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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
Elder Scrolls Skyrim, really niche indie game. Just kidding!
Nikoderiko - really fun platformer that’s kind of a mix of Donkey Kong and Crash. Currently on sale on gog (linked) and steam
Do not play with my heart like that
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.
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.
This is probably a bit cheating since it just came out, but we had A Fox Tale on our wishlist since 2021 and it apparently actually came out a couple months ago and we completely missed it!! I immediately went and grabbed it and yeah, it is good. Fox platforming, great story, really good level design and gosh the ART is just so good!
– Frost
A point and click in the same vein as There Is No Game by the same studio, that came out recently and that I haven’t seen people talk about at all, unfortunately already past its introductory offer
it’s on my wishlist, that jelly mechanic looks so silly :)
Wintermoor Tactics Club, part tactical rpg part VN. Very cute and lots of fun
EDIT: https://store.steampowered.com/app/917840/Wintermoor_Tactics_Club/
thanks, looks great :)
Ed-0: Zombie Uprising - A japanese 3rd Person Zombie Action Roguelike. It’s silly, it’s fun, it’s pretty hard sometimes!
I got this in a bundle, but it really seemed like it was just extra junk so I haven’t played it. The curious thing is, the other bundle items were gooner bait, which made me curious about implications.
no gooning in this one. it’s a bit janky, but the right kind of jank - feels like the type of game that was released in the later PS1, early PS2 era.
F2P (not gacha) but pretty good imo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/802930/The_Rainsdowne_Players/
This looks like a good time, gonna download it now
King of kings: the early years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kings:_The_Early_Years
A mediocre set of platformers interspersed with bible trivia. I played the crap out of them because it was the only thing other that super Mario we had.
Later we got Joshua and the battle of Jericho. A bomberman clone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_&_the_Battle_of_Jericho
A large scale, sci-fi, squad based FPS that’s been in development for about 10 years. Battles scale from individual soldiers all the way to pilotable battleships that can be boarded and sabotaged from within, and everything in between.
Total labour of love by the developers. It will soon be leaving early access.
Good game, the closest thing I can describe it as is Battlefront 2(2005)+Planetside with some Battlefield 4 mixed in.
I remember when it was a UT3 mod
Great game, honestly such a pity that nobody plays it.
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
