Some dungeon crawlers I enjoyed: Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Torchlight 1 & 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Legend of Grimrock, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth
Neverwinter Nights has 20+ years of custom content, runs on almost anything, is still getting graphical & engine updates and has modules & persistent world servers that cover both of those genres & more.
Not exactly a minor indie game by any means, but bloons td6 is the game I’ve player the most on mobile by some distance. It’s £6 with no microtransactions and a shit load of content. If you like TD games this is a home run.
Yeah, CrossCode is absolutely amazing. I didn’t hear about it until recently. I’m so glad I didn’t completely miss out on it. It’s like my number 1 favourite game now and I almost missed it.
I like to make sure I bring it up anytime people ask about good games they may not have heard of.
Welcome to the CC simps, because you're certainly not the only one who does that. It's generally a no brainer considering that they also still offer a demo to just try it out. Of course that doesn't tell you much about the great story and characters, but I think the fluidity of the movement and combat system definitely can convince people over already.
This list is utterly fantastic, but if you haven’t given Dave The Diver a chance you definitely should. It’s by far my favorite release from this year, and the devs seem to have even more content planned.
Ignore the pre-release hype (I mean hype before anyone gets to try the game, early access hype is good). If the game is hyped after people get to play it, then I find it’s safer to trust, though personal preferences can still make it miss the mark.
I’d like to add Ardor to the list. It’s a free turn based deck building game where you face off against hexagon creatures on a hexagon board. It’s pretty polished for an actual free to play game.
I would. But I didn’t play a lot of their games. Bastion is kind of unique. Story is pretty linear but its structure is quite a novelty. There’s an awesome narrator that is telling the story, but he reacts to everything you do and has a snarky sense of humor. Game is well designed action RPG with a good variety of weapons and in my eyes very little replay value. Still worth the asking price though.
Yea, I wouldn’t give them any money, though. The actual creators got fucked and any purchases of the game go to the people that fucked them. Great game, but I’d sail the seas for it.
A few of those games form my core of things I’ll go back to every so often, though my list isn’t all Indies. I’d probably throw CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and KSP in there too though, off the top of my head. Surprised to see foxhole in there but I suppose it’s in a relatively decent state at the moment and it’s somehow claimed 1400 hours from me on steam now.
Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.
Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it… a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.
Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It’ll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
Shouldn’t it be trivially easy to demonstrate “prior art” in this case, making the patent invalid? I guess that requires someone to get into a legal battle with Nintendo… but it’s not like this is some niche mechanic. Surely there are other entertainment megacorps who are currently in violation of this “patent” and do have the resources to fight it in court.
Indeed. The sources I’ve read seem to lay blame with games not usually patenting mechanics (which apparently is all patent officers look at for prior art, not other games), meaning it needs active challenging to be thrown out.
PocketPair is based in Japan, which is where the previous, more directly problematic patents have been filed mid-litigation. While there is clearly prior art for the US patent, it isn’t quite as comically broad as the Japan ones, and since Japan doesn’t seem to care about prior art, those remain the most concerning to me.
The patent office has long said they’re unable to attract and retain the expertise needed to evaluate novelty in any given field, and so the courts are left to sort it out.
I wonder how could a government agency not have the funding it needs? /s
This battle system was in use by final fantasy before pokémon though, wasn’t it? Also summoning was used in at least the 4 ff games that I have actually played.
This patent could have a chilling effect, but there’s no way it would stand up in court. They can still use it as a bargaining chip. Court cases are expensive. And if you don’t have a legal department, they are also a personal drain. But that’s small fry. Financially, I don’t believe it makes sense for them to resort to criminality to get such a patent. Maybe they hope it will influence their court case in Japan against Palworld?
Sort of the point though. If they take a small creator to court, they can just bankrupt them through expensive legal proceedings, and because they do have the patents the judge is unlikely to throw the case out
Yes, absolutely. And there is money in patent trolling. I just don’t see the business case here. Why damage the Nintendo brand with such shenanigans when you could leave the patent trolling to some formally independent company. Maybe I just underestimate how much money can be made by shaking down small devs.
What damage? Its been known for years what a scummy company Nintendo is and people still buy their games and consoles in the millions. The fans will just say that Nintendo is in the right and move on
People literally die of preventable diseases due to patents. I can’t find any news regarding the last time some nutjob died because they couldn’t torrent Sham’alyan’s Avatar movie.
Like the other guy said it’s a patient. I don’t know why these days it seems like the patent office is allowing patents for vague concepts, But it needs to stop. The entirety of the video game industry is built on itineration of ideas and concepts that came before. How much longer before they try to patent jumping?
forbes.com
Aktywne