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!
It’s a little known game from a small publisher originally located in Scotland.
The main premise is that you drive around a city as quickly as possible and go bowling with your cousin. Think Big Lebowski meets Driver. You can also play Pool and Darts in various locations around the town, and earn money doing small side jobs such as being a taxi driver or a paramedic.
I’ve never heard of it but it sounds like an interesting indie game from some rockstar guy. I wish they gave him a bigger budget to build a topdown version set in London.
After loving GTA 3 and Vice City and San Andreas, I strongly disliked GTA4. Story was fine, but they really went hard on terrible controls and boring missions.
GTA5 apparently “fixed it” by making the driving more arcade-like, but I forced myself to finish it to get to the ending. Flying was a bore. And again, boring missions.
Maybe I just like the more zany wacky open-world chaos that Just Cause, Mercenaries, or Saints Row provides.
The controls in GTA IV were realistic! Your car tyre would blip the curb and it would affect the stability of the car. Denting the car from every angle resulted in a uniquely deformed mesh that my god would still drive. Pedestrians would bounce off your bumper in unique and interesting ways. It was a simulation paradise.
In GTA V they changed all that, made it more midnight club and arcade-y as you said. You could literally decimate a crowd of people and they’d all die with the same canned animation. Cars would at most lose a door before considering deforming the whole mesh. It just felt dumbed down.
Saints Row is fun, but you play it once and then forget about it because there’s nothing to do once you reach godhood. Mercenaries was great fun, and Just Cause was a physics funbox, I’ll give you that
It’s made by the Developer who made Gunpoint and Heat Signature (also amazing games if you somehow haven’t heard of them BTW).
It’s a turn based tactics/puzzle game where you command a squad of wizards with different magical abilities to dispatch a room full of enemies. A bit like Into the Breach but hand crafted scenarios, not procedurally generated.
It also has a fun story, character customisation, and ability unlocks. Almost every scenario has a bunch of optional extra goals, so you decide how hard you want to wreck your brain. Highly recommend it!
Edit: It seems people are aware of this one, I really thought it was a bit niche.
Yep, don’t care, I’m up voting anyway. This game is well done. I loved Gunpoint, I loved Heat Signature, and I’ve been really enjoying this one. Writing, gameplay, graphics… I’m a fan, for sure. The whole Defenestration Trilogy is worth it.
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 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
HyperRogue has 352 reviews. It is a rogue like that is played on a hyperbolic plane rather than a euclidian one.
If you’re not familiar with hyperbolic geometry, don’t be fooled by the videos. It has the illusion of looking like it is on a sphere in many of the videos. It’s not! Also, you don’t need to be some master of hyperbolic geometry to play. I don’t really understand it but can still play the game well enough.
Essentially, imagine a hexagonal grid. Now, replace some of those hexagons with septagons (7 sided). The further away you get from a point there will be way more tiles in the hyperbolic grid than the euclidian.
The UI is pretty bad, the menus are pretty icky. Those are my only real complaints.
The game is charming. It has.a very retro feel to it. The music reminds me of something of hear from an old school point and click game or RuneScape. The graphics are minimal but charming.
The mechanics are easy enough. You get hit and you die. Most enemies die in one hit. There are no weapons or stats. It’s more like chess in a way. The game will also not let you accidentally move somewhere you’d die, so, yes, very much like chess with checkmates.
Because the game is so simplistic you can get into a flow state where you quickly move and attack enemies. It’s very satisfying to play.
Hyperbolic bonus: Hyperbolica, a first-person walking simulator set in a universe with hyperbolic geometry. You do odd jobs and play games that explore the strangeness of this geometry. Also, there’s a slight digression to explore spherical geometry as well.
Great game made by some devs who used to work at Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja/Jetpack Joyride fame). Highly recommend playing with an actual DJ turntable for the full fantasy. Also had a recently released VR mode.
Oh really? I wasn’t aware they (some of them) were the same devs! That’s pretty cool. It seems the community of the game is pretty small but pretty active for its size. I really like that the game is still being updated and everything. It’s such a fun game!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Outrun. The last one we had, Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, was fucking awesome. I literally bought that for every system they released it on. It’s one of my most played games.
I’d absolutely love a new Outrun in that same vein. There’s been a few half decent clones over the years, but none match both the gameplay, proper branching paths and overall vibes.
SEGA has long since stopped selling it because they no longer have the Ferrari license for the cars. But as a car guy, I’ve easily got dozens of suggestions what to replace them with. Ferrari’s are nice… but I’d also love an Outrun with Lamborghini, Porsche or a whole pack of Japanese cars like NSX, AE86, RX7, Miata…
I am aware of that excellent video, yes. And indeed I’ve played literally every game he shows there. I really like some of them, but none have that charm that actual Outrun has.
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.
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