What are some cool/decent PC games that are not on Steam?
Ew, not like Fortnite, I mean like indie launchers
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View original on lemmy.worldEw, not like Fortnite, I mean like indie launchers
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Vintage Story, a Minecraft-like game that focuses on a tough, realistic survival experience. There are climate zones and seasons. Things like smelting ores or growing food are much more involved than they are in Minecraft, which makes for a strong sense of progression when you've finally managed to make iron or build a windmill.
Hytale too, completely different direction than VS but another fun minecraft-ish game
I will add that it's Minecraft-like only graphically. Anyone going into Vintage Story expecting their Minecraft knowledge to carry over is going to have a very bad time because the actual overlap is minimal.
Really, its hard to under state how calling VS "minecraft like" is utter bullshit nonsense. Its like calling borderlands and tarkov the like each other. Its so insanely superficial that its absurd.
I mean both games are blocky, voxel based survival sandbox games where you’re dropped into a world and have to build a base and collect resources for better gear and hide from the monsters that come out at night.
It is very much similar to Minecraft in scope and gameplay loop. It’s just far, far more complex.
It’s more like comparing Tarkov and Arc Raiders.
Vintage Story was originally a mod for Minecraft, so I don't think the comparison is as superficial as you think.
I second vintage story, such a cool game
Starsector, perhaps the greatest 2D space game of all time.
This actually looks really good! I'll have to ask the missus for an advance on my pocket money 😀
I’m genuinely curious about this game but the dev blog goes back to 2010? Is this another star citizen or is it actually a full / good game?
It's perpetually in progress but what's there is already pretty much a complete game, dev just can't stop adding/revamping things. I've played it like 5 years ago, spent 50+ hours and had a great time. There's also an active modding community.
There is a lot of game there. It is like Mount & blade in space so don't except a story or something like that. You make your own. Totally worth the money.
There is quite a lot of game and there is a solid modding scene as well. It is worth the money.
More like Project Zomboid or Warframe. They could be released as version 1.0, but they just always have ideas for more things to add, and they do it in a way that doesn't make the experience feel incomplete, just that it feels better when there's new stuff added.
This isn't an underrated game, because everyone I've ever seen talk about it only praise it. It is an underrecognized game though. It's sad how few people know about it despite how well it's received.
I've probably played a few hundred hours of SuperTuxKart. It's a mario kart clone except i like it way better than the mario karts I've played.
Mindustry is fun, it's like a space factory builder thing.
I was going to say the powder toy but it turns out its on steam now
So is Mindustry. And it costs $10 on there for some reason..
It's a way for the devs to get some revenue. Doesn't mean that you have to buy it. Same with Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Super Tux is also on Steam but not paid.
And yet I've already found multiple reviews stating that they bought it on Steam before knowing the game was free elsewhere. So it seems to me that by not mentioning anywhere on the Steam page that this is a donation to the dev, that's a little shady.
Steam's terms of service mean devs/publishers can't promote a game as being free elsewhere. It's likely directed at preventing redirecting people to Epic or a sale at another store, but also by effect includes games like this. Either they put it for free on Steam or they sell it on Steam and can't mention free downloads from their website, and it's up to users to "shop around".
I get what you're saying, but I think if spending $10 on a game is something that would give someone pause, then the onus really is on them to search around first to see what the best deal is? People act like steam is a monopoly, but there is a lot of choice out there.
If you have it on steam then you can use the workshop for schematics and maps too
You can also get those from either the ingame mod downloader or from the mod "mindustry tool"
I bought it on steam and it was worth the money for the game. If I was willing to pay what I did for it then I don't have any issues with the costs elsewhere. There is also the convenience of it auto updating.
Most of the time the steam version acts as the "donation button" for many small indie and f2p open source games. It exists for no other reason then to cost money so you CAN buy the dev a beer if you want. Steam is easier, more likely to get people to actually donate, supports more countries, has less restrictions, has less taxes and fees in many cases even with steams cut.
Like its amazingly hard to actually monitize something globally in a reasonable, fair and efficent way. Fucking half the time you spend more money even attempting to do it then it would cost to just let steam handle it. As much as people bitch, moan, cry and whine about various store fronts taking a huge cut it SERIOUSLY is a fucking life saver and EXTREMELY fucking worth it in almost every case ever with basically zero expections.
Sure it would be nice to have it be smaller. But like FUCK man. Iv tried to do it my self. IT SUCKS. I would gladdly pay someone half the fucking profits to deal with all the bullshit for me if i wasnt trying to sell a product to make a living on in. Even then... i would be damn well fucking tempted.
It's worth giving the guy ten bucks imo.
Oh what, that's very weird
If you are brave enough there is big list of open source clone games.
Most of them are not on any play store.
https://osgameclones.com/
This is gold
I focus on non commercial free games that are also (for the most part) Open Source too.
Note Flathub is a repository for Linux. If you are on Windows, go to their website and look for downloads.
For Luanti I want to especially recommend the Game "Glitch" which is not minecraft like at all, but surprisingly great.
Funny enough, moving to Linux meant I discovered a lot of cool tools and games that I wouldn't have otherwise...and then eventually learned they had Windows releases anyway, so it wasn't strictly necessary to ditch MS for them. But beneficial anyway.
One of the reasons why you find so many interesting tools on Linux is, that you are new and need to setup your environment. Maybe even searching for alternatives. That will make you discover lot of stuff by nature.
Regarding osu's source code, I think the original osu (osu!stable) is closed-source, and I think the servers might be closed-source, but I believe osu!lazer, the new reimplementation in C#, is fully opensource. It's an ongoing effort and a long-term migration it's in the middle of, but lazer looks great and I think it's already meant to be the main version now.
Stable is also dead, thats part of the reason its closed source and staying that way. He doesn't want people using it and it will be retired entirely at some point. Its basically a unsaveable pile of pasta.
An MMO with no micro transactions: Clan Lord
It’s been around since the 90s, the original developer is now a farmer and gave control of the world to the players rather than selling to a larger company.
We could use an influx of newbies, just don’t be a turd.
Battle for Wesnoth, very good high fantasy strategy game. Lots of player created campaigns, and tons of mods
Edit: looking at their website, it is available through steam, but it is also available in a variety of other places.
Yeah, it's available on Steam (for free) but I think it still fits this thread nicely.
It's impressive that they're still actively developing it after 20 years. For anyone else like me who used to play Wesnoth a lot but hasn't touched it in a couple of years, I just noticed that they have added a new mainline campaign fairly recently.
I love that it continues to be worked on too. I remember playing it well over a decade ago.
Love this game! It still holds up pretty well
Vintage Story, Voices of the Void
2nded for voices of the void
Starsector is one of my favorites from the last decade.
https://fractalsoftworks.com/
OSU. There's a open source client don't know anymore which ones good.
Lazer client works native on Linux, and is perfectly suitable to play with. Lower audio latency on both Windows (WASAPI) and Linux (runs native and not via Wine) is a pretty solid reason why most people prefer it, but the interface isn't as skinnable as Stable is currently and slider head accuracy is confusing for some old players, but other than that there isn't any reason not to use Lazer.
If i recall lazer also doesn't let you "cheat" with spinners or some such and thus points are on avg lower compared to what people are use to.
used to*, fyi.
"are used to" is such an odd grammatical construction, now that I'm thinking about it... it's one of those phrases you don't really think about.
CLICK THE CIRCLES
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a really good traditional roguelike, often considered one of the four pillars of the genre along with NetHack, ADOM, and TOME. (Those are on Steam, however; Crawl is not.)
Voices of the Void
Absolute peak game that doesn't really have any contemporaries.
A game with base management, fully open map, random events ranging from spooky to hilarious, minigames to fix equipment, little robot helpers, big robot helpers that require some assembly, but don't need charging thanks to running on nuclear power, and a quadbike you can backflip.
And the Christmas gun.
Live For Speed
Racing simulator that launched in the early 2000s and is still going. There have been some rough times but overall the feeling of admiration is hard to deny for the 3 (mostly 2 now) devs. A couple years ago they updated it to create and allow mods and this year they released a public test for new graphical updates. I don't even play often anymore but I still check for updates almost daily :)
https://youtu.be/mP1OMIq9Ams
SRB2K, or Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, is a mod of SRB2, itself a doom mod, that is an absolute love letter to the classic days of Mario Kart (I'm thinking super mario kart or 64). Full of small QoL changes, and with a forum full of mods for any character you can think of, it's an easy pitch if you've ever wanted to play a kart styled game thats better than the original, with online play
Worth noting the devs have since released a sequel, Robotniks Ring Racers, but it does it's own thing in a way that does less for me personally in terms of nostalgia, and is also generally more complicated, and thus harder to pull random friends into. That's not to say it's worse or bad, it's just got very different appeal
Beyond All Reason (BAR) A spiritual successor to supreme commander made by a team of fans. It's free and had LAN and online multiplayer. Really fun if you enjoyed the source material.
Sauerbraten is always worth a mention for me. It's a quake style open source shooter with built-in mapping tools. Definitely a little dated but the game still feels more responsive and fun than a lot of other games today. I think I would really enjoy tinkering with it if I was still a teenager.
There are a substantial number of non-commercial FOSS games that aren't on Steam.
Many---though not all---of them are packaged in Linux distros.
Luanti, basically a FOSS Minecraft clone, is one example; that's in Debian.
A number of older games occur to me that aren't either in Linux distros or on Steam. They aren't necessarily the top FOSS games, but people may not be aware of them, if they rely on looking in distro packages or Steam to find things.
Linley Henzell, the guy who did Linley's Dungeon Crawl, which later became the well-known roguelike Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, had a couple of open-source games that he wrote way back. Overgod looks like it's been packaged and is in Debian. Lacewing is in Fedora, but not in Debian.
Video of Lacewing
Video of Overgod
There's a genre of games based on Paradroid. One of the first games I played on Linux was in this genre---NightHawk. It used to be in Red Hat Linux, but it looks like at some point, it fell out of the package repository, as it doesn't appear to be in present Fedora, and it's not in present Debian either today. Not on Steam, either.
I can't find any videos of anyone playing NightHawk on YouTube.
Abuse is a DOS-era action platformer, heavy on jumpscares, that was open-source and had some of the data files (the ones for the shareware version) put into the public domain. Could use the full game's datafiles too, if you got ahold of them. I think that that used to be packaged and in Red Hat Linux at one point, but it's not in Fedora or Debian these days, and it's not on Steam.
Video of Abuse
Surprisingly, while Empire---a very early game in the genre---is in Debian, xconq is not, and doesn't look like it's in Fedora either. Neither are on Steam. You may have played later hex-based strategy wargames in the genre, like Battle for Wesnoth.
Video of xconq
There is a very large collection of non-open-source-but-free text-based interactive fiction out there. These are games that are all or almost all text, where one writes instructions to the game in a somewhat-natural-language format and has the game respond. Zork is a (not-free, commercial, but you may be aware of it) early example of a game in the genre. Sites like IFWiki and IFDB catalog these. Many of the runtimes exist on Linux distros; gargoyle-free is a graphical frontend in Debian that can display games written for many different engines, and there are various terminal-based frontends, but the actual games are not generally packaged in Linux distros or on Steam. One notable exception---Anchorhead, a Lovecraftian game, was updated and had a commercial (and graphical) release on Steam a bit ago (which I cannot seem to get running on Proton under Linux, though given that it's Electron-based, maybe it's possible to run it natively using chromium...I'm not really long on Electron familiarity). I think that the reason that they haven't seen more popularity recently is partly because of the rise of the smartphone and touchscreens and onscreen keyboards. It's a pain to play them without a real keyboard, which many smartphone users don't have available. If I were going to recommend one particular game that I've enjoyed, maybe Babel, for the TADS interactive fiction engine.
I think most people know, but Luanti is more of a minecraft type voxel engine with a game launcher at this point.
From there you can play several variations of voxel type games and manage them.
I say that because if people think its just Minetest with a new name, that isn't quite accurate.
I’m surprised no one mentioned it yet, but Kitten Space Agency
It’s a free spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program that tries to be everything that KSP2 wasn’t. It’s still in early development by its progressing fast and it already looks great and allows you to do a lot of cool things, and it’s also built using their own engine instead of Unity and has modding support.
And it’s not on steam.
Probably because it's not really a game yet. You can play it, but there's really nothing to do at the moment. It'll be on a list like this when there's actual gameplay.
However, the studio also make Stationeers, which more people should play. It is on Steam though, so it's not for this list. I'm a pretty big fan of their studio. They seem to be doing everything right.
Is stationeers actually done yet? Last time I played the best station was a single cube with as few features as possible.
Done? No. They keep adding content. It may never be "done". It is feature-rich though.
A cube probably still is the best shape, as it is in real life often. It maximizes the volume-to-suface ratio. However, there's tons of reasons to build other shapes. Usually you're expanding organically, so you end up things tacked on all over as you add more features.
You can get to a livable base pretty quickly (especially on the normal start on a planet like Mars), and then just stop playing. The game is mostly about what you do beyond that though. Automating your furnace, backup power, mining, farming, etc. is the real goal. Stopping at just the basics is like stopping Minecraft after you build a farm.
Seems to have the things KSP had when I first played it in 2013, before career was added
Not really. I played in the first version that had the Mun, which was just a stationary object straight above the launch site, and it's missing stuff from that even. It does have more than that too though.
You can build rockets now, as of a very recent update, so it is actually something you can play with. Before then, the only thing you could really do was fly around a premade craft with unlimited fuel, so it's progress. KSP, before career, had more parts and more mechanics for the parts though. It also had reasons to explore, with secret locations all around the system. KSA is just the Solar system, which is cool but also you know what there is to see.
I'm not saying people shouldn't play it if they're interested. It's free, and it's a cool look at the tech they're building. It just isn't much of a game yet, especially if you already have KSP1. I fully believe it will get there though.
Japanese visual novels that never get translated are a big one. A huge chunk of them live on novelgame, DLSite, and DMM. In fact, there are some full fledged Japanese games that are DLSite exclusive. I've tried a few, and some can be quite good.
The Star Trek games on GOG (like Elite Force I and II, and Armada) are worth your attention.
Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is also typically bought on JAST.
There are also a bunch of gacha games that never released on Steam, though the bigger ones are working to change that.
Panel Attack is a FOSS clone of Panel de Pon with rollback netcode and modding support.
I know this one! As I love Tetris Attack, its so nice to have this as an Open Source project. Never thought that anyone in the world would recommend this (not because its bad or so, but because usually nobody knows.) But I never played it much beyond testing, to be honest. It's been a long time... 5 years or so. I guess its improved a lot since then. But weirdly, they have no link to the source code on their website: https://github.com/panel-attack/panel-game
Phantasy Star Online, especially with private servers
https://ephinea.pioneer2.net/
For Linux: https://github.com/zeroz41/pso_wine/tree/master/pso/pc#readme
EDIT: Lutris works better than that Github repo
I've been playing a lot of Gyakuten Live. It likely can't be officially monetized because it infringes upon "Love Live School Idols" as well as stealing a few assets from the Ace Attorney games. But, the game has quite an impressive amount of production value, with many emotive character faces, a full custom soundtrack, numerous cinematics between cases, and a lot of artwork to help visualize the scenarios. It centers around what seem like relatively innocuous cases, like a missing treasure, or fraudulent tickets, but (aside from the intro case) tends to dive into some complex character emotions as the motive behind each incident.
The other game that made me think of posting this is Hytale, which looks to basically be an indie, non-Microsoft, pro-modding version of Minecraft.
Holy shit. As a fan of both Love Live and Ace Attorney I never realized how much I wanted something like this. Unfortunately I don't have any recs to give, so all I can offer are my thanks and an upvote.
Just finished the fourth case (each of them are at least about as long as standard Ace Attorney cases), and it turns out the creator has plans to keep going.
I imagine a lot of AA fans getting put off with the first case being as simple as someone being served spicy bread, but things have gotten progressively more intense, with some very tricky writing to justify them not going to the police.
::: spoiler Case 4 Up until case 4, you get hints of cold Missing Persons cases. By this case, you're dealing with a literal murder, and there's a cold expectation that the police would be unable to stop this person. :::
Seconding HyTale!
Armadiilo Run https://www.armadillorun.com/
Oh man I sunk countless hours into this like.. 20 years ago. Amazing game.
Edit: I just found my old registration code from Oct. 2006 and it still worked to download the game. The game still runs great!
Wow what a flashback to my teenage years!
Dunno if anyone already said it, but Devotion is always a favorite of mine to share. Beautifully well done story for anyone into horror games.
Had to buy it there too, still pissed about it getting dropped from absolutely everywhere. Glad the studio is doing OK (at least I believe Nine Sols sold quite well)
I recently logged back into my telltale account on a whim and was surprised to find that I owned "Back to the Future: The Game". Even though I'm certain I never bought it. It's not listed on Steam or GOG, but I think you can find it as abandonware somewhere.
Have only played a bit so far, but it looks pretty good. It's a typical point-and-click, not a "X will remember this" story game.
It was a decent 4th installment. Still have it on steam, but not tried it on modern machines.
Vintage story. Much grittier minecraft with a larger emphasis on survival
YARG - Yet Another Rhythm Game. Like Guitar Hero/Rock Band (way better than Clone Hero) - open source. Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keys, Vocals.
I think it's still being worked on, but some Devs have been hired for the next big rhythm game - if I understood correctly - so the development has slowed some.
You can get quite a lot of songs for free with it, there are some real bangers and it's tons of fun (or go sail the high seas and get what feels like infinite songs, including those from the popular plastic instrument games). Also runs really well on my potato laptop...
Dwarf fortress is on steam, humble bundle, itch io and free on their website.
Dwarf fortress is an essential gaming experience.
Should be played until your most common cause of fortress failure is FPS death
And then you should start to experiment with science!
Freelancer. Basically abandonware at this point, but tons of community support, with some great mods and servers.
Love this game.
I really wanted Freelancer 2. Star Citizen was meant to be it before Chris Roberts did... well I have no idea what he did, what he is doing or the state of Star Citizen any more, its got so out of hand.
Elite Dangerous just wasnt it for me. The ship and space stuff is amazing but the world just isn't as fun as Freelancer. I know its come a long way after I played it just after release but it doesn't seem to quite fill the same niche.
Same. And star citizen isn't necessarily bad. But the scope creep has gotten out of hand. I started playing back in the mid 3.0 releases, back when delamar was still part of Stanton, and I thought the future state of the game was clear and obvious. But man CIG, or Chris, just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger. A lot of people talk about SC without playing it, and that's a shame because it has so much going for it. They truly are developing amazing things... But I have to agree. The vision is super muddy. Freelancer 2 it is not. I don't even think they know what the ultimate goal is. I keep saying its an indefinite test bed for things they want to develop. No end goal in sight. Just play and QC our development sandbox please.
Brogue
Universal Paperclips
Liero
StarSector
Bought it myself. On my 5th playthrough and its such a blast still. Mods keep the game fresh. All ya gotta do is.download a folder from the game's forums and put it in the right place. If thats to much work, there is always TriOS mod manager
Starsectors website: https://fractalsoftworks.com/
Review with a surprise towards the end
The Croc remake is Gog exclusive (and on console) and I love it! It's the first single player PC game that I've 100%'ed!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3043940/Croc_Legend_of_the_Gobbos/
Thanke Edit: Oh, I guess it is on Steam now?? The trailers definitely had a Gog logo at the end but not a Steam logo. This was the game that convinced me to get Gog in the first place lol
Hyperburner's a fun arcade flight game (though the iOS release is the definitive version).
Great game description, wish they could all be described that succinctly.
Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret from GOG.
All of Project Echo's visual novels (Ad Astra, Echo, The Smoking Room, Khemia, Glory Hounds, etc).
Unciv (https://github.com/yairm210/unciv) is a great low graphics but with nothing to be jealous of Civilization 5 free and open source alternative. It also has a great mod scene with mods that add undead and fantasy armies and so much more.
Xonotic
Aurora 4X if you are into very complex strategy games about building an interstellar empire.
I recently got into a Toontown rougelike ( rougelite? ) fan game called Toontown Grindworks. It's available for free on Itch. Ypu run from floor to floor climbing the corporate tower, fighting cogs ( basically businesspeople robots ), avoiding traps, and collecting gear and new gag tracks ( weapons/upgrades ). All to get to the final boss of the tower. I've only had a single run where I got to the final boss, but failed there because I got really unlucky.
There is also the current demo of Plants vs Zombies Universe, which jas a fair bit of content that can last a while if you don't speed through it. The game is basically devs wanting to create a PvZ fan game where it's basically content from all the games rolled into a single PvZ title. Meaning you get the exclusive PvZ Online plants/worlds/zombies, exclusive PvZ2/2C plants/worlds/zombies, etcetera. All while being a bit more balanced as of now to create a genuinely challenging game.
I was gonna say development is on indefinite hiatus, but it seems a 1.2 update was released about a week ago! Sadly, unless you already have the link, you need to access their discord for the download, from either google drive or mega, if that would sway anyone away from it. That, or I'm sure they have a QQ group set up, but I ain't creating an account just for this game.
Other than those, the only other games I could recommend are pokemon fangames or well known open source games like Mindustry ( has a steam version, but that's only for supporting the devs and getting steam workshop content, if you even care ) or SuperTuxKart. That, and a few furry visual novels on Itch that aren't completed yet that I like.
Super tux kart
Hytale, Tibia, Escape from Tarkov, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue
2xko by riot games. Not indie but it is a free fighting game through the riot launcher. Sadly, riot been fumbling with it but I hope they give it a few years of love & development. I genuinely love it.
Any game made by Riot sadly uses the same shitty kernel-level anticheat (read: spyware), doesn't it? The game looks good, expecially as a free to play, but it's a hard pass.
Yeah, that's the only issue. I just play it on PS5 but I know not everybody has/wants one. Sadly, we are the minority when it comes to the anti cheat given the playerbase in league & valorant.
Factorio you can buy it from there website. It's on steam yes but it's also available on there website with (iirc) to get a steam key or link it to steam if you want to do that.
This was how I first got Factorio, but the post is really about things you can’t discover on Steam.
Oh I misinterpreted. My apologies
If you like factorio, mindustry in similar and open source. It's on itch.io, Steam and their website.
If you can put up with the (unending) bugs and performance issues, there really isn't something that hits white like Star Citizen for me. A friend bought it for me but I would happily pay the minimum $45 when it finally releases in a stable and reliable playable state.
If they could just get the base systems down and do a big push on bug fixing instead of adding flashy events and more ships it would make such a difference.
Artix Entertainment has their own game launcher. Not all of the games are exclusive to it though, as Adventure Quest 3D links to the steam version. Surprisingly, the original Adventure Quest (and by extension WarpForce) still receives updates.
I've heard good things about star citizen
I played it in one of their free play weekends, and it had so many glitches. I spent an afternoon and evening trying to play it and have never bothered with it again.
It's got the kernel of something amazing in there, but it's insanely buggy (and essentially unplayable when it's busy, like the Free Fly events or right after a patch) and the pace of development is absolutely glacial. And you really can't trust anything the devs assure you is happening/on the way. It's unclear whether they're just bullshitting everyone or they somehow genuinely believe their own hype about deadlines, even after consistently missing all of them for over a decade, by a lot.
That probably makes it sound worse than it is TBH. There's a really cool game in there somewhere, but you have to be extremely patient with it.