Submitted 3 weeks ago by Elevator7009@lemmy.zip to games@lemmy.world
Given the swathes of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
Hollow Knight
I love it so much that I can’t finished, I always stop when I’m about to fight the final boss. I just don’t want it to stop.
Maybe when Silksong came out I finish it once and for all.
Hollow Knight isn’t exactly over when you finish the story. There are more flights, especially Godhome. If you can beat all that you’re an incredible player.
For me, FTL: Faster than Light still hasn’t been topped. *Hades II might get there, though. Disco Elysium, Ikaruga, and Papers, Please are also high on the list.
FTL!!! And yeah, PP is awesome and so unique!
Stardew
Dwarf Fortress. Not even just my favorite indie game, but favorite game ever.
I’m such a sucker for world simulation! It made me hate games where events happen because they’re programmed to do so.
FTL: Faster Than Light
The Multiverse mod expands the game dramatically, and is, if anything, better than the base game; I highly recommend it.
It does add a lot of very good playable content, but the quality and tone of the writing is a departure from the main game. Some find it a deal breaker.
such a great non traditional roguelike with sooo much replayability.
It’s the game that made me like these kinds of games. 1,300 hours :)
Pushing the definition but I started when it was still in beta… Minecraft has gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours put into it.
Terarria and Starbound are both really good and scratch that same itch as Minecraft. Core Keeper is another one that has some of that feel and I ended up really enjoying.
Surprised I haven’t seen it mentioned but Cave Story was made by one guy doing everything… and everything in it is immaculate. It’s still free for the original version as well.
Stardew Valley is awesome and restarted a genre.
Crypt of the Necrodancer is awesome, and well worth checking out… also goes on sale really cheap.
Pacific Drive is a fun one to check out. If you’re from the PNW, it will hit even more.
Really enjoyed Stray. Worth grabbing on a sale.
OwlBoy was a delightful game with a lot of character.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was a really nice return to form if you like IgaVanias.
If you like roguelites then you owe it to yourself to check out Enter the Gungeon (isometric) as well as RoboQuest (fps).
If you want a game that’s beautiful, with emergent story and is hard af… definitely check out Rain World.
Is Black Mesa still considered indie? It’s how I would recommend anyone play Half-Life 1 these days.
Rusty’s Retirement… isn’t so much a game… sorta… but yeah… check that out.
+1 for Pacific Drive. Nothing else like it out there. And you get to form a relationship with a station wagon, which is peak passenger vehicle design.
And the soundtrack is outstanding!
Nothing else like it out there.
I keep meaning to check this one out but haven’t yet. store.steampowered.com/app/1290170/Titan_Chaser/
I enjoyed Rusty’s Retirement, glad to see someone else has played it. (I do count idlers as games.) Cute little desktop idle/incremental game.
Factorio.
Honourable mentions:
You might like !factorio@lemmy.world
subscribed, thanks!
You might enjoy Heaven’s Vault since you’ve played Chants of Sennaar! It’s languagerific.
Janky though at times, movement wise
thanks, I’ll check it out!
Balatro
Obra Dinn
Same but with spelunky 2
In my thirst for difficult games, I 100%'d it. Took more than a 100 hours but still the most fun I’ve had mastering a game to that level of expertise
Lethal Company. It was developed by one person, yet it outsold Call of Duty. It trended from 2023 to 2024, but I still play it at least weekly. A couple Lethal Company clone games have come out and some say one (R.E.P.O) is better, and graphically I would say yes, but nothing quite matches Lethal Company’s charm.
Bro yes. That game is so good. Wish I could get my friends to play more often lol.
The monsters in REPO are worse somehow.
Not sure if its because its relatively easier to stun/kill them or of its because their mechanics are lacking in some way compared to lethal company’s, but I feel as if they don’t have the same sauce.
Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don’t find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!
Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.
Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers’ solidarity and union struggle type of plot.
Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.
Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.
Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.
Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.
Dwarf Fortress. It’s Dwarf Fortress.
WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.
Descenders. Crazy fun downhill bicycling game.
One game I love that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Subnautica. The only survival crafting game I ever finished. The story telling and athmosphere are unmatched.
One of the few games I’ve played through too!
Valheim. Bought it late January and already got almost 400 hours on it. Play it vanilla first then modded. I played it with friends, beat final boss on Day 997, we took our times, building and all along the way. Then I started over solo with x3 resources, no raid, and move metals through portal. I just wanted to see if I could solo all game and today I just finished basically everything. So right now, I’m just collecting resources for gears and buildings. Going to make few houses across the map.
Balatro. It’s a great Maths game.
Here are a few, hopefully they aren’t mentioned yet:
Some of these might be AA, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. I have plenty more where that came from. :)
I feel like blufire never got the recognition it deserved.
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was. It’s not the best game of its genre, but it’s better than most.
I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:
Tails Noir was a cool little game! I really liked it. 🤩
I liked that it wasn’t a parody of itself. Most of the writing could have been unchanged if it hadn’t been anthro themed. And the writing was nice, nothing ham-fisted, and had some respect for the reader. I keep running into games where you’ve just talked to an NPC about how they need you to hit the blue button, and you’ve gone through a hallway of posters saying your goal is to hit the blue button, had a quest marker guiding you there that says ‘this way to the blue button you need to press,’ and your character still feels the need to speak to the air about the need to hit the blue button when you walk into the blue button room.
Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.
Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.
Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I’ve ever played, but to be fair, it wasn’t exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn’t really take off either.
There are also a handful of indie games that I’ve played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Mind Over Magnet is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what’s there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.
Vagante’s negative reviews criticize its too-numerous insta-death traps. What would your reply be to that?
I would say it’s a game that requires you to play tactically rather than rushing through it. Especially early game, the traps are very reminiscent of Spelunky, and it’s clear where a lot of their inspiration came from, but Vagante gives you even more mechanics to deal with traps, like magic rings that let you go through walls and floors, for instance, but you won’t necessarily find them every run. Noita has caught my attention here and there, but I just never made time to try it.
Here are the ones that don’t get uninstalled from my potato box:
Sable
Ion Fury
Torchlight
Ziggurat
Baba Is You
Edritch
Fez
Plunge
Valley
Into The Breach
Journey
(Disclaimer: some are very old, some may not be indie, eh, I did my best.)
With the amount of content the main game of Baba Is You comes with, alongside the level editor and custom modded level packs people have made for it, would 100% recommend it.
N++
Undoubtedly the best, most complete 2D platformer I’ve ever played. Super tight controls and incredible level design, coupled with an episode-long timer mechanic that you can influence makes this one absolutely unmatched. Sure, games like Celeste are flashier, but nothing is a better game than N++. I think I put something like 120 hours into this to get the platinum on PS4. I would happily start over and play the whole thing from scratch again.
Too bad the developer duo basically disappeared… I had an idea for a 2-player sequel but they never responded.
Slay the Spire
Probably Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. All the older Indy games weren’t that great but this new one is really good.
Dude, The Fate of Atlantis was awesome. Don’t you be crapping on my LucasArts point and click adventure games
Inside Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Eternal Strands Disco Elysium
All very different and unique. All fantastic!
Cave Story, the original 2004 version.
I played it a long time ago and I still think about that game from time to time.
Cave Story is undoubtedly the greatest Metroidvania made to date of which I know.
Cave Story really isn’t a metroidvania. The path splits at points, but there’s very little choice where to explore. It’s just a platformer action shooter.
My favorite metroidvania has to be Aquaria. Vibes of the game are on point. The story is great for a game in that genre, and the traversal and combat are unique and tons of fun. Soundtrack is phenomenal.
Check out Gato Roboto if you want a metroidvania similar to Cave Story!
The OG. The fact it was all done by a single dude blows my mind. People often praise Toby Fox for the same reason, and he definitely deserves it, but he wasn’t good at programming. Pixel was good at everything: programming, music, writing, and art.
Slay The Spire Fury Ori And The Blind Forest
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is an excellent followup to Blind Forest.
Fury
Furi? Or is there another indie game also called Fury?
The Furi soundtrack slaps btw
Oh yeah Furi.
I was very tired when I typed this up.
Factorio.
You might like !factorio@lemmy.world
Kerbal space program (the first one) And The Long Dark
Can’t really decide which I like more, and they are vastly different
I’ve not seen many RPG maker games mentioned here, so i’ll do my part. These are a lot of my favourites through the years:
There are also a lot of them that i’ve not played but i’ve watched full playtroughs of, like IB, Hello Charlotte, Lisa, … and most recently The coffin of Andy and Leyley
One game i would also like to add is Rain World, which is a 2d survival platformer, a bit challenging, but i would argue it’s also a “metroidbrania” if you know the genre, games that have knowledge as gates rather than keys or power-ups like metroidvanias. Some notable examples are Outer wilds or Return of obra dinn, who others have already mentioned
Celeste is really good. So sad that the “Sequel Game” from the Devs got chanceled.
Woops, i’ve left Celeste in while re-writing the list, that’s not an RPG maker game And i didn’t know about the sequel until now, that’s a shame
Finding Paradise is absolutely an amazing game. Would absolutely recommend a blind playthrough of it, or at least a no-commentary walkthrough if nothing else.
Dyson sphere program is still one of my enduring favorites.
inlandempire@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
Outer Wilds
Disco Elysium
Inscryption
Carto
Spiritfarer
Pyre