I recently bought stardew valley and its fun but the farming grind feels kinda forced, no? I feel like I need to pay attention to not loose myself in the game which defeats the purpose.
I used to find it kinda stressful until i realised there was no time limit to the game like the usual harvest moons so once I realised that, I never find myself rushing around or overextending my ability to farm to grind more and just focused on what I was enjoying in the game which was a bit of everything.
I only really played early on, not dabbled with it properly in years but I do remember things happening. It's not like I could only get things to happen in the first two years in game
I can imagine it gets better but the grind is kind of not for me. The mining and farming grind in minecraft I understand and the grind in factorio as well. Maybe its heightened due to the saving cycle that seems to want you to keep going.
There are ways to play (besides mods) where you barely have to grow crops. Unless you're trying for all the achievements there's not really a wrong way or a time limit to play.
I had a harder time getting good at and staying interested in ITB. I still really enjoy a playthrough every now and then.
With FTL I guess it just feels more replayable and "on edge" to me. There is just something special about ftl runs, be it overpowered, under powered. There are so many ships, weapons, systems, and crew combinations that no run really feels the same.
The same could be said about ITB and their different mech teams but I guess it just doesn't have the same feel. ITB feels like I'm selling my services to big corporations with saving people as an after note. FTL feels like a suicide mission for the fate of the galaxy and I think that feeling is what really makes me come back to FTL.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing, I don't really disagree with any of your points. Maybe I just liked the style of ITB more...I do love isometric tactics games
Personally one of the aspects I enjoy a lot in FTL is managing my power levels mid-fight (Do I need my oxygen powered right now? I could probably turn it off until the fight is over...) I don't know if any other game that has you shuffling around power like that.
Came here to say Outer Wilds. That game is a masterpiece and I encourage anyone and everyone to try it. Only two things I'll say are this: The less you know about it going in, the better the experience. The DLC is also worth it.
It's one of those I downloaded, played 10 minutes of, and then got distracted by something else. I've done a good job avoiding spoilers, I'll check it out next.
That's actually very ironic, the game needs about half an hour to get you hooked and yet so many people quit it beforehand. You'll understand what I mean when you play it
Interestingly enough, I did the same thing. When it launched, I was big into piracy and had a shitty job to pay for games with. Played until I could fly the ship, flew into the sky, then promptly lost control of my ship and didn't touch it again for at least half a decade. So glad I bought it and played it without spoilers!
The less you know about it going in, the better the experience.
This includes the knowledge that it's good. You should forget that people praise it everywhere because that has a potential of ruining the experience. It did for me, somehow.
Came here super late to ask: how? I played it and after discovering most of the things in game I couldn't continue without guides (not good with puzzle games). I also don't get attached to characters that can't move with a few lines of dialog (no I'm not a psychopath, OneShot's endings always give me mixed emotions for a few days). I'm not looking to argue I just want an answer
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I'm 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I'm pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Playing on the gold stake, I think I don't make it past the first ante like 80% of the time. I might be too greedy or just bad at the game, but in StS I can make a decent run on ascension 20 at a much higher rate.
You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?
Slay the Spire is the gold standard for me, at least. I haven't played Monster Train -- it doesn't look that appealing to me, but I've heard good things.
It's very similar in some ways in the surface, but pretty different in essence. I like both. STS is more hardcore and "strict" and choices matter more, MT is more chill, relying on a single good combo usually, but with very high ceiling for broken fun things. I prefer MT more to unwind.
Supergiant might not be 3 dudes in an apartment, but it's still an indie studio. They do put an impressive amount of effort into their games though, I agree on that
Uh... I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another... oh well... :)
Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it's an exploration game, but what you're exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.
Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that "huh?" factor where right until the end you're not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?
Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.
Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).
Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you're a robotic loader than can put down dots. That's all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You're attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.
Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you're the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you're up against and that all the corpses stay. It's not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.
Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It's 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You're an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the "freaky alien attack" recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?
Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you're digging underground for metal and for "lumen." To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.
Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.
Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You're a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the "SCP" universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won't spread again.
Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you're bording and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn't grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.
Space Run - 2D base building. You're a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don't do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.
Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you're just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species "gift" to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.
i'm not saying you didn't run into quality posts on reddit, but this is the kind of post i see way more often here and it makes these spaces way more enjoyable.
nice work, definitely going to try a few of these out!
this is a great post. I do think the outer wilds description is a smidge spoilery. I know, people figure that out pretty quickly but it's still a neat experience if going in blind
I really wanted to love rain world since it seemed right up my alley. I bounced off it not because of the difficulty, but I think because the character's movement feels bad. You're slow, can't jump high, a lot of maneuvering is fiddly.
Maybe I'll try it again at some point though, because the world they made is brilliant and has interesting emergent behaviors.
Rain World is a sidescrolling platformer in which you play a small rodent who must survive on a planet of other life forms pelted with recurring lethally powerful downpours of rain. You must learn to control your creature (who moves with dynamic physics, along with all other creatures), and learn to interact with and hunt the various other creatures (who have varied and intelligent AI and are not necessarily hostile) in order to gain food to sustain you through the next rain cycle.
Through all of this you explore a large interconnected world of different areas that show a background lore of a world that previously inhabited intelligent industrial beings (who have vanished) and uncover the mysteries within and find others of your kind.
That was as succint as I could make it to show off the unique qualities of Rain World. Its visual style is beautiful, its gameplay has a moderate learning curve due to the physics, and the AI of the creatures are successful in creating a dynamic ecosystem wherein the player feels like they're a small incidental piece of a world that has its own goals and behaviors that the player must learn to fit in with and work within.
Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don't know anyone else who has played this game but it's so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that's kind of it's own whole thing so I don't think that counts.
edit: I can't believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my "main" and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete "real world" feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it's a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that's not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn't sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it's complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.
Balatro has taken that mantle for the moment (over a hundred hours in under two weeks). Other similar games would be Cobalt Core (finished with all characters, don't feel the need to go back though) and... Monster Train (it's okay, not as tight as the others).
I'm in love with balatro, but do you think it's better than slay the spire? I think slay the spire just feels... More of a game than balatro I guess? Maybe I feel that way just because there's not really a story set up against balatro, and slay the spire at least has you fight an entity that you feel good about.
I picked up Balatro because of this thread and I agree, it's a great game and something a little fresh, but slay the spire is still probably the best.
I agree about the "more like a game" element. Baltoro feels more like playing cards than playing a video game. I think it's cause I'm using the same odds/play styles as when I play real life card games.
StS doesn't really have a story, but yes, it has characters instead; I don't really mind either direction, Balatro's fight-against-the-game is essentially the same thing.
They are different, and I do enjoy them both in their own ways. Balatro's heavy focus on combinations (and regular stores) means decks can shape quite quickly into something very unique. It's also more accessible as the games are shorter; StS can be an hour if successful, if not more. My comment is more that Balatro is newer and has at least satisfied the itch which - after being out for years - StS has perhaps not been able to do in such a way for a while.
Yeah, StS really ruined me for other deckbuilders, and I'm still chasing that high. Some pretty good ones have been Power Chord and Banners of Ruin. They're both team-based games where cards are tied to certain characters, and I think that particular mechanic adds enough that it took me a while to crack the code on them.
Wildfrost is a really good one. It's got a lot of different play styles and has a pretty big learning curve.
Also on android there is Pirate Outlaws. It feels like a slay the spire clone, but has a good amount of content and does enough different to be worth mentioning.
Not exactly the same cause it's not a deck builder, but has a similar feel is dicey dungeons (both steam and android). It's a lot simpler and luck is a larger factor, but it's got a decent gameplay loop and being able to play on Android helped scratch that itch on the road.
I'm not too into deckbuilders, so I played it just for that gorgeous presentation lol. The art style falls under an unusual category of "cute, but I'm pretty sure that the artist also draws naughty stuff on the side"
I liked Wildfrost, but it didn't have that much replay value after 30 or so hours, whereas I have 500+ in StS. They have updated it since I last played though, so maybe there's a bit more to do now?
They've definitely added things to it over the year or so it's been out. Not sure if enough to make it worth it for you. It's also possible I'm just bad at it, as I haven't beaten it (although only 12hrs on it).
The Steam version makes 90% of the learning curve (learning the UI) disappear because it is so, so much better than the legacy version lol
The game itself is really rather straightforward and easy to figure out. It was always the presentation and layout of the UI and hotkeys that made it a challenge to actually start playing since you could know what you needed to do, but not know how to reach the command for it.
Most games are great because they provide something unique or are polished to perfection, so it's wild that they've made something that manages to be both their first attempt. Really looking forward to whatever they decide to do next.
Obligatory Undertale mention. I know it's the cliché answer, and it's fan base is...a lot, but it really is a great game.
Also, very happy to see FLT FTL get a couple of mentions here. Hardly any of my IRL friends have even heard of it, but it's probably the best Star Trek game ever made (even if it's not actually a Star Trek game).
It's one of the simplest games possible, the controls are "clockwise" and "counterclockwise", and there are no distracting characters, setting, or story.
And yet the easiest level is -- quite accurately -- labeled as difficulty "Hard". The next 5 levels (6 total) go way up in difficulty (and labelling) from there.
Each level lasts 60 seconds. If you can survive that long. I've never unlocked the final level myself, so I don't even know what it is like, but I can guess.
Outer Wilds and Hollow Knight share the spotlight for greatest games of all time. Both are as close to perfect as it gets.
Bastion gets an honorable mention. Not sure if SuperGiant Games is considered indie anymore, especially now that Hades hit big, but I love their early work.
Lunacid - King's Fieldalike with a great atmosphere and PS1 era esthetic. Fun hidden secrets (sometimes a little too obscure, but whateva, still fun) that I fell in love with as a fan of the OG From Soft King's Field/Eternal Ring games.
Signalis - A thought provoking horror sci-fi game about an android trying to find their missing ship captain on a far away planet. I don't want to stay more to stay away from spoilers, but this plays homage to OG Resident Evil and other early survival horror games from a top down perspective.
Pyre - A sports game and VN hybrid made by Supergiant games. Not as popular (At least I think) as Hades, Transistor, and Bastion. Just fantastic story and world building with characters that you end up feeling so passionately for by the end of the game. Just a wonderful game and probably my favorite Supergiant game barely in front of Hades.
Dusk - A retro FPS ala Quake 1 era games. The game that kicked off the newest resurgence of "Boomer shooters" and is one of the best out there. Wonderful secrets and level design along with some solid atmosphere and scares by those New Blood boys that I love so much.
He's a bit of a FromSoft fanboy, with his longest and most popular series being "Steam Dumpster Diving" where he searches the Internet for any games with a "Soulslike" tag and reviews them. He's spent more than a few videos talking about King's Field and FromSoft's other earlier games.
Also he made some absolutely nasty For Honor vids a few years back that I think are worth checking out even today.
From Soft pulled me in with the first Armored Core because I've always been into massive robots, so I checked more of their stuff out using the library dial up and found out about King's Field. I love slow dungeon crawlers and weird shit, so it was a match for me the whole way. Lunacid really plays it up too. You can tell the developer loves those old games.
I’m not normally into fantasy at all and I was gripped by Pyre’s story and characters. It’s a real testament to Supergiant’s writing abilities that I’d kill to see it picked up for a series by someone and it’s the game of theirs I most consider replaying just to spend time in the world again.
That ending video rolling and the absolutely beautiful personalized version of Bound Together playing is one of my favorite moments of any game I've played. I would love to go back to that world in other mediums.
I've been putting off playing Ultrakill until it finally releases, but from the little I had to check out when I bought it; I thought it was great. I'm excited to play it. Dusk is also just fantastic. It's hard to pick a favorite from the New Blood games for me. Amid Evil is also up there.
I feel like people must be tired of me recommending the same few games (you know, if anyone cared enough to read all my comments), but I'm the type of guy who is pretty much only interested in finding the more hidden gems, and I generally ignore the stuff that keeps showing up on the front page of Steam.
The Upturned - A cartoony horror-comedy game with a great sense of humor.
Withering Rooms - The story is interesting and the atmosphere is great.
Your Spider - This one is possibly my favorite indie horror game.
Exanima - Read about the features. This one is more impressive than the screenshots make it look (at least for me).
Lunacid - I love the visual style and atmosphere of this. I also enjoyed Lost in Vivo by the same developer.
Praey for the Gods - This one is for anyone who's looking for more games like Shadow of the Collossus.
8Doors: Arum's Afterlife - This is a decent metroidvania with a charming story. If you enjoyed Hollow Knight, then you may also enjoy this.
The art is phenomenal, but the writing is cringeworthy. I loved it as a teenager but I have a hard time taking it seriously now. I wish I never replayed it so I could have kept my nostalgia.
The combat mechanics are fun and feel amazing when played as intended, but they're massively unbalanced. IIRC with two exceptions (enemies that require a parry to enter a vulnerable state) every single fight can be won flawlessly by spamming Dust Storm even on the highest difficulty.
It's a remarkable game, all the more so since it was only one dev. I 100%'ed it, and it sits in a place of honor in my collection, but it's not one I'll ever return to.
From memory I do remember things getting ludicrously easy if you levelled Fidget right up. And I don't recall the writing at all. Likely just nonsense to move the plot along while opening up new areas.
But as a one man effort, it's incredible. Especially the art style, which normally falls into the pixel art or just plain ugly when it comes to the 1-2 man indie games.
Agreed. The art looks straight out of an anime, and Dust's combat animations are really smooth and satisfying. I think the cutscenes looked really good, too, but it's been long enough that I don't remember.
I had a quick look on YouTube and they're not bad at all. It's hardly Baldur's Gate 3, but it doesn't look out of place next to most of the AA Ubisoft 2D games that had dozens of people working on them.
Terraria is the easy pick for me. I believe the only game that comes even close to the amount of hours I have in it would be Minecraft. I doubt I need to say much about this game, so I'll leave it at 3 words: near infinite replayability.
Melvor Idle is an amazing game if you like the "idle" in idle games. And if you like the idea of leveling up a multitude of different skills like in RuneScape but don't like the idea of walking back to a town every time you've chopped down 12 trees, Melvor Idle has you covered. It's a long grind but I had fun the whole way. I've 100%'d it and all the DLCs and still love playing it.
Cassette Beasts... I'm genuinely surprised I haven't seen this game mentioned here. An absolutely amazing creature collector with a very unique twist on things, a great story, beautiful pixel art, and hands down the best game soundtrack I've ever heard.
Melvor Idle is a great call.
The base game is a solid idle game and there's a load of mods too.
I did a HCCO12B (Hardcore combat only, 12 bank slots only) run when the game first released.
Reinstalled the game yesterday and started another HCCO run using the new mod, it adds some QoL and tweaks.
My only negative about it is that when playing normally, I always feel like there's a perfect/optimal strategy and I should figure it out before playing.
Aside from FTL (which I'm glad to see is well-represented here), my top ones would probably be Papers, Please and Disco Elysium. Papers, Please manages to pair a good narrative leading to many endings with oddly fun gameplay. Disco Elysium simply has some of the best writing ever in a video game and world lore that I can't get enough of.
I also really liked The Binding of Isaac (Rebirth and later), Don't Starve, Shovel Knight, and Hollow Knight.
I think the Deep Rock developers are owned by Embracer now, so I'm not sure if that counts as "indie" anymore, even if they're still a small (and previously somewhat home-grown) studio. But it's still a damn good game - ROCK AND STONE
DRG was never an indie, it was published by Coffee Stain Publishing, which is a subsidiary of Coffee Stain, which in turn is a subsidiary of Embracer.
Ghost Ship got fully acquired by Embracer in 2021, though their publishing deal with Coffee Stain started in 2017, before Embracer had even touched either company.
Ghost Ship did not self-publish DRG, they published with Coffee Stain. The publishing deal started in 2017, with Embracer/THQ buying Coffee Stain a year later in 2018. And even later buying Ghost Ship, as well.
I’ve really enjoyed playing Tails of Iron (metroidvania with a focus on learning bosses attacks) lately.
For programming games, I really liked Shenzhen IO (You create hardware with something resembling an Assembly language and a printable manual) and Human Resources Machine (drag and drop assembly programming)
I also have a soft spot for anything from Ska Studios (I maed a game with zombies in it, salt and sanctuary, salt and sacrifice, dishwasher, Charlie murder, and a bunch of older games that are probably not playable anymore)
Also looks like everyone else forgot to mention the great game that is Undertale as well.
I'm replaying subnautica after a few years since my first playthrough. I thought that it was more of a one-time experience than a replayable game but enough time has passed that my memory is more of a general feeling than remembering specifically where everything is, so it's been surprisingly engaging. Without even trying, I'm pretty sure the way I'm going through everything is different from my last playthrough, too.
Oh wow, are there any non-fish foods other than the nutrient blocks and those trees on the surface? Can you fabricate the blocks at any point? I can't remember if the first one has the indoor grow plots for surface plants like sub zero does.
I guess the main question I'm getting at is if you can do this without having to travel to the surface to stuff your face with trees or being very strategic with the nutrient blocks you find?
So, the first 30 minutes go like this. Find the stuff to make and craft the knife, scanner, fins, air tanks, and building tool.
You can eat kelp and make bleach>water w salt and coral to stay alive, though it's a LOT of kelp.
Then head straight to southern island to scan the multipurpose room, indoor and outdoor grow beds, and grab lantern fruit and marble mellons.
You can then build a base and grow all the food you will ever need. I stock up on a ton of bleach and make water as needed, though the food also restores some hydration.
I usually have this done before the Aurora explodes.
Once you have the cyclops you can plant in there as well. Three lantern fruit trees per base is all the food you will need in the game, and marble melons have a lot of water.
The only thing you miss out on really is the emergency air bladder, as that requires a fish. To make up for it I carry a second air tank when diving deep or exploring wrecks. I also build outdoor grow beds w brain corals in strategic places as emergency air supplies.
Honestly, I started it as a lark, and found it so enjoyable because I never get distracted chasing down and catching fish.
i finished the game without hatching eggs so that's something I'd do on my next play, i also missed the large strider crab creatures on my first play. going into the spinoff game, I'm taking advantage of all the new tech before progressing the story because i managed to get halfway through the first one without crafting a proper base
Yeah, the one achievement I'm missing is hatching a certain egg so I've been collecting eggs this time around. Just got the alien containment, so I guess it's time to start at that.
I've just built my second base. I only had one in my first playthrough, but I built more for sub zero and realized there's nothing really stopping me from building a ton of them other than how much time I want to spend gathering the resources for it.
I'm considering trying to go to the end without a Cyclops sub since I've already got the max depth for the seamoth, though I need to find those deep mushrooms again for the defense shock that would be essential for that. Though now that I think of it, the Cyclops was probably why I didn't build a second base and the lack of Cyclops was probably why I ended up building more bases in sub zero.
Tunic. The shortcuts are so cleverly hidden that allows you to easily break the sequence in your next playthrough. The manual translation felt just like back when I tried to understand japanese game manuals that come with game boy cartridges.
Chain of Echoes. A one man RPG game with a unique combat system that has great quality of life.
I was kinda frustrated by Tunic. Not gonna lie. It's clearly a masterpiece but you have to play old school and write every single little thing down. Go back and forth for days.
Chains of Echoes is tied with Chrono Trigger for best JRPG of all time and my mind won't be changed. Now if only anything else could soothe that itch. I love that you absolutely never 'Just click Attack's over and over to save MaNa.
Tied with Chrono Trigger? That's some insanely high praise. Why do you say that, exactly? I've never played Chained Echoes, so just curious. Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time.
The battle system for starters is constantly asking you to think smart. You've a gauge that you have to keep centered to be "in the flow" such that you can't blindly use the best attack every time. You always start every battle with full health and mana - so you never have to ration between fights. Which adds up that every fight can be difficult. There is no cannon fodder.
You level up as the story progresses so you can't simply grind to a higher level. There is a level system but it's more a skill mastery one
It respects your time in that you will never need to grind for anything.
The puzzles are difficult enough to be challenging but not so much that you will ever need a strategy guide.
The story is relatable without being convoluted. Each character has realistic goals, and interests. There is no clear "I'm evil because fuck you I'm evil". There is no clear good guy either, and you will see what I mean if you finish the story.
The world makes sense and has no suspension or disbelief moments. Speaking of it's a world in which both Dragons and Giant frickin robots are both natural, and they make sense.
I absolutely loathe when a JRPG Battle System demands that I either save everything so that I have MaNa for the boss fight, or makes it so that you should just click 'Attack' every time with no reason. I also loathe random battles. This has none - you choose which monsters to fight, and they don't come right back.
I literally could not put it down for any length of time until I had hit 100% of everything. A tall order for a game that took me almost 100 hours when I'm a full time adult with kids.
Agreed 1000%. That game is phenomenal. It has made me laugh so hard I ended up crying, well and sometimes I was just crying. An emotional roller coaster, superb writing.
My husband was playing it and I thought the game looked terrible, but he kept saying I really should play it, and I can't put into words how fucking happy I am that I chose to try it. Can't believe I almost missed out on it. Truly a masterpiece.
Against the Storm - I find the loop of those first 30-40 minutes of city building very satisfying.
Ultimate General Series - I love the land battles, it scratches that gun powder Total War itch.
Mount & Blade Series - Playing the Viking Conquest expansion while watching or listening to the Last Kingdom (Saxon Stories) might be one of my favourite gaming memories.
Sea of Stars - Reminds me of Golden Sun. And the soundtrack is just fantastic.
It's a really well done RPG in the spirit of the original Paper Mario games. Charming and fun to play. Got some depth to the build choices using a similar badge system as Paper Mario or even Hollow Knight.
I don't know why Nintendo won't just give us a proper Paper Mario again. What is their problem? It's so annoying. Bug Fables was fantastic though definitely hard agree.
I played it to completion. Then Rebirth came out and I played it to completion (barring The Lost, because come on). I only recently picked up Repentance and I'm already another 200 hours in.
Yeah it was only pre-holy mantle that I gave up on, The Lost is actually a pretty interesting character to play now. Is Tainted Lost still slightly easier than original Lost though?
Think the original Lost but nearly all defensive items are removed from the item pool. On one hand that means no useless health ups clogging the item pools. On the other hand, that means no holy mantle or dead cat.
Overall I'd say that makes him a more consistent and more fun character, but I'm not sure if I'd call him easier. Losing the ability to find things like dead cat hurts.
IIRC (been almost a year since I've played Isaac), he has a higher damage stat as well, which is great.
Outer Wilds certainly was. It was started as a college project and the devs stayed together to finish it after they graduated.
Journey I'm not so sure. I don't think it's indie? If it is indie, then I'd put The Pathless up for consideration. That game finished what Journey and Abzu started, and it has some of the best feeling overworld movement of any open world exploration game I've ever played. Flawless.
Abzu fell kinda flat for me after Journey, but The Pathless more than makes up for it. It seems to be set in the same world as both prior games and has several references to each, so playing the first two does make it more rewarding to play.
I definitely recommend it since you liked Journey. The movement and combat feels great. It's refreshingly short and focused for an open world exploration game, so it respects your time, and it also has some excellent storytelling with plenty of nice emotional highs and lows. It's a worthy successor.
Yeah I was let down by Abzu. It was beautiful but didn't have substance. You speak very highly of The Pathless, I'm excited to try it out. Thanks for the rec!
You are in a weird cabin in the middle of the woods playing a card game with your fate on the line. Some of your cards are talking to you and comment on how you play.
Then things get weird.
For those that like Inscryption, honorable mention for Hand of Fate 1 & 2
I'm not any good at deck building games, but my girlfriend is pretty close to platinuming it on PS4 and I have to say, that game just gets weirder and weirder.
I played A Short Hike recently, and I was transported. It's a painterly little adventure in which you walk and glide your way through an archipelago, meeting people and solving small puzzles, mostly around platforming. It's amazingly soothing. First game my wife actually enjoys too, and she's not into games at all.
Battle Brothers: Battle Brothers is a turn based tactical RPG which has you leading a mercenary company in a gritty, low-power, medieval fantasy world. You decide where to go, whom to hire or to fight, what contracts to take and how to train and equip your men in a procedurally generated open world campaign.
The Godfather of Squad-Management-Games!
Songs of Conquest: If you like Turn-Based-Strategy and know HoMM3, you will love this game!
Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy game inspired by 90s classics. Lead powerful magicians called Wielders and venture to lands unknown. Wage battle against armies that dare oppose you and hunt for powerful artifacts.
Fight N Rage was my favorite beat'em up before Streets of Rage 4 released, made by mexicans I think, very stylish and manga influenced, tons of juggling and branching paths.
Valdis Story was the hollow knight of it's generation, awesome metroidvania with great bosses and combat with good combos, but it didn't get tiresome like castlevania mirror of fate because regular enemies weren't health sponges, bosses were where you let loose.
Not technically in their bedrooms but made by students - Narbacular Drop. It was the game that spawned Portal. It’s not a great game, per se, but I’ll never forget the paradigm-shifting moment I had when I realized what was happening.
Valve ended up hiring the entire team to work on Portal.
OMORI is incredible. The gameplay is okay (typical JRPG stuff), the music is okay (I've heard better in other games), but the storytelling is some of the best in all of video games, up there with Silent Hill 2 and 3.
The Binding of Isaac is an incredibly addicting game. It's basically rougelike 2D Zelda dungeons, and upgrades stack on top of each other. It's the game that I have the most hours in on Steam (specifically the much better-programmed remake, Rebirth). The DLC is great as well, adding a ton of content. Its replayability is damn near unmatched.
Super Meat Boy is just a really fun, fast paced 2D platformer, that is challenging, but fair. The controls are some of the best of any 2D platformer out there, beating out both Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island IMO.
Undertale. I was blown away by the soundtrack and the cleverness of it all. The twist was good too, but I hated the total completion grind a bit. But it is optional.
Crypt of the Necrodancer. Again, blown away by the soundtrack and how confidently it pulled off the idea of a rogue-like rhythm game.
Insurgency: Sandstorm. This might be stretching the concept of "indie" a bit, but its predecessor was definitely an indie game. This is an excellent arcade/realistic FPS shooter.
+1 for Insurgency. It's more "mid shelf" than "indie", but either way it's an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they're not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they're in. No one ever yells "Allah akbar" or whatever.
Haven't seen these mentioned, Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters by Jump Over the Age are incredible games, beautiful artistically and really great world building
Rodina is a very cool space game. You fly a starship - which you can completely design and walk around inside - around an open solar system. You land on planets and asteroids ( seamlessly in real-time) and collect pieces of the very awesome scifi novel-like story. I believe there are now enemy alien bases you enter, but when I played the real draw was the incredible lonely atmosphere of space. It has some of the best newtonian space flight/combat I've played to this day, and the gun play is kind of like old school Doom. I'm sure it's come quite far since I played years ago, but it was literally a one man project at the time.
Graphically, it's very low-poly, and it's not the most varied game, but what's there is 👌
Anyone who likes space scifi should play it. It's incredible, and it came before No Man's Sky released.
Undertale. It was the best game I've ever played and I can never play it again. This game lives rent free in my head, in my fanworks, in the music I listen to and make. It's a game that combines technology and art.
There's a lot I could list here, but I'll focus on a few that I've played recently, that don't seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There's not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There's really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It's super cheap, it's super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you're telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don't actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It's rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated "city" (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age... And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You're a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 ("The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia"), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say "solve crimes" I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There's no Arkham "Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues" going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it's all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you're the brains. It's on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I'm slightly scared of the people who made it.
Even Arkane alone at that time wouldn't be considered indie. They had done a few contract jobs for major releases, like CoD, before developing Dishonored.
Stardew Valley by a long shot.
Hollow Knight is up there too.
Don't forget minecraft was originally just one guy. 15ish years ago. In Java.
Now over 600 people work on it.
I recently bought stardew valley and its fun but the farming grind feels kinda forced, no? I feel like I need to pay attention to not loose myself in the game which defeats the purpose.
What is your experience there?
I used to find it kinda stressful until i realised there was no time limit to the game like the usual harvest moons so once I realised that, I never find myself rushing around or overextending my ability to farm to grind more and just focused on what I was enjoying in the game which was a bit of everything.
Can relate. It’s the same for me but I have to constantly remind myself of the fact which is why I cant relax, sadly.
You can also get a new "review" whenever you want after that.
Really? That sucks I'm sure I'm on year 3 and I've had events happen
I only really played early on, not dabbled with it properly in years but I do remember things happening. It's not like I could only get things to happen in the first two years in game
The grind is fun for me, but once you get through a few seasons there’s also so much time to explore and talk to the villagers
Got it. Thanks for chiming in.
I can imagine it gets better but the grind is kind of not for me. The mining and farming grind in minecraft I understand and the grind in factorio as well. Maybe its heightened due to the saving cycle that seems to want you to keep going.
For me the game only became fun when I started playing with the wife, we split up tasks and got a lot more done and was much funner
Neat, thanks for the info.
There are ways to play (besides mods) where you barely have to grow crops. Unless you're trying for all the achievements there's not really a wrong way or a time limit to play.
I usually put off doing too much farming until I have a decent sprinkler setup.
FTL and to a lesser extent their second game Into The Breach.
RNG heavy strategy games with lots of micromanaging.
I loved both FTL and Into The Breach but I think I preferred the latter. What makes you like FTL more? (not arguing, just interested)
I had a harder time getting good at and staying interested in ITB. I still really enjoy a playthrough every now and then.
With FTL I guess it just feels more replayable and "on edge" to me. There is just something special about ftl runs, be it overpowered, under powered. There are so many ships, weapons, systems, and crew combinations that no run really feels the same.
The same could be said about ITB and their different mech teams but I guess it just doesn't have the same feel. ITB feels like I'm selling my services to big corporations with saving people as an after note. FTL feels like a suicide mission for the fate of the galaxy and I think that feeling is what really makes me come back to FTL.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing, I don't really disagree with any of your points. Maybe I just liked the style of ITB more...I do love isometric tactics games
FTL is the modern Oregon trail in space. It's just so good.
Personally one of the aspects I enjoy a lot in FTL is managing my power levels mid-fight (Do I need my oxygen powered right now? I could probably turn it off until the fight is over...) I don't know if any other game that has you shuffling around power like that.
Oh yeah I forgot about that!
I redownload ITB after this thread and have been playing it. I might bust out FTL next because I apparently forgot how to play it lol
No other game has had the impact on my way of thinking more than Outer Wilds.
Came here to say Outer Wilds. That game is a masterpiece and I encourage anyone and everyone to try it. Only two things I'll say are this: The less you know about it going in, the better the experience. The DLC is also worth it.
It's one of those I downloaded, played 10 minutes of, and then got distracted by something else. I've done a good job avoiding spoilers, I'll check it out next.
That's actually very ironic, the game needs about half an hour to get you hooked and yet so many people quit it beforehand. You'll understand what I mean when you play it
Interestingly enough, I did the same thing. When it launched, I was big into piracy and had a shitty job to pay for games with. Played until I could fly the ship, flew into the sky, then promptly lost control of my ship and didn't touch it again for at least half a decade. So glad I bought it and played it without spoilers!
This includes the knowledge that it's good. You should forget that people praise it everywhere because that has a potential of ruining the experience. It did for me, somehow.
Came here super late to ask: how? I played it and after discovering most of the things in game I couldn't continue without guides (not good with puzzle games). I also don't get attached to characters that can't move with a few lines of dialog (no I'm not a psychopath, OneShot's endings always give me mixed emotions for a few days). I'm not looking to argue I just want an answer
Slay the Spire. I've probably put more hours into this game than any other in my life.
From there, I guess all the usual picks. Hades, Hollow Knight, Braid, Fez, Dead Cells, Celeste
FTL - Faster Than Light
Dead Cells
Factorio. Help I got 4k hours and I still get cravings.
Honorable mentions.
Rimworld, Dyson sphere program, Minecraft (before it became microcrap)
I think we‘re the same person! :D
Jokes aside, I wholeheartedly agree. 500 hrs in factorio but rw and dsp are awesome. Mc used to be. I like mineclone though.
Hit me up if you wanna play something together some time.
Closing to 6k. There is just infinite replayabillity. Then you add mods, and friends.
Minecraft. I know it's a big company now or whatever, but back when it was just Notch, it was still completely captivating.
Also, Stardew Valley!
Dead Cells
Terraria
Hollow Knight
Risk of Rain (both 1 and 2)
Hades
Factorio
Balatro (my newest addiction)
Balatro but not Slay the Spire?
I'm too dumb for StS, Balatro hits that sweet spot in difficulty for me
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I'm 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I'm pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Playing on the gold stake, I think I don't make it past the first ante like 80% of the time. I might be too greedy or just bad at the game, but in StS I can make a decent run on ascension 20 at a much higher rate.
You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?
Finding two of those hands with a smaller hand and fewer discards is much harder. I could be miscalculating odds for sure though.
Slay the Spire but no Monster Train?
Slay the Spire is the gold standard for me, at least. I haven't played Monster Train -- it doesn't look that appealing to me, but I've heard good things.
It's very similar in some ways in the surface, but pretty different in essence. I like both. STS is more hardcore and "strict" and choices matter more, MT is more chill, relying on a single good combo usually, but with very high ceiling for broken fun things. I prefer MT more to unwind.
Hades was actually made by a reasonably large team in an actual office setting. NoClip documented the entire development of the game on YouTube.
Supergiant might not be 3 dudes in an apartment, but it's still an indie studio. They do put an impressive amount of effort into their games though, I agree on that
Uh... I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another... oh well... :)
Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it's an exploration game, but what you're exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.
Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that "huh?" factor where right until the end you're not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?
Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.
Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).
Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you're a robotic loader than can put down dots. That's all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You're attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.
Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you're the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you're up against and that all the corpses stay. It's not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.
Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It's 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You're an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the "freaky alien attack" recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?
Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you're digging underground for metal and for "lumen." To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.
Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.
Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You're a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the "SCP" universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won't spread again.
Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you're bording and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn't grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.
Space Run - 2D base building. You're a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don't do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.
Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you're just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species "gift" to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.
man.
i'm not saying you didn't run into quality posts on reddit, but this is the kind of post i see way more often here and it makes these spaces way more enjoyable.
nice work, definitely going to try a few of these out!
That's just anecdotal. Be careful as a lot of these answers are often written by bots / ads in disguised.
this is a great post. I do think the outer wilds description is a smidge spoilery. I know, people figure that out pretty quickly but it's still a neat experience if going in blind
Rain world is up there with the best games of last decade.
Terraria is amazing.
Dwarf fortress is obligatory.
I really wanted to love rain world since it seemed right up my alley. I bounced off it not because of the difficulty, but I think because the character's movement feels bad. You're slow, can't jump high, a lot of maneuvering is fiddly.
Maybe I'll try it again at some point though, because the world they made is brilliant and has interesting emergent behaviors.
Did you mean rimworld?
Rain World is a sidescrolling platformer in which you play a small rodent who must survive on a planet of other life forms pelted with recurring lethally powerful downpours of rain. You must learn to control your creature (who moves with dynamic physics, along with all other creatures), and learn to interact with and hunt the various other creatures (who have varied and intelligent AI and are not necessarily hostile) in order to gain food to sustain you through the next rain cycle.
Through all of this you explore a large interconnected world of different areas that show a background lore of a world that previously inhabited intelligent industrial beings (who have vanished) and uncover the mysteries within and find others of your kind.
That was as succint as I could make it to show off the unique qualities of Rain World. Its visual style is beautiful, its gameplay has a moderate learning curve due to the physics, and the AI of the creatures are successful in creating a dynamic ecosystem wherein the player feels like they're a small incidental piece of a world that has its own goals and behaviors that the player must learn to fit in with and work within.
Awesome! Thank you, I'll check it out.
No
I guess it depends on your definition of indie some, but here are mine:
Guacamelee 1 & Guacamelee 2 - The humor is mixed but the gameplay is just so damn tight
Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don't know anyone else who has played this game but it's so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that's kind of it's own whole thing so I don't think that counts.
edit: I can't believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Oooh, MUDs! I used to play 1 or two, don't even remember their name now...
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my "main" and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete "real world" feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it's a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that's not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn't sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it's complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
If you like Recettear then you would like Moonlighter. It's the same game but made a decade later.
AND it's 85% off as part of the spring sale. As a lover of Recettear this was an easy buy for me.
Ooooo good tip, thank you!
-Will edit with more in a bit.
Balatro has taken that mantle for the moment (over a hundred hours in under two weeks). Other similar games would be Cobalt Core (finished with all characters, don't feel the need to go back though) and... Monster Train (it's okay, not as tight as the others).
I'm in love with balatro, but do you think it's better than slay the spire? I think slay the spire just feels... More of a game than balatro I guess? Maybe I feel that way just because there's not really a story set up against balatro, and slay the spire at least has you fight an entity that you feel good about.
I picked up Balatro because of this thread and I agree, it's a great game and something a little fresh, but slay the spire is still probably the best.
I agree about the "more like a game" element. Baltoro feels more like playing cards than playing a video game. I think it's cause I'm using the same odds/play styles as when I play real life card games.
StS doesn't really have a story, but yes, it has characters instead; I don't really mind either direction, Balatro's fight-against-the-game is essentially the same thing.
They are different, and I do enjoy them both in their own ways. Balatro's heavy focus on combinations (and regular stores) means decks can shape quite quickly into something very unique. It's also more accessible as the games are shorter; StS can be an hour if successful, if not more. My comment is more that Balatro is newer and has at least satisfied the itch which - after being out for years - StS has perhaps not been able to do in such a way for a while.
Yeah, StS really ruined me for other deckbuilders, and I'm still chasing that high. Some pretty good ones have been Power Chord and Banners of Ruin. They're both team-based games where cards are tied to certain characters, and I think that particular mechanic adds enough that it took me a while to crack the code on them.
Wildfrost is a really good one. It's got a lot of different play styles and has a pretty big learning curve.
Also on android there is Pirate Outlaws. It feels like a slay the spire clone, but has a good amount of content and does enough different to be worth mentioning.
Not exactly the same cause it's not a deck builder, but has a similar feel is dicey dungeons (both steam and android). It's a lot simpler and luck is a larger factor, but it's got a decent gameplay loop and being able to play on Android helped scratch that itch on the road.
Wildfrost mention, hell yeah
I'm not too into deckbuilders, so I played it just for that gorgeous presentation lol. The art style falls under an unusual category of "cute, but I'm pretty sure that the artist also draws naughty stuff on the side"
I liked Wildfrost, but it didn't have that much replay value after 30 or so hours, whereas I have 500+ in StS. They have updated it since I last played though, so maybe there's a bit more to do now?
They've definitely added things to it over the year or so it's been out. Not sure if enough to make it worth it for you. It's also possible I'm just bad at it, as I haven't beaten it (although only 12hrs on it).
It's definitely a tough game. The only thing easy about it is taking your turn, missing something important, then dying.
Terraria. My most played game on steam!
Dwarf Fortress.
Not just best indie game, but best game period.
If DF never existed, we would've missed out on so many amazing games it directly and indirectly inspired.
Still haven't played it, seems like too much homework just to get started.
Try keeperRL, DF lite.
The Steam version makes 90% of the learning curve (learning the UI) disappear because it is so, so much better than the legacy version lol
The game itself is really rather straightforward and easy to figure out. It was always the presentation and layout of the UI and hotkeys that made it a challenge to actually start playing since you could know what you needed to do, but not know how to reach the command for it.
Dwarf Fortress is a very good game.
Most games are great because they provide something unique or are polished to perfection, so it's wild that they've made something that manages to be both their first attempt. Really looking forward to whatever they decide to do next.
Obligatory Undertale mention. I know it's the cliché answer, and it's fan base is...a lot, but it really is a great game.
Also, very happy to see
FLTFTL get a couple of mentions here. Hardly any of my IRL friends have even heard of it, but it's probably the best Star Trek game ever made (even if it's not actually a Star Trek game).FLT - Five Lights at Teddy's
Celeste
This is my top one too. It's always a fun replay. Terraria and Stardew are probably tied for second.
This would be mine too. Fun gameplay, cool story!
Since I don't see it Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the best games ever made, and done by 1 guy
One that I didn't see (or missed) is Project Zomboid. Absolutely can't wait for Build 42 to drop (someday).
Since I don't see it yet...
Super Hexagon
It's one of the simplest games possible, the controls are "clockwise" and "counterclockwise", and there are no distracting characters, setting, or story.
And yet the easiest level is -- quite accurately -- labeled as difficulty "Hard". The next 5 levels (6 total) go way up in difficulty (and labelling) from there.
Each level lasts 60 seconds. If you can survive that long. I've never unlocked the final level myself, so I don't even know what it is like, but I can guess.
Great game, and Chipzel did such a good job on the soundtrack
Outer Wilds and Hollow Knight share the spotlight for greatest games of all time. Both are as close to perfect as it gets.
Bastion gets an honorable mention. Not sure if SuperGiant Games is considered indie anymore, especially now that Hades hit big, but I love their early work.
Don't forget about Transistor and Pyre.
Has Super Giant ever made a flop? Just all outstanding games all around.
Bastion was definitely indie when it was made so it counts
Noita (from indie super-group Nolla games) is still amazing.
100%. Not enough people have played Noita.
Hämis 👍
Lunacid - King's Fieldalike with a great atmosphere and PS1 era esthetic. Fun hidden secrets (sometimes a little too obscure, but whateva, still fun) that I fell in love with as a fan of the OG From Soft King's Field/Eternal Ring games.
Signalis - A thought provoking horror sci-fi game about an android trying to find their missing ship captain on a far away planet. I don't want to stay more to stay away from spoilers, but this plays homage to OG Resident Evil and other early survival horror games from a top down perspective.
Pyre - A sports game and VN hybrid made by Supergiant games. Not as popular (At least I think) as Hades, Transistor, and Bastion. Just fantastic story and world building with characters that you end up feeling so passionately for by the end of the game. Just a wonderful game and probably my favorite Supergiant game barely in front of Hades.
Dusk - A retro FPS ala Quake 1 era games. The game that kicked off the newest resurgence of "Boomer shooters" and is one of the best out there. Wonderful secrets and level design along with some solid atmosphere and scares by those New Blood boys that I love so much.
I've never seen anyone else ever mention King's Field 🥹
You ever watch IronPineapple on YouTube?
He's a bit of a FromSoft fanboy, with his longest and most popular series being "Steam Dumpster Diving" where he searches the Internet for any games with a "Soulslike" tag and reviews them. He's spent more than a few videos talking about King's Field and FromSoft's other earlier games.
Also he made some absolutely nasty For Honor vids a few years back that I think are worth checking out even today.
From Soft pulled me in with the first Armored Core because I've always been into massive robots, so I checked more of their stuff out using the library dial up and found out about King's Field. I love slow dungeon crawlers and weird shit, so it was a match for me the whole way. Lunacid really plays it up too. You can tell the developer loves those old games.
I’m not normally into fantasy at all and I was gripped by Pyre’s story and characters. It’s a real testament to Supergiant’s writing abilities that I’d kill to see it picked up for a series by someone and it’s the game of theirs I most consider replaying just to spend time in the world again.
That ending video rolling and the absolutely beautiful personalized version of Bound Together playing is one of my favorite moments of any game I've played. I would love to go back to that world in other mediums.
Dusk and Ultrakill both are my favorite.
I've been putting off playing Ultrakill until it finally releases, but from the little I had to check out when I bought it; I thought it was great. I'm excited to play it. Dusk is also just fantastic. It's hard to pick a favorite from the New Blood games for me. Amid Evil is also up there.
Amid Evil. Yeah, I will definitely play it after upgrading my laptop.
I feel like people must be tired of me recommending the same few games (you know, if anyone cared enough to read all my comments), but I'm the type of guy who is pretty much only interested in finding the more hidden gems, and I generally ignore the stuff that keeps showing up on the front page of Steam.
I was looking for someone recommending The Upturned, it's great. Also made by the same guy who made Lethal Company
+1 for Exanima
Because nobody else has mentioned it yet: Dust: An Elysian Tail.
Made almost entirely by one person, and that honestly makes it all the more impressive.
Dust is great, but it's deeply flawed.
The art is phenomenal, but the writing is cringeworthy. I loved it as a teenager but I have a hard time taking it seriously now. I wish I never replayed it so I could have kept my nostalgia.
The combat mechanics are fun and feel amazing when played as intended, but they're massively unbalanced. IIRC with two exceptions (enemies that require a parry to enter a vulnerable state) every single fight can be won flawlessly by spamming Dust Storm even on the highest difficulty.
It's a remarkable game, all the more so since it was only one dev. I 100%'ed it, and it sits in a place of honor in my collection, but it's not one I'll ever return to.
From memory I do remember things getting ludicrously easy if you levelled Fidget right up. And I don't recall the writing at all. Likely just nonsense to move the plot along while opening up new areas.
But as a one man effort, it's incredible. Especially the art style, which normally falls into the pixel art or just plain ugly when it comes to the 1-2 man indie games.
Agreed. The art looks straight out of an anime, and Dust's combat animations are really smooth and satisfying. I think the cutscenes looked really good, too, but it's been long enough that I don't remember.
I had a quick look on YouTube and they're not bad at all. It's hardly Baldur's Gate 3, but it doesn't look out of place next to most of the AA Ubisoft 2D games that had dozens of people working on them.
Prince of Persia (1989). Designed and implemented by 1 person. Hours and hours of fun and frustration.
Mostly Frustration.
I could never make it to the second level despite hours of playing.
Terraria is the easy pick for me. I believe the only game that comes even close to the amount of hours I have in it would be Minecraft. I doubt I need to say much about this game, so I'll leave it at 3 words: near infinite replayability.
Melvor Idle is an amazing game if you like the "idle" in idle games. And if you like the idea of leveling up a multitude of different skills like in RuneScape but don't like the idea of walking back to a town every time you've chopped down 12 trees, Melvor Idle has you covered. It's a long grind but I had fun the whole way. I've 100%'d it and all the DLCs and still love playing it.
Cassette Beasts... I'm genuinely surprised I haven't seen this game mentioned here. An absolutely amazing creature collector with a very unique twist on things, a great story, beautiful pixel art, and hands down the best game soundtrack I've ever heard.
Melvor Idle is a great call. The base game is a solid idle game and there's a load of mods too.
I did a HCCO12B (Hardcore combat only, 12 bank slots only) run when the game first released.
Reinstalled the game yesterday and started another HCCO run using the new mod, it adds some QoL and tweaks.
My only negative about it is that when playing normally, I always feel like there's a perfect/optimal strategy and I should figure it out before playing.
Got up to the god dungeons in HCCO (never did 12B), dog tripped over my headset during a fight, I looked up and I was dead. That one hurt lol.
It's still on my plans to try again at some point, maybe when the upcoming third DLC comes out.
Aside from FTL (which I'm glad to see is well-represented here), my top ones would probably be Papers, Please and Disco Elysium. Papers, Please manages to pair a good narrative leading to many endings with oddly fun gameplay. Disco Elysium simply has some of the best writing ever in a video game and world lore that I can't get enough of.
I also really liked The Binding of Isaac (Rebirth and later), Don't Starve, Shovel Knight, and Hollow Knight.
I spent hours in the Papers Please menu just to hear the music...
I bought Disco Elysium, but my potato laptop cant run it
Hollow knight, deep rock galactic.
I think the Deep Rock developers are owned by Embracer now, so I'm not sure if that counts as "indie" anymore, even if they're still a small (and previously somewhat home-grown) studio. But it's still a damn good game - ROCK AND STONE
They are, Ghost Ship Games.
DRG was never an indie, it was published by Coffee Stain Publishing, which is a subsidiary of Coffee Stain, which in turn is a subsidiary of Embracer.
Ghost Ship got fully acquired by Embracer in 2021, though their publishing deal with Coffee Stain started in 2017, before Embracer had even touched either company.
Ghost Ship did not self-publish DRG, they published with Coffee Stain. The publishing deal started in 2017, with Embracer/THQ buying Coffee Stain a year later in 2018. And even later buying Ghost Ship, as well.
Factorio, Don't Starve Together
Since everyone’s mentioned the standards.
I’ve really enjoyed playing Tails of Iron (metroidvania with a focus on learning bosses attacks) lately. For programming games, I really liked Shenzhen IO (You create hardware with something resembling an Assembly language and a printable manual) and Human Resources Machine (drag and drop assembly programming)
I also have a soft spot for anything from Ska Studios (I maed a game with zombies in it, salt and sanctuary, salt and sacrifice, dishwasher, Charlie murder, and a bunch of older games that are probably not playable anymore)
Also looks like everyone else forgot to mention the great game that is Undertale as well.
Inside, Subnautica
adding Ori
I'm replaying subnautica after a few years since my first playthrough. I thought that it was more of a one-time experience than a replayable game but enough time has passed that my memory is more of a general feeling than remembering specifically where everything is, so it's been surprisingly engaging. Without even trying, I'm pretty sure the way I'm going through everything is different from my last playthrough, too.
Just finished my first permadeath vegan play through (never caught a single fish, though I admit I ran over a few hundred).
hello, were you also inspired by poor dunce's vegan Skyrim playthrough?
No, haven't seen it, but will check it out.
Oh wow, are there any non-fish foods other than the nutrient blocks and those trees on the surface? Can you fabricate the blocks at any point? I can't remember if the first one has the indoor grow plots for surface plants like sub zero does.
I guess the main question I'm getting at is if you can do this without having to travel to the surface to stuff your face with trees or being very strategic with the nutrient blocks you find?
So, the first 30 minutes go like this. Find the stuff to make and craft the knife, scanner, fins, air tanks, and building tool.
You can eat kelp and make bleach>water w salt and coral to stay alive, though it's a LOT of kelp.
Then head straight to southern island to scan the multipurpose room, indoor and outdoor grow beds, and grab lantern fruit and marble mellons.
You can then build a base and grow all the food you will ever need. I stock up on a ton of bleach and make water as needed, though the food also restores some hydration.
I usually have this done before the Aurora explodes.
Once you have the cyclops you can plant in there as well. Three lantern fruit trees per base is all the food you will need in the game, and marble melons have a lot of water.
The only thing you miss out on really is the emergency air bladder, as that requires a fish. To make up for it I carry a second air tank when diving deep or exploring wrecks. I also build outdoor grow beds w brain corals in strategic places as emergency air supplies.
Honestly, I started it as a lark, and found it so enjoyable because I never get distracted chasing down and catching fish.
i finished the game without hatching eggs so that's something I'd do on my next play, i also missed the large strider crab creatures on my first play. going into the spinoff game, I'm taking advantage of all the new tech before progressing the story because i managed to get halfway through the first one without crafting a proper base
Yeah, the one achievement I'm missing is hatching a certain egg so I've been collecting eggs this time around. Just got the alien containment, so I guess it's time to start at that.
I've just built my second base. I only had one in my first playthrough, but I built more for sub zero and realized there's nothing really stopping me from building a ton of them other than how much time I want to spend gathering the resources for it.
I'm considering trying to go to the end without a Cyclops sub since I've already got the max depth for the seamoth, though I need to find those deep mushrooms again for the defense shock that would be essential for that. Though now that I think of it, the Cyclops was probably why I didn't build a second base and the lack of Cyclops was probably why I ended up building more bases in sub zero.
oooh, yes!! i forgot Inside. i loved that game.
juicy atmosphere and environmental storytelling, my favourite >:)
Since I don't see anyone mentions it.
Tunic. The shortcuts are so cleverly hidden that allows you to easily break the sequence in your next playthrough. The manual translation felt just like back when I tried to understand japanese game manuals that come with game boy cartridges.
Chain of Echoes. A one man RPG game with a unique combat system that has great quality of life.
I was kinda frustrated by Tunic. Not gonna lie. It's clearly a masterpiece but you have to play old school and write every single little thing down. Go back and forth for days.
Chains of Echoes is tied with Chrono Trigger for best JRPG of all time and my mind won't be changed. Now if only anything else could soothe that itch. I love that you absolutely never 'Just click Attack's over and over to save MaNa.
Tied with Chrono Trigger? That's some insanely high praise. Why do you say that, exactly? I've never played Chained Echoes, so just curious. Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time.
Just everything, honestly.
The battle system for starters is constantly asking you to think smart. You've a gauge that you have to keep centered to be "in the flow" such that you can't blindly use the best attack every time. You always start every battle with full health and mana - so you never have to ration between fights. Which adds up that every fight can be difficult. There is no cannon fodder.
You level up as the story progresses so you can't simply grind to a higher level. There is a level system but it's more a skill mastery one It respects your time in that you will never need to grind for anything.
The puzzles are difficult enough to be challenging but not so much that you will ever need a strategy guide.
The story is relatable without being convoluted. Each character has realistic goals, and interests. There is no clear "I'm evil because fuck you I'm evil". There is no clear good guy either, and you will see what I mean if you finish the story.
The world makes sense and has no suspension or disbelief moments. Speaking of it's a world in which both Dragons and Giant frickin robots are both natural, and they make sense.
I absolutely loathe when a JRPG Battle System demands that I either save everything so that I have MaNa for the boss fight, or makes it so that you should just click 'Attack' every time with no reason. I also loathe random battles. This has none - you choose which monsters to fight, and they don't come right back.
I literally could not put it down for any length of time until I had hit 100% of everything. A tall order for a game that took me almost 100 hours when I'm a full time adult with kids.
Goddamn. I'll have to try it out. The story is by far the most important part of any JRPG for me, though.
FTL, Rimworld.
I have about 5000 hours just on these two
FTL sucked me in for a few years. I still have yet to get the crystal cruiser
Return of the Obra Dinn. City Game Studio. Until the Last Plane and Full Metal Sergeant (by the same dev).
Stardew Valley by a wide margin, probably dumped close to 1000 hours into it overall
Looking forward to the patch on Tuesday?
Kinda but I also have to be careful because how addicted I get to it, also in the middle Rebirth
Spiritfarer. Probably one of the most touching games I've ever played. What Remains of Edith Finch. Stardew Valley. Firewatch.
The "To the moon" games. They are heavly Story based but they are also one of the few games where I cried like a toodler.
I only played the first one, and it just dodn't have as much of an impact on me as I was hoping for. OMORI on the other hand...
Disco Elysium. Best writing and storytelling I've ever played.
Agreed 1000%. That game is phenomenal. It has made me laugh so hard I ended up crying, well and sometimes I was just crying. An emotional roller coaster, superb writing.
My husband was playing it and I thought the game looked terrible, but he kept saying I really should play it, and I can't put into words how fucking happy I am that I chose to try it. Can't believe I almost missed out on it. Truly a masterpiece.
Visuals are great too. A blending of a noir movie, a psychedelic trip and an abstrac painting. A rare beast.
To the Moon - gonna have my partner play it here soon so they can cry from it too
Citizen Sleeper, one the the best games, not just indie.
Played this on Gamepass. It had a wonderful story, and getting each unique ending was so satisfying <3.
Cave story the og ... man what a game
Off the top of my head:
Bug Fables
It's a really well done RPG in the spirit of the original Paper Mario games. Charming and fun to play. Got some depth to the build choices using a similar badge system as Paper Mario or even Hollow Knight.
I don't know why Nintendo won't just give us a proper Paper Mario again. What is their problem? It's so annoying. Bug Fables was fantastic though definitely hard agree.
Spelunky. My Vita was basically a Spelunky machine.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (ASCII mode) and Neofeud hold a special place in my heart
Shattered pixel dungeon Many hours put into this game
The Oregon Trail, Pong, Myst, Doom, Worms, Transport Tycoon, Tetris...
Binding of Isaac. When it finally came out on the switch, I played it more than Breath of the Wild.
I played it to completion. Then Rebirth came out and I played it to completion (barring The Lost, because come on). I only recently picked up Repentance and I'm already another 200 hours in.
❤️, or perhaps I should say ❤️🤍🤍💙💙🖤💔
The Lost at least gets significantly easier once you unlock the holy mantle for him. The Tainted Lost though...
The only way we cleared Tainted Lost at my house was playing co-op!
Yeah it was only pre-holy mantle that I gave up on, The Lost is actually a pretty interesting character to play now. Is Tainted Lost still slightly easier than original Lost though?
Think the original Lost but nearly all defensive items are removed from the item pool. On one hand that means no useless health ups clogging the item pools. On the other hand, that means no holy mantle or dead cat.
Overall I'd say that makes him a more consistent and more fun character, but I'm not sure if I'd call him easier. Losing the ability to find things like dead cat hurts.
IIRC (been almost a year since I've played Isaac), he has a higher damage stat as well, which is great.
The glassiest of cannons, I look forward to it!
Valheim is one of the best, especially with frends
Shame the updates come at such a glacial pace though...
It is a small indie team, that doesn't want to crunch their devs. I can live with that.
Are Journey and Outer Wilds considered indie games?
Outer Wilds certainly was. It was started as a college project and the devs stayed together to finish it after they graduated.
Journey I'm not so sure. I don't think it's indie? If it is indie, then I'd put The Pathless up for consideration. That game finished what Journey and Abzu started, and it has some of the best feeling overworld movement of any open world exploration game I've ever played. Flawless.
Oh good shout, I remember being intrigued by The Pathless when it came out but never got around to trying it!
Abzu fell kinda flat for me after Journey, but The Pathless more than makes up for it. It seems to be set in the same world as both prior games and has several references to each, so playing the first two does make it more rewarding to play.
I definitely recommend it since you liked Journey. The movement and combat feels great. It's refreshingly short and focused for an open world exploration game, so it respects your time, and it also has some excellent storytelling with plenty of nice emotional highs and lows. It's a worthy successor.
Yeah I was let down by Abzu. It was beautiful but didn't have substance. You speak very highly of The Pathless, I'm excited to try it out. Thanks for the rec!
Inscryption
You are in a weird cabin in the middle of the woods playing a card game with your fate on the line. Some of your cards are talking to you and comment on how you play.
Then things get weird.
For those that like Inscryption, honorable mention for Hand of Fate 1 & 2
I'm not any good at deck building games, but my girlfriend is pretty close to platinuming it on PS4 and I have to say, that game just gets weirder and weirder.
Daniel Mullins will be recognized as a true artist in the coming generations.
Literally never have I seen such detailed, years pre-planned and perfectly delivered mind fuckery.
Across ALL of his games.
He's insane in the best way.
LIke a modern David Lynch with better grasp of aesthetics.
Does STALKER count? I love the atmosphere of the games.
If not I've sunk a lot of time in Mini Metro
Hotline Miami. Would appreciate recommendations of similiar games.
I played A Short Hike recently, and I was transported. It's a painterly little adventure in which you walk and glide your way through an archipelago, meeting people and solving small puzzles, mostly around platforming. It's amazingly soothing. First game my wife actually enjoys too, and she's not into games at all.
Battle Brothers: Battle Brothers is a turn based tactical RPG which has you leading a mercenary company in a gritty, low-power, medieval fantasy world. You decide where to go, whom to hire or to fight, what contracts to take and how to train and equip your men in a procedurally generated open world campaign. The Godfather of Squad-Management-Games!
Songs of Conquest: If you like Turn-Based-Strategy and know HoMM3, you will love this game! Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy game inspired by 90s classics. Lead powerful magicians called Wielders and venture to lands unknown. Wage battle against armies that dare oppose you and hunt for powerful artifacts.
Fight N Rage was my favorite beat'em up before Streets of Rage 4 released, made by mexicans I think, very stylish and manga influenced, tons of juggling and branching paths.
Valdis Story was the hollow knight of it's generation, awesome metroidvania with great bosses and combat with good combos, but it didn't get tiresome like castlevania mirror of fate because regular enemies weren't health sponges, bosses were where you let loose.
Several hundred hours of Oxygen not included...
Not technically in their bedrooms but made by students - Narbacular Drop. It was the game that spawned Portal. It’s not a great game, per se, but I’ll never forget the paradigm-shifting moment I had when I realized what was happening.
Valve ended up hiring the entire team to work on Portal.
POST VOID and Brotato
OMORI is incredible. The gameplay is okay (typical JRPG stuff), the music is okay (I've heard better in other games), but the storytelling is some of the best in all of video games, up there with Silent Hill 2 and 3.
The Binding of Isaac is an incredibly addicting game. It's basically rougelike 2D Zelda dungeons, and upgrades stack on top of each other. It's the game that I have the most hours in on Steam (specifically the much better-programmed remake, Rebirth). The DLC is great as well, adding a ton of content. Its replayability is damn near unmatched.
Super Meat Boy is just a really fun, fast paced 2D platformer, that is challenging, but fair. The controls are some of the best of any 2D platformer out there, beating out both Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island IMO.
Undertale. I was blown away by the soundtrack and the cleverness of it all. The twist was good too, but I hated the total completion grind a bit. But it is optional.
Crypt of the Necrodancer. Again, blown away by the soundtrack and how confidently it pulled off the idea of a rogue-like rhythm game.
Insurgency: Sandstorm. This might be stretching the concept of "indie" a bit, but its predecessor was definitely an indie game. This is an excellent arcade/realistic FPS shooter.
+1 for Insurgency. It's more "mid shelf" than "indie", but either way it's an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they're not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they're in. No one ever yells "Allah akbar" or whatever.
Salt and Sanctuary and Hollow Knight.
So good
IDK if this counts, but I loved SPACEPLAN.
Haven't seen these mentioned, Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters by Jump Over the Age are incredible games, beautiful artistically and really great world building
Rain World and Space Station 13
Orwell, the first one
Fall Guys, back before the vaulting fiasco
Signalis just affected my fucking life it was really something else.
Me too and I didn't even play it, just watched a few lore videos about the story and now WHAT ARE THESE TEARS DOING ON MY FACE?!?
Untitled Story was by the person who made Celeste. It's old and looks like it was made in mspaint, but it was such a good metroidvania.
Rodina is a very cool space game. You fly a starship - which you can completely design and walk around inside - around an open solar system. You land on planets and asteroids ( seamlessly in real-time) and collect pieces of the very awesome scifi novel-like story. I believe there are now enemy alien bases you enter, but when I played the real draw was the incredible lonely atmosphere of space. It has some of the best newtonian space flight/combat I've played to this day, and the gun play is kind of like old school Doom. I'm sure it's come quite far since I played years ago, but it was literally a one man project at the time.
Graphically, it's very low-poly, and it's not the most varied game, but what's there is 👌
Anyone who likes space scifi should play it. It's incredible, and it came before No Man's Sky released.
I remember playing a very early version of this; at the time, it looked very cool, even if somewhat basic
Undertale. It was the best game I've ever played and I can never play it again. This game lives rent free in my head, in my fanworks, in the music I listen to and make. It's a game that combines technology and art.
Universal Paperclip
If I had to pick one it would be Terraria. But there are many good options.
There's a lot I could list here, but I'll focus on a few that I've played recently, that don't seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There's not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There's really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It's super cheap, it's super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you're telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don't actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It's rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated "city" (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age... And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You're a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 ("The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia"), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say "solve crimes" I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There's no Arkham "Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues" going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it's all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you're the brains. It's on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I'm slightly scared of the people who made it.
i couldn't put celeste down the first time i played it.
very fun game :3
i also remember a game called webbed, where you were a spider and got to do actual web physics and swinging. That was pretty cool.
Shadow Empire without a doubt. Practically a one-man team, and yet a better logistics and supply system than any other game out there.
Hollow Knight
Hyperlight Drifter
Ori series
Dead Cells
Banner Saga series
Into the Breach
Bastion
Monument Valley
Child of Light
Gris
Limbo
Baby hands.
Dishonored, when it first came out.
I'm not sure Arkane and Bathesda could be considered as indie devs at the time of release. Bathesda had released Skyrim the year before.
That's true, I was just talking about Arkane.
Even Arkane alone at that time wouldn't be considered indie. They had done a few contract jobs for major releases, like CoD, before developing Dishonored.
Ah, my mistake then.