AAAAXY. AAAAXY is a nonlinear 2D puzzle platformer taking place in impossible spaces. You can take a walk on a Möbius strip, try to find the platform with your train at the train station, and play a piano that makes the Shepard tone. It will be a bit confusing at first, but I promise it will eventually get fun.
It’s not on Steam, but it’s available for download on the website for free. Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Also on F-Droid and FlatHub. give it a try im begging you
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!
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.
Gauntlet, specifically in the vein of Legends/Dark Legacy. Arrowhead did a reboot-ish of the original style games 10 years ago, let em put some of that Helldivers 2 money into this.
In a way, I do feel sad about that game. Big AAA offerings take a lot of time for a studio, and the reviews say there wasn’t too much wrong with the gameplay. When they first started development, they probably didn’t know how bloated the hero shooter genre would be.
A large part of what’s wrong with Concord is the development time that it took, and I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to try to make game development leaner and more sustainable.
I’d love to see a modern take on Cannon Fodder, as well as another entry in the Desert/Urban/Soviet/Nuclear Strike series.
Lastly, there was a very fun demo/mod to Sensible Soccer for the Amiga that set the match between UK and Germany, and replaced the ball with a bomb that would periodically explode and eliminate any nearby players. I’d live to see a modern-day version of this, honestly - just some goofy fun!
…and yes, I am fully aware of just how old this makes me all sound.
For a modern Desert Strike check out Cleared Hot on Steam. It’s not out yet but it looks promising and it’s by a guy who wanted something like Desert Strike. Funnily enough it came up in a similar thread on Reddit a while back and I added it to my wishlist there and then.
In a similar vein to another commenter wanting a pre-Paradise style Burnout; I’d like another NFS:U entry, but honestly am so over ‘open world’ racing games… give me a good ol’ fashioned menu any day of the week!
Honestly 5 had a lot going for it. It removed radio tower puzzles. It way cleaned up on absurd collectaton mechanics of 4, which had gone way too overboard. The survialist bunkers were a neat mechanic to replace a lot of collectaton stuff. I actually enjoyed the side games like the fishing. The gunplay and the customization was iterated on and improved. The editor where you could make your own missions and post them online was really cool (I made a lot of super complicated stealth missions).
The vibe of the game was pretty good, and the villains were engaging enough. It’s really just the main plot that falls to pieces and only at the very end does it become impossible to ignore how dumb it is.
I think that in mechanical design, 5 is a straight improvement on 3 and 4.
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.
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.
Heaven’s Vault is a game about archaeology and translating a dead language. You explore a unique solar system and discover ruins, in which you uncover artifacts, and bits of text. Through context clues, you translate the passages to uncover the storyline. It’s not difficult, so if you’re looking for a puzzle, this won’t really do it for you, but it’s more of a narrative experience. If you aren’t sure about a word or phrase, you can give it a guess (based on assigning words from a collection of possible translations to specific symbols), and the game will remember that choice and let you slowly revise your translations as you find new text that rules out prior incorrect guesses. There’s an interconnected storyline with multiple paths to follow, and a very unique world - haven’t seen anything like it in other games.
The game has a NG+ mode wherein you start with all of your translations from the first playthrough intact, but, most of the bits of text are considerably longer and more involved, letting you use your prior knowledge to uncover more of the story and the lore of the world, which is also neat.
Didn’t know that! Was going based off of the review score; 1600 reviews in 5 years seemed pretty little-known. All the same, don’t mind the downvotes - that’s the point of the thread after all. :)
This sounds really interesting. I'm gonna put this on my wishlist in hopes it goes on sale or something. Can't justify $25 right now due to circumstances.
If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy Chants of Sennar! It’s also about translating languages; it’s more puzzle-oriented and less story-based; there’s a story to uncover, but it’s not as clear-cut and narrative driven. Still a great game, however!
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.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne