With the Steam sale running, this seems like a good time to try this thread again. We don’t often use the downvote button much in Lemmy, but the idea is this: Do your best to present game suggestions that no one has heard of before. If, in reading other people’s suggestions, you spot one that you’re familiar with, then put a downvote on it. Ideally, if the game is past a year old, it may have a discounted price during the Steam sale, and others will be able to check it out.
I’ve made this thread once before and it generated some good suggestions, but the rate of indie publishing on Steam has only accelerated with time, so it seems to be worth trying again.
I thought of another one. This is an odd one, because I think the dev is actually quite well known: it’s Yahtzee Croshaw, formerly of Zero Punctuation and now of Fully Ramblomatic. He’s made a number of games over the years, but one that almost nobody ever mentions anymore is Poacher. (Note: link is to Archive.org rather than Steam; I don’t think the game is available on Steam.) I didn’t actually beat this one, as it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as it goes on, but the basic controls and whatnot are very nice, and the humor is great. Here’s Wot Rock, Paper, Shotgun Thought about it, since it’s a bit of a faff to actually install at this point and Archive doesn’t offer reviews and whatnot.
Man, I played all the way through the 5 Days a Stranger trilogy but never heard of that one.
Quadrilateral cowboy.
first person cyberpunk logic puzzle game that tells a story without any words. Absolutely a blast and I wholeheartedly recommend it
Total Distortion is a point-and-click adventure that combines music video creation, business simulation, and surreal humor. Players build music videos, battle guitar monsters, and navigate a strange dimension, all in pursuit of earning $1 million.
Ah, I knew I’ve seen the title before. The game over music is perhaps more famous than the game.
But does just knowing the game over screen actually account for knowing the game?
Project Gorgon or, as I like to call it, Project Gorgonzola. Its an indie MMO, but its possibly my favorite MMO and I play a lot of them. Its very unique feeling. Has a lot of jank, but also a lot of charm. Come play with me :3
Mega Knockdown a turn-based fighting game that successfully adapts the best part of fighting games: throwing rock four times in a row because you’ve gotten in their head well enough to know they’re gonna throw scissors four times in a row.
(note the above is an old clip, the placeholder frames have since been filled in)
Looks like a slower-paced YOMI
What a wild concept mashup! Great recommendation.
Maybe Ten Bells
Solo dev who was pretty sad that it had slow traction on release because he put so much work into the game. I can see it now has over 500 reviews, so perhaps he got the reaction he wanted!
After reading a good review I tested it with my horror-loving gf, but we found it kind of mid.
I’m not familiar with anomaly horror as a genre, but it sounds like a very well-made game. I’m scared that I’d be too scared though
Little Rocket Lab - fun factory builder with Stardew valley vibes
What a great post idea, thanks OP!
My contribution is NeonXSZ, a 6DOF open-world ARPG by a solo dev. It’s been a decade since it released, but IIRC, the dev cited Quake and Diablo as primary inspirations and the game has a native Linux version.
I have that, I should probably play it sometime
Reassembly, a fantastic and beautiful simple shipbuilder with a great modding scene. My go-to game when I’m high and just want to chill with some pretty particle explosions…
(should we be upvoting the games we haven’t heard of? Or just downvote only?)
I would humbly suggest you upvote quality games you’re interested in. I’m sure I could go find a dozen AI asset-flip games no one’s ever heard of, but that doesn’t mean they are worth sharing!
I liked that game until I realized that the enemies were just spawning random attacks rather than playing against a peer level opponent, which meant there wasn’t any strategy involved in taking the enemy positions. It’s just whack a mole on the attacks on you while you take their bases (also defended by random fleet spawns).
That’s a fair criticism - there’s mods out there that improve the AI situation, but I don’t know of one that really changes the fundamental nature of the gameplay eventually becoming progressively moving through the map.
I have longed for years for the devs to revist the game and add something like a campaign or story mode - or to make it more focused on survival and exploration. Pretty much a total overhaul I realize, but still I dream…
Yeah, the game was exactly what I wanted prior to realizing how the enemy AI worked, but then it just took all the wind out of my sails and I didn’t even want to scale up to overwhelm that increasing resistance. That momentum is what I love about strategy games, where at some point you get over the hump and things get easier because you’re strategically dismantling your opponent’s war machine. They should obviously push back, which then becomes a part of your strategy, where to defend to prevent a halt to that momentum as much as where to attack to continue building it.
Grabbed, thanks for bringing it up! Looks really interesting :)
This looks awesome, and its on GoG too
A game that holds a fantastically emotional spot in my heart is Jason Oda’s CONTINUE?9876543210. It has a mixed rating by the general public, but holds the very core of my faith.
At the start, a video game character dies, and is scheduled for deletion. Eventually, the garbage collector that filters through the computer’s RAM, deleting levels that have served their purpose, characters of memory damage and mangled speech, and reflections on what it it is to be dying, all deleted. The goal of the game is to find peace in the milliseconds of afterlife, however that happens.
we all fear deletion
those who were deleted
i took with me
their lightning, their prayerhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/263340/Continue9876543210/
(yes! I got a downvote! Someone else knows this game!)
9€??
I should reorient myself into "game"dev
Any idea why “This item is currently unavailable in your region”?
Because your region isn’t my region?
Thanks! I just wondered what could be in the game that triggers banning it in my region.
Could be a licensing thing. E.g. there are quite a few online Steam games that are not available in Europe, but are in North America.
The game’s been dead and without updates for a decade, so I’m not sure what’s going on.
It’s something I pass through about weekly though. It’s a good game to keep my head on my shoulders with.
Suzerain is an underappreciated, text-based, role-playing political simulator. I wish there were more games out there like it.
WORMHOLE (51 Steam reviews)
WORMHOLE is next-level Snake. I’ve written about it before! There are powerups, wormholes (obviously), and increasingly complex and cramped levels. The game’s graphics and music get more intense over time and it becomes an oddly hypnotic action game.
I’m glad to see these threads again! They’re fun.
Ash & Adam’s GOBSMACKED (37 Steam reviews)
This is a single-player arcade FPS. You battle robots in a series of arenas with a set of wacky weapons, with shops in between. At the start of each run, you have to buy yourself a starting loadout using the money you got from previous runs, but you can’t choose the same items as your last run. Buying an item for the first time at a shop unlocks it so you can choose it as a starter in a future run.
Eh, I don’t know how well the game is known, but I’ll throw out A Robot Named Fight, since looking at Metacritic it seems like it never got much mainstream attention. It’s also (unsurprisingly) on sale right now, only $3.24 in the US.
Anyway, the game is a metroidvainia roguelite mashup. The gameplay is more the Metroid side of “metroidvania” being very obviously inspired by Super Metroid. You traverse a randomly generated map, getting unlocks for future runs by accomplishing various things though out that run, think Binding of Issac’s item progression.
Excellent game! So satisfying when you get a run that totally breaks everything! And it just got a true online coop mod! Previously you could play with one Fight and up to three players could be Orbs.
I found the game through a review recommending it to “Paper Mario” fans, but that video was so obscure I failed to ever find it again. The platforming is jank, the story compares unfavorably to another game with the same first 2 syllables, and the switch port is terrible with its load times. But I like the combat system, and while it starts fairly generic, each area becomes more and more visually intersting. Also we play as a silent protagonist, but they still gave them so much personality in the form of a hint system notebook, most devs would do hint systems as generically as possible to not confuse anyone, but I love them for not doing that.
A true flawed 7/10 game.
