After Hades, I hope some folks went back and played Supergiant’s other titles. I love them all. But even amongst them, Pyre is the underdog, unknown, shunned. And I think it’s fantastic. The music and writing is top notch. You can really see the bones of Hades in all their games, but they polished their world building and story telling to perfection in this one.
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.
Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit are two brilliant gems that come to mind by Mimimi Studios. I discovered them a few weeks ago and just learned they went defunct back in August because they were too niche a genre and couldn’t make enough sales. They’re Stealth Strategy games where you control a group of ninjas/pirates through a heavily guarded level to the objective, stealthily murdering everyone along the way. If you get seen you can easily jump back to a quick save and try again. You’re not overpowered and can easily be killed by enemies so save scumming is deliberately built in to the experience to experiment with your approach.
Shadow Tactics is set in feudal japan. This one has an expandalone.
Desperados III then takes the game to the wild west.
Shadow Gambit goes wild and gives us a magic ship and an undead pirate crew. It has two rather pricey expansions, one bringing in a character from the first game. It also has a hidden character to unlock after you beat the game, which is kinda cool.
You can notice how each game perfects the formula, but they’re overall extremely similar. I would very much recommend the last one if you have to pick one, as the focus on magic allowed them to go truly wild with the character abilities. Gaelle shooting corpses and partymembers around with her cannon is a particularly fun one.
Sidenote: Far as I can tell they didn’t go bankrupt or anything, they just … stopped. They’re done or so. Did the same concept three times, happy now, works for them.
the Skyrim total conversion mod, Enderal: Forgotten Stories, blew me away, and it's free if you own Skyrim. Even has its own installer and game page on Steam.
Their earlier game Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is also worth a play. It runs on the Oblivion engine so it’s a little dated graphically, but story- and gameplay-wise it holds up fine.
I treasure it a lot. The aesthetic, the design, the voices, the calm, everything just fits together perfectly to create something amazing that’s truly greater than its parts.
I feel like it’s a game that works best if you are a person that either doesn’t have or can let go of their expectations, and just experience.
Just recently started Lunacid, and I’m having a blast. I’m a fan of dungeon synth and its subgenres, and I"ve been looking for a game that has those vibes for quite some time. This one seems to fit the bill quite a bit. And I also have wanted to check out King’s Field, but was afraid that it might be too dated to be enjoyable; Lunacid seems like a fresh take on that dungeon crawler style of gameplay. The only thing the game lacks imo is a dedicated pause button
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.
Hacknet. You play as a novice hacker who investigates the disappearance of a character by hacking into other people’s computers to gather information.
The hacking mechanic is fairly realistic and requires you to use the terminal a lot, so it really makes you feel like a hacker. Pretty short and sweet game, and the soundtrack is pretty good as well
Oh, I really love Hacknet! Played the main game and the DLC. Discovered it one day while browsing Rémi Gallego’s (aka The Algorithm) discography, and found out that he did some tracks for the OST
Iconoclasts - really nicely made metroidvania with pixel graphics
Tametsi - a collection of handmade Minesweeper puzzles with additional twists and mechanics. Extremely cheap on Steam
Gunfire Reborn - roguelite FPS with Borderland-ish graphics, decently made 4 man co-op (unlike Risk of Rain 2, you can actually revive teammates that got knocked down immediately) and a lot of difficulty scaling. Notably, still gets new content, both free and paid DLCs (those add new classes and some new weapons)
Edited to add another: Opus Magnum - an automation/optimization puzzle game with alchemy theme. Supports user-created puzzles through Steam Workshop
Tametsi just barely eked out being my most played game of 2023 over, duh duh duh!! Elden Ring. Yes, it took me longer to finish a $1 Minesweeper clone than to finish a massive Fromsoft Soulslike. Haha!
rogue Lords: it is inspired by Slay the Spire (StS). Card game with roguelike element. Here, the cards are replaced by your minions skill. But the right set of skill is less frustating to build than in StS. Making it a more fun experience, and the graphics are way above StS(not hard). As in StS , with luck/skill you can manage to build some 'infinite deck" where you never let go of the control of the battle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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