Submitted 11 months 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.
I loved a tiny one called The Last Day of June.
It was on PlayStation Plus and it really had a great story.
hypnospace outlaw
A Hat in Time UFO 50 Outer Wilds Hylics Hylics 2 Pizza Tower Celeste
It’s hard to pick one lol
UFO 50 is fantastic.
Got a favourite yet? A friend and I have been paying a lot of lord’s of disconia and party house most recently.
For anyone not familiar, UFO 50 is an anthology of 50 games in the style of nes/SNES era. It’s made by Derek Yu, who made Spelunky before it.
For me, it’s between Mooncat, Party House, and Porgy
Can’t believe none of these haven’t been mentioned yet: Starsector Kenshi Graveyard keeper Battle brothers Ghost of a tale
I really love Supraland, but it’s hard to convince people to try it for some reason.
Just played through both of these, they were so good.
Isn’t there still a demo? I bought it the minute I reached the end of the demo.
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.
Gotta go with Dwarf Fortress. Been playing on and off for the past 10 years at least, it’s just endless !!FUN!!
Exanima Unique physics-based isometric dungeon crawler also featuring an arena career mode. Moddable. Really slow development cycle, though,
Severed Steel Futuristic 3D shooter with maybe the best movement system I’ve tried, with wall running, full 360 air movement, sliding and more. Weapons have only one magazine, so you’re constantly sourcing them from your enemies while blasting holes into the fully destructible levels. Very replayable.
Dave the diver! /s
But seriously I’m a real sucker for platformers, and so A Hat In Time is my most favorited one. It brought back this sort of charm I haven’t felt since the n64 days and I love it!
Stray and Kena: Bridge of Spirits are pretty awesome too, would be my second and third favorites
From the top of my head
Top of my list right now is Vintage Story! It’s like a serious version of Minecraft, with more focus on realism.
Currently it’s Bellwright, among many other titles. what particularly tickles me about it is the shitty ai voices they used for the npcs. I am not pro ai by any means, but nothing makes me happier than hearing “all in a good days of work.” delivered constantly, in the most off-kilter reading imaginable.
Monster sanctuary (turn based monster collector) and Roboquest (arena shooter) were a couple from recent years that stood out to me
For older games nethack and dwarf fortress are great if you can look past the graphics
Monster Sanctuary was so good. I tried it when I had Game Pass, and I loved it so much I bought it outright for Xbox, and then again on Steam. Also got the hardcover monster journal.
Aethermancer, made by the same folks, is looking really good from their demo. Clearly lots of inspiration from Monster Sanctuary but very much its own sort of game
Kerbal space program (the first one) And The Long Dark
Can’t really decide which I like more, and they are vastly different
FlyKnight and ATLYSS, I think. Kinda retro but actually really good and very affordable.
Check out frog fractions!
+1 for Frog Fractions. I finished in about an hour. Cannot tell you much without spoilers, but I can say it’s not one of those surprise horror games. It looks like a kid-friendly game and at least content-wise stays kid-friendly.
One of my all time favorites right now is Brok The Investigator.
It’s a game by French company COWCAT Games that is describes as a point and click beat’em-up game. Has lots to do because there are multiple endings. It has a free visual novel made to essentially showcase a vn engine that can be used to make BTI fan games or your own creations and has an upcoming DLC (apparently only gonna be $9.99) that focuses more on the combat side of the game.
It’s currently available on PS4/5 (vita planned but scrapped), xbox (don’t know if they mean one and series x/s or just series), switch, steam, itch(dot)io, and even epic if you hate yourself.
Hey, I have that game! I need to get to it
The Cat Lady and the other games from Harvester Games 👀
Minimetro and Cultist Simulator are my go to “comfy” games, but cultist simulator really does get you feeling like you’re chasing a mad eldritch horror when playing at times. It’s deliberately obtuse and odd, and then a revelation of the truth takes you over and you push on beyond your wildest expectations.
Slay the Spire and Hollowknight have both been mentioned enough in other posts in case anyone reading this is somehow unaware of either of them.
Faster than Light and Into the Breach are both excellent games. FtL is rng mitigation and crisis control par excellence. ItB is basically chess, and you play out the turns as best you can. It’s rewarding, but once you get good you need to ramp up the difficulty somewhat to keep it fun.
I want to like Into the Breach but it’s too stressful. Like, when I fuck up in FTL and the crew dies it sucks, but when I fuck up in Into the Breach and all those civilians die? Oof. They were counting on me!
Yes, it hurts seeing those 3 or 4 digits numbers.
But once you’ve finished a run once or twice, you’ll get more options and be able to turn it essentially into Sudoku or some other solitaire puzzle and do most levels perfectly once you know what’s going on and having a few more options.
Probably gotta be https://fractalsoftworks.com/
[youtu.be/acqpulP1hLo](the video that hooked me)
This is on my wishlist since a long time. I really want to play it.
It’s great. That video I posted has a working CD Key in it if you want to try it out!
Hey, you might want to know that the item in brackets comes first and the link comes second. I see the raw link and the item in brackets, instead of what you probably intended: to have the item in brackets be a clickable link.
[Starsector](https://fractalsoftworks.com/) will produce what you want.
Thank you. It’s been a day!
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
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.
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.
Bro yes. That game is so good. Wish I could get my friends to play more often lol.
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.
For me it’s Rimworld
Shadow Empire. Best 4X wargame ever. 400 page rulebook included. Realistic logistics and planet generation 6000 years in the future!
I think I have that on my GOG account, I’ll have to check later. Also currently on sale there, too, super cheap
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.
Crumble A speedrunning platforming game, where you play as a blob with a tongue. Pleasant experience to play through while learning, while absolutely balls to the walls insane when actually speedrunning
Cyberpulse Twin-stick arcade neo style virus slamming game. Great control precision, challenging and colourful. The right thumbstick pressing might take a bit of getting used to.
Pseudoregalia Such a fun old school platformer. Big bunny girl MC for some reason but SUPER FUN and satisfying movement mechanics and the world is built well enough for the mechanics. A few hour long game, unless you look everything up.
Actually going to put some indie demos here I played this weekend, that I really enjoyed: Half-Sword Physics based medieval combat game. Reminds me of Exanima but instead of 2.5D, you can play Half-sword in 3rd or 1st person, which is really fun. Can have full gore or turn the gore completely off.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon First person (potentially later also 3rd person) RPG, very much in the vein of Elder Scrolls or Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Really enjoyed the demo, it takes place on the tutorial island/dungeon. Going to buy the full version when it releases, because there seems to be a save wipe for 1.0.
Bloodthief Reminds me of Neon White and Ultrakill having an even more indie baby. Seemed to be pretty simple and good speedrunning platforming fun.
Shape of Dreams 2.5D action RPG roguelike. Very pretty and gameplay feels good. Didn’t play it quite enough yet, only thing I kinda disliked was the amount of cooldowns on abilities.
9Kings Small town defense game with waves of enemies led by other kings attacking your kingdom. Really enjoyed this one. Demo isn’t too difficult, even when I am really bad with these type of games.
RKGK (RAKUGAKI) 3rd person platforming game, where you bring some colour to the world with your graffiti. Very fun movement and popping colours. The dialogue isn’t necessarily for me but the gameplay felt really fun.
Unbeatable Colourful rhythm adventure game, style is grear and soundtrack slaps.
Factorio.
Honourable mentions:
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!
You might like !factorio@lemmy.world
subscribed, thanks!
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 11 months ago
I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:
Azrael@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Tails Noir was a cool little game! I really liked it. 🤩
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 11 months ago
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.