Undertale. It was the best game I’ve ever played and I can never play it again. This game lives rent free in my head, in my fanworks, in the music I listen to and make. It’s a game that combines technology and art.
Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don’t know anyone else who has played this game but it’s so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that’s kind of it’s own whole thing so I don’t think that counts.
edit: I can’t believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my “main” and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete “real world” feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that’s not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn’t sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it’s complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
I feel like people must be tired of me recommending the same few games (you know, if anyone cared enough to read all my comments), but I’m the type of guy who is pretty much only interested in finding the more hidden gems, and I generally ignore the stuff that keeps showing up on the front page of Steam.
The Upturned - A cartoony horror-comedy game with a great sense of humor.
Withering Rooms - The story is interesting and the atmosphere is great.
Your Spider - This one is possibly my favorite indie horror game.
Exanima - Read about the features. This one is more impressive than the screenshots make it look (at least for me).
Lunacid - I love the visual style and atmosphere of this. I also enjoyed Lost in Vivo by the same developer.
Praey for the Gods - This one is for anyone who’s looking for more games like Shadow of the Collossus.
8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife - This is a decent metroidvania with a charming story. If you enjoyed Hollow Knight, then you may also enjoy this.
Lunacid - King’s Fieldalike with a great atmosphere and PS1 era esthetic. Fun hidden secrets (sometimes a little too obscure, but whateva, still fun) that I fell in love with as a fan of the OG From Soft King’s Field/Eternal Ring games.
Signalis - A thought provoking horror sci-fi game about an android trying to find their missing ship captain on a far away planet. I don’t want to stay more to stay away from spoilers, but this plays homage to OG Resident Evil and other early survival horror games from a top down perspective.
Pyre - A sports game and VN hybrid made by Supergiant games. Not as popular (At least I think) as Hades, Transistor, and Bastion. Just fantastic story and world building with characters that you end up feeling so passionately for by the end of the game. Just a wonderful game and probably my favorite Supergiant game barely in front of Hades.
Dusk - A retro FPS ala Quake 1 era games. The game that kicked off the newest resurgence of “Boomer shooters” and is one of the best out there. Wonderful secrets and level design along with some solid atmosphere and scares by those New Blood boys that I love so much.
He’s a bit of a FromSoft fanboy, with his longest and most popular series being “Steam Dumpster Diving” where he searches the Internet for any games with a “Soulslike” tag and reviews them. He’s spent more than a few videos talking about King’s Field and FromSoft’s other earlier games.
Also he made some absolutely nasty For Honor vids a few years back that I think are worth checking out even today.
From Soft pulled me in with the first Armored Core because I’ve always been into massive robots, so I checked more of their stuff out using the library dial up and found out about King’s Field. I love slow dungeon crawlers and weird shit, so it was a match for me the whole way. Lunacid really plays it up too. You can tell the developer loves those old games.
I’m not normally into fantasy at all and I was gripped by Pyre’s story and characters. It’s a real testament to Supergiant’s writing abilities that I’d kill to see it picked up for a series by someone and it’s the game of theirs I most consider replaying just to spend time in the world again.
That ending video rolling and the absolutely beautiful personalized version of Bound Together playing is one of my favorite moments of any game I’ve played. I would love to go back to that world in other mediums.
I’ve been putting off playing Ultrakill until it finally releases, but from the little I had to check out when I bought it; I thought it was great. I’m excited to play it. Dusk is also just fantastic. It’s hard to pick a favorite from the New Blood games for me. Amid Evil is also up there.
Rain World is a sidescrolling platformer in which you play a small rodent who must survive on a planet of other life forms pelted with recurring lethally powerful downpours of rain. You must learn to control your creature (who moves with dynamic physics, along with all other creatures), and learn to interact with and hunt the various other creatures (who have varied and intelligent AI and are not necessarily hostile) in order to gain food to sustain you through the next rain cycle.
Through all of this you explore a large interconnected world of different areas that show a background lore of a world that previously inhabited intelligent industrial beings (who have vanished) and uncover the mysteries within and find others of your kind.
That was as succint as I could make it to show off the unique qualities of Rain World. Its visual style is beautiful, its gameplay has a moderate learning curve due to the physics, and the AI of the creatures are successful in creating a dynamic ecosystem wherein the player feels like they're a small incidental piece of a world that has its own goals and behaviors that the player must learn to fit in with and work within.
I really wanted to love rain world since it seemed right up my alley. I bounced off it not because of the difficulty, but I think because the character’s movement feels bad. You’re slow, can’t jump high, a lot of maneuvering is fiddly.
Maybe I’ll try it again at some point though, because the world they made is brilliant and has interesting emergent behaviors.
Battle Brothers: Battle Brothers is a turn based tactical RPG which has you leading a mercenary company in a gritty, low-power, medieval fantasy world. You decide where to go, whom to hire or to fight, what contracts to take and how to train and equip your men in a procedurally generated open world campaign. The Godfather of Squad-Management-Games!
Songs of Conquest: If you like Turn-Based-Strategy and know HoMM3, you will love this game! Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy game inspired by 90s classics. Lead powerful magicians called Wielders and venture to lands unknown. Wage battle against armies that dare oppose you and hunt for powerful artifacts.
Slay the Spire is the gold standard for me, at least. I haven’t played Monster Train – it doesn’t look that appealing to me, but I’ve heard good things.
It’s very similar in some ways in the surface, but pretty different in essence. I like both. STS is more hardcore and “strict” and choices matter more, MT is more chill, relying on a single good combo usually, but with very high ceiling for broken fun things. I prefer MT more to unwind.
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I’m 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I’m pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Playing on the gold stake, I think I don’t make it past the first ante like 80% of the time. I might be too greedy or just bad at the game, but in StS I can make a decent run on ascension 20 at a much higher rate.
You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?
Supergiant might not be 3 dudes in an apartment, but it’s still an indie studio. They do put an impressive amount of effort into their games though, I agree on that
I played a bit of Bootstrap Island tonight, it’s fun! It’s a vr roguelike island survival game, monsters come out at night and it’s pretty fuckin scary
I was a bit misleading though, because I also play a lot of the 2.5-year-old AoE4, and a tiny amount of AoM and AoE3 (and expect the amount of AoM to go way up later this year when Retold comes out).
It’s crazy how well that game holds up even today. Also quite hilarious how completely different my playing style is today than when I was 12. I had no clue about how to counter specific units, build order or even luring the boars. I’d absolutely wipe floor with my past self even with the medicore skills I have at it now.
Yeah it’s pretty incredible. I don’t know if I ever played without at least resource cheats as a kid.
I do remember knowing the triangle infantry beats cavalry beats archers, but also thinking “more expensive units must be better”. So I would build m@a-line to counter scouts or knights, rather than spear-line. I probably never built more than 20 vills, either.
You are in a weird cabin in the middle of the woods playing a card game with your fate on the line. Some of your cards are talking to you and comment on how you play.
Then things get weird.
For those that like Inscryption, honorable mention for Hand of Fate 1 & 2
I’m not any good at deck building games, but my girlfriend is pretty close to platinuming it on PS4 and I have to say, that game just gets weirder and weirder.
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Aktywne