This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options.
The way it goes: Suggest games, ideally the kind that you believe would have relatively broad appeal. Don’t feel bad about downvotes, but do downvote any game that’s suggested if you have heard of it before (Perhaps, give some special treatment if it was literally your game of the year). This rule is meant to encourage people to post the indie darlings that took some unusual attention and discovery to be aware of and appreciate.
If possible, link to the Steam pages for the games in question, so that anyone interested can quickly take a look at screenshots and reviews. And, as a general tip, anything with over 1000 steam reviews probably doesn’t belong here. While I’d recommend that you only suggest one game per post, at the very most limit it to three.
If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.
This one isn’t super new, but Druidstone. It’s a story based tactics game with some RPG elements and it’s just excellently done. I’ve never heard anyone else mention it and I think more people should know about it.
It was pretty good, but I got stuck on an annoying mission and dropped it. Really wish that dev had just made grimrock 3, but I respect not wanting to do the same thing over and over…
Thanks for doing what I didn’t have time to!
Also available on GOG for those who prefer.
A first person scifi FPS-RPG. Developed in Ukraine. Very unique experience wrapped inside of a concept that’s been done before. High slavjank tolerance required.
Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There’s a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it’s now down to $1, and it’s a steal at that price.
Quest Master. Mario Maker meets Zelda dungeons, done well. It deserves way more attention than it’s currently getting, and it’s pretty fun with huge potential despite being early access.
This looks rad!
On a similar note I Wanna Maker which is more or less Mario Maker but free and tonnes of developer created and user created levels to play through.
Oh, that is great. I have fond (painful) memories of I Wanna be the Guy, and this seems right up my nostalgia alley.
I like this stuff and I wanted to get either this or Super Dungeon Maker.
But kinda hard to pick a side since they both look like they have overlapping small communities. And games like this, communities are the only reason to play.
Pick Quest Master. The developer is extremely active and responsive to community feedback and requests. There’s even weekly content updates.
Sold.
Moonlight Pulse (83 reviews)
Metroidvania with character-switching
This 2D platformer metroidvania has memorable characters and very cool worldbuilding. You switch between characters to match their abilities to the right situations. They live on a living, planet-sized creature and are fighting off the parasites that are slowly killing their creature-planet. You’ll swim through its blood vessels and explore its organs.
It’s not super long—I finished the story in 9 hours. It’s just about the right length to satisfy.
Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle Game
It’s a word-puzzle game that incrementally teaches you how to use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to find & replace text. Some of the puzzles add silly restraints for you to work around, and the game has charming NPC coworkers that introduce each challenge.
Never heard of it, and sounds awesome, regexes are the sort of things that need lots of practice to be good at, a game seems like a great way to keep the skill alive
Ah yes, a game that taunts me about my shitty regex-fu.
After a decade, I don’t think I’ll ever remember how to regex without a cheat sheet.
Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.
I’ve bought so many Survivor games and many are so bad.
This one looks like it’s trying something unique. I’ll take it for a spin.
What are your picks of the genre?
I’ve also tried a whole bunch, my favourite is probably Rogue: Genesia, I really like the challenges and metaprogression over some of the other titles I’ve tried
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
This is the first comment I’ve found talking about a game I’ve played. Had a lot of fun playing cannon brawl it feels wrong to downvote your comment.
Calcium Contract is a boomer shooter with a pretty unique rewind feature. Humorous with old school feels, but for a modern time. It’s a one man project.
Simple premise is basically Minesweeper, but all the puzzles are handcrafted with some neat designs and concepts that will stretch your puzzle solving to the limit. Also importantly, no guessing required to solve and it’s dirt cheap for the amount of hours of puzzles you get!
Piggybacking off of this comment, if you happen to enjoy Minesweeper, I recommend:
No guessing is required to solve any puzzle either, despite some variants seeming completely impossible.
Fun fact: There’s an achievement for stumbling across a level with a conpletely empty starting board, without any spaces being revealed to be mines or non-mines. Yes, that can be solved without guessing.
Fun fact 2: I’d argue there are more than 14 variants.
ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.
You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.
You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)
When a publisher goes bust, who gets the money from game sales after that point?
This is an incredible game I highly recommend, but I had to downvote because rules
The Masterplan is a true heist game. You know that fantasy of playing out a heist from Heat? This is that game. It’s top down, and you control all of the members of the crew. You pick your time to initiate the heist, you hold up people at gunpoint, you prevent them from being a hero, and you try your best to get out with the best score that you can. It’s a real bummer that this team never got to make another game.
Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.
This was the 3DO game.
Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.
The Black Pool is a game I decided to try recently. It reminds me a lot of Returnal in terms of visuals and gameplay, but I don’t expect the story to evolve much beyond the initial “kids lost in the woods trying to get home.”
It’s a 4-player roguelike where you get to choose random elements to slot into different abilities, namely a Primary, Secondary, and AOE attack as well as a jump, dodge, and once-per-world ‘rally’ buff. Each element makes the ability act differently, like a light primary is a slow charging piercing laser while wind is a projectile with knockback, and you also get to upgrade your elemental abilities after each stage you clear. I’m only about an hour into it so far, but I definitely think it deserves a little more than the 29 player peak it got right after it launched.
