This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options.
The way it goes: Suggest games, ideally the kind that you believe would have relatively broad appeal. Don’t feel bad about downvotes, but do downvote any game that’s suggested if you have heard of it before (Perhaps, give some special treatment if it was literally your game of the year). This rule is meant to encourage people to post the indie darlings that took some unusual attention and discovery to be aware of and appreciate.
If possible, link to the Steam pages for the games in question, so that anyone interested can quickly take a look at screenshots and reviews. And, as a general tip, anything with over 1000 steam reviews probably doesn’t belong here. While I’d recommend that you only suggest one game per post, at the very most limit it to three.
If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.
Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
Adding one more to the Ace Attorney spinoff block:
Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is a well-written fan spinoff of the AA formula, taking place in a fantasy universe where magic is real, but mostly the domain of the nobility. Trials are a form of theatre, where the nobility knows how to tip the scale, but your mentor knows how to tip them back.
It introduces some very enjoyable mechanics, in which knowledge of each spell’s effects and conditions constitutes its own evidence. Tyrion bears his own magical ability that lets him view the thoughts of witnesses. He is also accompanied by the defendant of his first case, a mercenary-mage named Celeste, who gets a lot of investigation banter with Tyrion, much like Maya and Phoenix.
Five cases in all, and none of them are shortened crapshoot cases, nor is there a downer ending; all the major threads conclude with satisfying endings, and the developer hopes to make a sequel from the world they’ve built.
Oh, and as is common for AA games, take a listen to “Eye of Horus”, the game’s equivalent of the “Objection!” theme when Tyrion nails a contradiction. The game’s soundtrack as a whole has some real bangers, for both the high points and the emotional pulls.
This is SOLID GOLD holy shit
edit: OKAY I FINISHED THE FIRST CASE ABSOLUTELY PLAY THIS
Continuing this in the same thread as it’s a bit topical:
Are you a fan of Love Live! School Idol? Me neither! I basically knew nothing about it at all. Regardless, Gyakuten Live is an incredibly detailed cutesy Ace Attorney style game, in which the characters of the show gather for “school trials”. Though you may need to put up with a cutesier all-girl cast, and the stakes are much lighter and involve things like stolen possessions rather than murder, the mysteries end up having a surprising number of twists and even some heartfelt motives at the end. Features a fully custom soundtrack and LOTS of custom artwork, matched with some traditionally silly Ace Attorney humor.
So far, THREE cases are available, and each features a different prosecutor. The game’s page lists plans to continue up to 6 episodes.
In ItchIO’s standard, the game is “name your own price” - so you can choose to download it for free. It’s unlikely to come to Steam since it technically infringes on an anime/manga without permission.
One more coming if my AA recommendations are well received.
It is actually a Skyrim mod but basically a complete game that just happens to be built upon Skyrim. It features full professional quality voice acting in German and English, new game systems inspired by the Gothic series, a setting separate from Elder Scrolls, and a story that gets close to the quality of Planescape Torment or Disco Elysium. I can’t recommend it enough.
Ooh I still haven’t tried this. I wonder if it has any issues with Skyrim VR.
It probably works with some tinkering. I would recommend completing it once the way the modders intended since they likely never tested their game with VR in mind.
It takes some fiddling, but it works, and is fantastic!
Megabyte Punch is a side scrolling fighting game where you build your robot with different parts salvaged from fought robots that give you different abilities and powerups.
It is a super fast, casual game that you can bang out in a few nights. It has a pretty good electronic soundtrack, boss fights feel weighty even if they are relatively simple.
One of my favorite games as far as just fun and de-stressing!
Astalon: Tears of the Earth. Really fun 8-bit roguelite metroidvania where you swap between characters to access different parts of the dungeon.
In Grotto, you play the role of a soothsayer living in a cave who is occasionally visited by members of a tribal society living nearby. They come to you with problems, and they want you to present your opinion, but you can’t speak. You have access to constellations of stars, which each hold different meanings, and you must present your answers in the form of a single constellation, which the petitioners are left to interpret.
You’ll feel a bit of frustration as your intended message is missed completely in favor of something that the petitioner wanted to hear, and the same constellation might mean different things to different people, but that’s just part of the game. The story unfolds around you and its progression is communicated to you only through the explanations your petitioners give for their visit. Each is a uniquely unreliable narrator, so what you believe is for you to decide.
Two endings, and an interesting story with some occasionally unexpected consequences that might make you feel bad, so if a game giving you a case of the sads is unappealing, maybe take that into consideration.
fantastic game by the makers of Laika, check out their whole ludography
NandGame is a browser puzzle game, where you start of by building basic logic gates from relays and progress from there all the way trough processor design to compiling high-level languages. It does not hold your hand too much, but the invidual puzzles progress so incrementally, it feels almost magical how easily you learn to build computers and compilers.
Nexus: the Jupiter incident. It is a now a bit old tactical space combat game with a big focus on the narrative. It’s awesome, but I never see it mentioned anywhere.
God how badly do I want to see a remaster/remake. So under rated. With a bit more fleshing out (It’s a pretty short, pretty linear experience) it could easily compete with the mechanics in Homeworld.
Ha, “bit old” indeed.
I recommend Scavenger SV4 It’s a very unique game where you send a rover down to a planet to grab what alien artifacts you can before your radiation exposure gets past the point it can be treated. You can bolt some of them onto your rover to make it better and send it down again. It also has several hundred different endings that are decided by how much radiation you absorbed and how much loot and what loot you brought back.
D-Day Normandy is a Quake 2 total conversion mod that is a standalone game. Our website is currently reduced to a forum, but we hope to get that back on track soon. The admin is currently unavailable… Anyways, WW2 FPS from around 2000. Class-based, objective or fraglimit (or both in some maps). Runs on everything these days. We have a couple servers worldwide, more info on ddaydev.com.
Mobmania https://store.steampowered.com/app/2099220/Mobmania/
It’s an Bullet Heaven game like Vampire Survivor. You can play online with up to 4 Friends and every Character has it’s own Skills. The Game is still in Early Access but it gets Updates regularly.
RTS. Kind of reminds me of the ground comabt from Star Wars Empire at War crossed with Starship Troopers. Command a squad of space marines tasked with battling an overwhelming alien horde. Pretty fun campaign (if a bit of a predictable story), plus an endless mode. Not exceedingly difficult, but definitely challenging enough to make you think tactically and keep you on your strategic toes. Somewhat limited replayability makes the sticker price hard to recommend (unless your bread and butter is RTS), but it regularly goes on sale for less than $5, which it is absolutely worth!
Hex based rouge like deck builder. If we’re taking indy gems, this one’s probably a nice Amethyst. Not quite the most polished (the game kind of just throws you in without much of a tutorial and the story’s pretty bare bones), but overall a solid B. If Slay the Spire and Into the Breach are your jams it’ll be right up your alley.
Spin Rhythm XD is a highly enjoyable rhythm game where you spin a wheel with two colors and match them with the beats on the game’s rhythm track.Here’s a description from Steam:
Enter the Rhythm Dimension. A homage to classic arcade rhythm games (Guitar Hero, DDR), with a modern aesthetic and soundtrack. Match colours and beats, spin, tap, flick and flow through the juiciest beats in the universe. Supports multiple control styles including MIDI DJ gear on Steam!
Edit: at the time of writing this, I didn’t realize that this game had 3.5K reviews on Steam, but literally nobody I asked knew about the game, so I guess it kinda counts.
The first game I ever completed and the first time I left a review for a game. The music, the atmosphere, the design, everything blew away. It was freeware from back in 2006. Made by a guy called Nifflas. It’s a sidescrolling platformer where you are an intelligent bouncing ball. I still think about it to this day.
Oh wow, I never heard of this but I love Knytt Underground by the same developer. You also play as a bouncing ball at least for part of it.
Now this is a real oldie but a goodie. Glad to see that it is mostly unknown from the ratio. Obligatory downvote
Aw yeah! This is where my knowledge of absurdly good but extremely niche games comes in. I think I’ll make multiple replies to this comment.
Think enter the gungeon combined with superhot, but simplified a lot. It’s a turn based bullet hell, and an excellent arcade game playable in the browser.
EDIT: I’d also like to take this oppurtunity to talk about flashpoint. Flashpoint is a massive archive of basically every flash game and animation, and you can even play them again.
However, in addition to flash projects, I also noticed that flashpoint also archives HTML/HTML5 games… but only a subset of them. Although flashpoint’s primary purpose still is as a flash archive, it can also be used as a curated list of HTML5 games.
Here is a website that lets you search the flashpoint database
Open source idle game, playable in browser. No clicking, just watching numbers go up.
Open source idle game, but not quite. It eventually expands beyond watching numbers go up, into a sort of roguelike, where you can wander the world and collect stuff. And die. Die a lot.
A Dark Room was where I first saw the @ symbol used to represent the player character.
A short questionaire game that demonstrates the difficulties of poverty.
Spent
This game hurts, got a bit of water in my eyes. Hit me in feeling bruh.
this game is really fun
Gameboy roguelike that is simple, but very elegant.
Sadly, since romhacking went down, I don’t think it’s possible to find the translation patch for it, unless they uploaded it to the internet archive.
Simple bike racing game, although the player is very fragile, which adds some difficulty. Playable in browser.
All the maps are user created content.
Gameboy puzzle game. Very high quality.
Always love to see Mole Mania get some love. One of Shigeru Miyamoto’s earliest titles he worked on also
A fnaf fangame that is close enough to feel like fnaf, but has a twist: Every single level also involves a puzzle. While trying to survive enemies fnaf style. Although I’ve never played this game, I LOVE watching it on Twitch. I like to call it “Human’s can’t multitask: The Game”.
Absolutely obligatory, the simply named “The Game” is a work of art, and truly a life changing experience. You’ll never think about things the same after experiencing “The Game”.
Learn the pleasures of loving another human, and the pain of being a programmer — at the same time!
Also by double speak games, and open source gridland is a variant on the match 3 style. During the day phase, you accrue and store resources, and build stuff. During the night phase, you fight.
Addictive arcade game about archery. Reminds me of flappy bird, not in the raw mechanics, but in the way they are both addicting in the same manner.
A wonderful and life changing experience.
I like to link it without the ending title, like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1944240/ because it’s funnier when people can’t see the game title in the link.
Fork of the older warsow, open source movement shooter. Think quake.
Sadly, it seems to be dead on steam.
Fun arcade bullet hell survivors (think vampire survivors) type game. Dodge bullets, and survive as long as you can.
A webgl/browser based 3d dungeon crawler with proceduraly generated levels.
A simple but elegant io game. You are a ball, and you want to knock other balls to the ground.
One thing I like is that rounds in small, 4 person lobbies, rather than the massive worlds of other io games. Although you can’t really make friends, you can know personas, and it’s more personable.
This site has a few high quality browser games. The one I come back to is X Type, a bullet hell shoot-em up that has ever expanding enemy ship sizes, and never ends. It gets hard fast.
I also like Xibalba, which is a Doom/Wolfenstein style game playable in the browser.
The creator also did a rewrite of quake in 13 kb of javascript
That guy’s seriously talented!
Among the things he’s made, he’s also made some really nice, easy to understand, high-speed compression formats (QOI/QOA), as well as a public domain mpeg decoder.I’ve used all three for various projects and I’d highly recommend that most software developers check them out. If only for the learning experience.
