned outside that community. It’s definitely the (nearly) traditional roguelike I put the most time into thanks to its class/ability system that bridges the gap between roguelike and turn based rpg really well.
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The Captain: Technically not indie as it was published by Tomorrow Corp (of World of Goo/Little Inferno/etc. fame) instead of the devs themselves. A mix between old school point and click game, but as a highly episodic space adventure. You travel from planet to planet on an overarching mission and each planet has its own interactive short story. Some are longer, some are very short and you never quite know what you’ll find before you land. All of the short stories have multiple endings depending on how you tackle the moral dilemmas it throws at you.
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Infinity Wars actually released before the rise of Hearthstone and also before the popular Avengers movie of the same name. It is to this day one of my favorite digital TCGs, and I played so many of them. Before I get into the main thing that I love about it, I wanna mention that every single card’s base version (colorless) is free, anyone can build any deck for free the moment they pick up the game and be 100% competitive with everyone else. The only thing they monetize is bling. Unlike in most mainstream TCGs both players do their turns at the same time in secret, once they both lock in, their moves play out. This gives way for some insane mindgames and outplays that eclipse those in any other TCG I’ve played. It is a bit rough around the edges, so it might be more of a “hidden diamond in the rough” than a hidden gem.
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Bombernauts is a really fun party game. To sum it up in one sentence: “Imagine if Bomberman was a platform fighter.” If you have friends to play with it, buy it on a sale, crank powerup drops up to the max (they stack, which took us hours to figure out), maybe download a mappack and I’m sure you’ll have a blast if the trailer looked any fun to you. There’s virtually no chance to play it with strangers through as it is super dead.
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Lastly I wanna give a shoutout to Clonk. Clonk is (or was) a 2D sidescrolling game-series that is visually reminiscent of Lemmings. The gameplay is a sort of mix between Minecraft or Terraria (predating it by many many years) and very very very low-pop RTS. It’s a mission based game where you control around 1-3 Clonks (the lemmings) and has full online multiplayer support. The missions can range from “build a base in this active volcano”, “take out the enemy team’s castle”, “win this wizarding duel” to “build a bridge across this canyon”. What made it truly unique was the community and community creations though. It was created with the explicit purpose to be customizable and users made many, many different maps and modes. It was to me what Minecraft was to the kids in the generation after me (without all the content creators, of course). Some people made an entire RPG in it. Others made what was essentially Among Us, just to give you an idea. Sadly the spiritual open source successor Open Clonk could never recapture the magic for me, and I guess I’m not alone in that because it pretty much died around 5 years ago. If I could make one game popular overnight, it would be Clonk. It did warm my heart to see that some of the celebrated custom map/mode creators from back then ended up getting into gamedev. One of the games developed by someone I remember from back then is Vintage Story.
Holy fuck I rambled a lot about Clonk and I still feel like I’d have so much more to say but this isn’t the most fitting thread for that.
I loved Clonk back in the day. Discovered it from the falling sand craze a long time ago and I still have fond memories of it.
shoutout to nice explanation and link. I’m like 5k hours into Tales of Maj Eyal, and confirm it is excellent, especially after unlocking the adventurer, which allow to combine any of the 100+ skill trees.
I will try Infinity war, seems up my alley and less grindy then MtG
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Crosscode is one of my favourite games of all time. It’s an immensely charming action RPG heavily inspired by the 2D Zelda games. It has some absolutely insane combat and surprisingly challenging puzzles. The story is also very good and really touching at times. The devs spent 7 years making this game and I feel like it never got anywhere near the attention it deserved.
It’s just $20 on steam AND it has a free demo, so there’s no reason not to check it out!
I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven’t looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.
I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don’t worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It’s purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there’s 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it’s something special.
I think if I have one criticism of the plot is that it takes a while to get going. If I may, I’d recommend you to play thorough it at your own pace, possible also at the lowest difficulty just to experience the story. It’s well worth it just for that.
I can’t even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can’t even recall.
Not only that, the combat was also utter jank.
If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I’ve seen in a long time.
If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.
Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.
The comment you replied to reminded me how much I wanted to love Crosscode, and yet I also “bounced off” it (amazing phrase).
Your comment made me understand why I bounced off of it. I had exactly the same experience as you, with the controls.
Ouroboros - an RPGmaker game where the protagonist is trapped in a looping simulation and tries to escape without alerting his captors. Short and sweet, perfectly executes the power fantasy of being a hyper competent rational character who’s gone completely emotionally numb after living for thousands of years. It’s an adult game and features some sex scenes but they’re not important and I think they can even be turned off. It goes on an 80% discount every steam sale.
For the record, every game by that dev is incredible. One of them is still being worked on but should be finishing this year, and that one is free.
Receiver is pretty good. You have to clear the slide, and remember to count bullets, did your own jams, and otherwise it makes shooting more of a simulation rather than an arcade.
They released two games. The first was just a game jam thing they threw together that established the core mechanics. The second was much more fleshed out and polished.
If I’m not mixing something up, they also created Overgrowth (third-person action platformer with rabbits beating up wolfs). And in order to distribute it without messing with third party services, they’ve created Humble Bundle. They sold it to some company later but for a long time it was them putting together the bundles.
It’s a little off-topic, I know
Aquaria is a very expansive Metroidvania with great visuals, creative encounters, and excellent music. Certainly one of my favorites growing up.
Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can’t recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there’s still a massive backlog of online levels to play.
Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It’s a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there’s a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there’s split-screen too).
Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest roguelike out there, it’s a lot of fun and very unique. It’s essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I’ve played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.
Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.
Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.
I know many of those words.
TL;DR you’ll enjoy it if you like casual puzzle games lol.
Voxelgram is a spiritual successor to an older game called Picross 3D. Picross 3D is a 3D version of a popular logic puzzle called Nonograms.
- To The Moon: Absolutely heart breaking.
- Tales of Maj’Eyal: An incredible rogue-like with 30+ classes and God knows how many achievements.
- Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead: Apocalyptic rogue-like. Zombies, bandits, aliens and Lovecraft shit. Want to raid a dojo? Learn Judo from a book and proceed to race around town on a pair of rollerblades practicing on the undead? Feel free.
Griftlands doesn’t get as much attention as I think it deserves. It’s everything Slay the Spire offers, but better. With plot and characters and two decks to balance.
I bought it discounted because i remember that i have seen it before. I really did not expect it to be this good. The world, the storyline and the combat are just awesome. Highly recommended!
Shadows of doubt is a sandbox detective game. You are a detective and you have to solve crimes, which are totally randomized. What makes this interesting is that the world does not stop:
- the NPCs actually have daily routines
- the murderer might not stop killing
- you can talk with anyone
- and so much more
It is truly a sandbox! I havent played it too much yet, but i feel if i really start playing it, then i will skip going to bed!
I bought that game a while back, but I couldn’t get into solving anything. Maybe I was just playing it wrong or something.
I mean, if Josh from Let’s Game it Out fucked around nonstop in almost every possible way and still “solved” a case, I doubt you could be playing the game wrong 😆
Invidious linkie - https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=ckmPfn-KCGg
Unciv for Android. It’s basically Civilization 5, but FOSS.
Shoutout to Iji, too. Amazing soundtrack and lots of replayability. It’s an old game by now, but it’s also free. Sidescrolling platformer, killing is optional.
Assault Android Cactus. Dunno how well known the game is, but it’s one of the best twin stick shooters/bullet hell I’ve played, with the android girls full of charm.
I was going to say Iji. Such an amazing game, it’s like the 2D version of an immersive sim. I wish there was a remake only so the dev could make the money they rightfully deserve.
I recommend Nex Machina if you enjoyed that one.
Uh, which one? I mentioned 3 games
Sorry, Assault Android Cactus. The formatting in my app made it look like two separate comments when I was skimming quickly.
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