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.
Splinter Cell, specifically picking up where Chaos Theory left off. Use it to showcase Unreal Engine 5 lighting and make it a proper, spectacular stealth game again with Spies v. Mercs multiplayer.
Oh man, just made my own comment on black and white, and I assumed I was the only one. Black & White 2 is still the best God game out there for me and it was so much fun.
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…
If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you’ll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.
Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place’s secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don’t understand, so you’ll just have to leave it for later, when you’ve learned more puzzle mechanics. It’s like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.
All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.
definitely scratches the same itch more than games like the talos principle. there’s like one group it completely fails to properly tutorialize imo, and one that kind of falls short (although having played the witness will make your assumptions more accurate i think). other than that it’s a brilliant 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.
XCOM 2 came out in 2016. Let’s get another XCOM game. Maybe humanity pushing into space and creating a colony which then comes under alien attack. You have to defend the colony, cut off from earth, and take out the alien menace.
I want to like Chimera Squad but every mission feels the same. I love the character based approach though. Also it was fun having aliens on the team for once.
Xcom 2 and Chimera Squad both had some annoying UI problems but luckily they were fixed (for the most part) by mods.
The 2d platforming world and top-down world have smashed together. You control one hero from each dimension, who share the same space in the levels. You switch between platformer and top-down modes and must get both characters to the goal. The boss levels are hard but very cool, combining action and puzzles.
Also features local 2-player co-op and a generous assist mode.
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.
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.
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.
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