Given the big swathe of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If that doesn’t count. Will…HoloCure or Noita or Parking Garage Rally Circuit.
Clair Obscur really isn’t an indie game.
Holocure is amazing! I don’t even watch Vtubers I just looked at the highest rated games on steam and found it. Within the first 3 weeks I put in 100 hours
Some I really appreciate that I’m not seeing on this list:
I’m currently enjoying Blue Prince which is a fairly new rogue-like puzzle/mystery game it’s hard to explain without spoiling but it’s worth looking up.
Portals of Phereon is one of my absolute favorites. It’s a fairly deep tactical RPG thing with loads of replayability. It’s kind of like a Pokemon x FF Tactics but with monstergirls and it’s also currently free while it’s in development. Be aware it’s extremely NSFW and horny, which I suspect is the main reason it’s not as popular as some of the others listed (IE rimworld, stardew valley, etc.) however the horny is such a key point to it’s original gameplay and world-building that it wouldn’t be the same without it.
Thea: the awakening is a decent tactical RPG. I love it for it’s original battle mini game, crafting system and world-building. It unfortunately has some balance issues and jankiness that prevents it from being an all time favorite, but it’s definitely one I would encourage at least trying.
Thought of a few others:
- Reus (2nd one’s alright, first one’s excellent)
- Library of Runia
- Book of Hours
- Kenshi (saw it listed one other time, but it deserves a lot more love)
I was getting into Blue Prince, then I think I got a little annoyed with a puzzle involving a time lock, that claimed you could set it to open at a future date/time and it would stay for one hour. Fun, inventive way to get people to plan ahead.
But no, then I wasted several out of game days planning only to find that it’s referring to in-game time; something that has not plainly existed through any of the other mechanics thus far. I’ll likely get back to it, just think they could’ve chosen the orientation of “big picture” puzzles like that a bit better.
Oh I agree, but that one didn’t seem to bad to me due to the clocks depicting an in-game time that were everywhere. The ones that I almost rage quit on were:
possible spoilers
- The stupid gallery puzzles with the nonsensical images that you have to creatively interpret to get the initial clues to parse together in insane ways to get the correct answer
- the culture of nuance
Clonk Endevour is not my favorite game, but I played it a lot with friends when I was younger. You can play with 2 or even more people, with just a monitor and a keyboard! Also it’s so old it should run on any potato.
edit: real answer is Slay The Spire
edit2: ah shit now all of a sudden all the good indie games I played pop up in my head. Project Kat I enjoyed. Synthetik was awesome. Caves of Qud hasn’t been mentioned yet (didn’t play it much though).
Valheim. Bought it late January and already got almost 400 hours on it. Play it vanilla first then modded. I played it with friends, beat final boss on Day 997, we took our times, building and all along the way. Then I started over solo with x3 resources, no raid, and move metals through portal. I just wanted to see if I could solo all game and today I just finished basically everything. So right now, I’m just collecting resources for gears and buildings. Going to make few houses across the map.
Most of my picks have been mentioned already, but I had a blast with Mullet Madjack. A tongue in cheek riff on 80s anime in a boomer shooter where you have 10 seconds to live, but each enemy kill gives you 2 more seconds of life.
Check out Tunic. I would recommend going blind.
The soundtrack to Tunic is so moody.
I used a few little hints to help with the “true final boss”, but it was a fantastic reorienting of everything, and was glad by then it got away from traditional combat. I enjoyed the core combat too, although I usually don’t even like Soulslikes.
Tactical Breach Wizards
The whole defenestration trilogy is amazing
Yep, agree. Heat Signature was also fun, but getting rather repetitive.
I can’t say it’s my favorite, but after checking out all of these games, I’m just gonna post one I think all you guys would love.
NOITA
I love it and hate it at the same time. Every time after I get far down, I don’t want to play again for a long time.
The further you get, the heavier the loss.
Monster sanctuary (turn based monster collector) and Roboquest (arena shooter) were a couple from recent years that stood out to me
For older games nethack and dwarf fortress are great if you can look past the graphics
Monster Sanctuary was so good. I tried it when I had Game Pass, and I loved it so much I bought it outright for Xbox, and then again on Steam. Also got the hardcover monster journal.
Aethermancer, made by the same folks, is looking really good from their demo. Clearly lots of inspiration from Monster Sanctuary but very much its own sort of game
Slime Rancher, though most of my library is indie so I could list like ten others.
I won’t list out the “big” famous ones since those get covered anyway (Stardew, Undertale etc.)
There are plenty I love that have a little less polish but charm their way through, like Calico and Yonder. I also just played through Tunic and quite enjoyed it.
A solid indie publisher is Reddeer games - about half my switch titles are by them. Finji is another.
Crosscode for sure! They have a new game in the works as well, it looks like it will be just as good. Great time to get into it
I really hope the sequel does more with dungeons than just ricochet/geometry puzzles. CrossCode’s incessant use of those in dungeon after dungeon was what made me stop playing.
Not a sequel, just their next game! Combat and UI look similar so far. They’re doing dev streams on their discord
I thought crosscode had the best puzzles haha. The way they built it out with the elemental system, the enemies that required puzzle mechanics you had learned, the tight timing where you had to send a ball flying and then race it to various objectives, the myriad of subtle environmental puzzles in the overworld. Could go on and on, but yeah the VRP is the game’s central mechanic so if you simply don’t enjoy lining up your shots then I imagine the game would be pretty rough lol
Not sure what “VRP” is unless you just mean ricochet puzzles, but mind you, I did play 95% of the game. It felt just too same-y after long enough (it was the plot and environment that had kept me going), and then I just gave up and finished through some YouTuber’s play-through and I confirmed that I had apparently quit at the start of the final dungeon, because it just felt like… more of the same timing-&-angling annoyances with no more originality. Zelda was far, far more creative and I think the game just could have done more with items or different weapons, or something, though I know much of it is based on your character being a specific class that was fixed pre-game… It just ultimately wore me down, sadly.
Right: *successor, not “sequel.”
Virtual Ricochet Projectile :p
It’s the game’s in-game (Crossworlds) terminology for the charged shot that bounces around, yeah. They cover it in the tutorial but the main cast basically ‘nerd emoji’s’ Sergey and they simply refer to it as “balls” for the rest of the game lol
timing-&-angling annoyances
But yeah, like I said, you just don’t like the central mechanic. It’s valid. This is the main point of contention for the minority of people who don’t click with the game, as is evidenced by filtering for negative reviews on steam
But imagine if you didn’t find it to be an annoyance, and instead found it to be inherently satisfying? One of my favorite parts about Crosscode is how unafraid they are to present you with puzzles that are not only difficult to solve in the typical sense, but also difficult to perform once you know what to do. It’s a rare treat, most games instead lean hard only into one direction (purely cerebral puzzling or purely focussed on action)
It’s a game that just gives and gives, and to the contrary of your experience, I found the constant innovation of the puzzles throughout the game is what brought it from A to S tier. I finished the final dungeon wishing there was more game to play. Imagine my delight when the DLC dropped and added another 20 hours of timing & angling goodness. Replayed the game 3 times over the years.
And yeah, frankly we should compare it to Zelda, the most celebrated and beloved puzzle adventure series of all time developed and supported for 40 years by one of the largest and most influential video game companies of all time. No joke, I think this is actually exactly where Crosscode stacks up. It’s up there for me with my favorite Zelda titles
Oh. It’s been literal years so I totally forgot that initialism, but while we’re at it, the second “C” in “CrossCode” is also capital.
It’s smooth as butter, yeah, but I think I would prefer a game focused on a different character class/weapon. I remember some progression of concepts but I guess didn’t really connect the dots (even though I don’t think I looked up a guide more than once or twice briefly).
Yeah plenty of people develop these feelings about laser focussed games. Sekiro is a good example. Not gonna be your game if you don’t like parrying. Lots of comments online from such people who write the game off as “spam parry to win” as tho there’s no depth to it.
Huge parry fan on the other hand? Probably your favorite game, and you’re bewildered by those comments because you feel like you could write a novel about how interesting the system is and how rewarding it is to master all the way into your seventh charmless NG+ run.
I think at the end of the day, when the gameplay is simply not catered to our preferences we’re not really going to appreciate what makes it so great at what it is
Absolute favorite is Outer Wilds. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I can’t experience it again. A true masterpiece of a game.
After that, probably Noita for sheer insanity. Deeply unfair, but getting a god-run going is that much sweeter. It took me ~100 hours to beat it the first time, now I can consistently win if I try but I’m addicted to doing stupid things to see what happens.
hypnospace outlaw
Balatro. It’s a great Maths game.
Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion. Top 3 shmups of all-time and best shmup on Steam, IMO.
You might like !shmups@lemmus.org
