- Joined
- Oct 4, 2019
I enjoy games. I really enjoy finding cool, obscure games that have interesting stuff. And I especially enjoy sharing cool obscure games with other people so that they can also enjoy them. I’m also one of those ehoarders who plays little bits of a lot of games, just so I can dig out the interesting parts. I doubt I’m unique in this.
I didn’t see any other thread, at least from the last few months that really fit this, apologies if I missed one. (Chat Thread’s close, but not really) so I decided to make one myself. There’s threads for a lot of the bigger franchises and zeitgeist games, but I’m sure people have a couple lesser known games that they’d like to see more people discover.
tl;dr - If you’ve got some less well known games you like, tell us about it. Please include a purchase (or download, if it’s free) link, if possible. If it’s in Early Access or Beta, please let people know if it’s at least far enough along that you’d be ok if they stopped work on it tomorrow.
Sorry, that’s still pretty long.
(Would people prefer I make another post for these, so the thread objective stays pure?)
Factory Town: (EA, NOT ready for 1.0 yet, but good enough to still consider buying). I really, really love this game. It’s basically a cross between Factorio and the Caeser/Anno style city-builder games. For the first hour or so it basically plays like an Anno game: you start with workers who you start sending out to acquire wood & stone & food; you build houses & make sure they’re within range of the various stockpiles; you create tiers of processing buildings for more luxuries, etc. But, because people are expensive and inefficient, you also start to get better ways to process things - building wagons and chutes, and then conveyor belts, etc.
You quickly run into the usual Factorio spaghetti problem and the input-output ratio problem, and all the things that make that game interesting, while also giving you an additional problem of trying to keep things in a small footprint, and where not delivering goods also limits your resources to make more machines.[/SPOILER]
Troubleshooter: (EA, missing some content, NEEDS EDITING, but would be ok if it went 1.0) I feel like if the Persona team decided to make a new Freedom Force game today, this is close to what it would be. It’s made by a Korean studio, and has a rough English translation at the moment, but the game itself is solid.
And lastly, for now, The Flame in the Flood: Not sure if this is still obscure. It’s been a Twitch Prime freebie, it’s currently an Xbox PC Pass freebie. But I really think it does some interesting stuff, so I want more people to play it. It’s a survival roguelite, set in a post-apocalyptic Louisiana, on a river.
You’re on a raft, going downstream. On the river you’re trying to avoid rocks and hazards. Between those sections you have a choice of 3-6 places to stop, and no way to get to all of them, so you have to choose your spots. Each stop has various items - like branches and food - or hazads - like boars and wolves. Notably, your character can’t really fight, so it’s mostly a game about avoiding dangers, scavenging what you can and how much risk you’re willing to take. And it does some really neat stuff with its interface to show what you’re afflicted by and how to fix it, that I’d like more games to steal.
It is a game about eking out survival and slowly being broken down. It’s a score game based on distance travelled and not a game about becoming better and eventually winning (at least I never have won). So, probably not for everyone, but if you like fighting against being slowly ground down, this will probably appeal.
All right, so those are some from me. I’ll dump some more later, since I’m home sick today. But I’d like to see what some of you guys have..
I didn’t see any other thread, at least from the last few months that really fit this, apologies if I missed one. (Chat Thread’s close, but not really) so I decided to make one myself. There’s threads for a lot of the bigger franchises and zeitgeist games, but I’m sure people have a couple lesser known games that they’d like to see more people discover.
tl;dr - If you’ve got some less well known games you like, tell us about it. Please include a purchase (or download, if it’s free) link, if possible. If it’s in Early Access or Beta, please let people know if it’s at least far enough along that you’d be ok if they stopped work on it tomorrow.
Sorry, that’s still pretty long.
*****
I’ll start off with a few I recently found and like:
(Would people prefer I make another post for these, so the thread objective stays pure?)
Factory Town: (EA, NOT ready for 1.0 yet, but good enough to still consider buying). I really, really love this game. It’s basically a cross between Factorio and the Caeser/Anno style city-builder games. For the first hour or so it basically plays like an Anno game: you start with workers who you start sending out to acquire wood & stone & food; you build houses & make sure they’re within range of the various stockpiles; you create tiers of processing buildings for more luxuries, etc. But, because people are expensive and inefficient, you also start to get better ways to process things - building wagons and chutes, and then conveyor belts, etc.
You quickly run into the usual Factorio spaghetti problem and the input-output ratio problem, and all the things that make that game interesting, while also giving you an additional problem of trying to keep things in a small footprint, and where not delivering goods also limits your resources to make more machines.[/SPOILER]
Troubleshooter: (EA, missing some content, NEEDS EDITING, but would be ok if it went 1.0) I feel like if the Persona team decided to make a new Freedom Force game today, this is close to what it would be. It’s made by a Korean studio, and has a rough English translation at the moment, but the game itself is solid.
You start as a Troubleshooter, a member of a super-powered vigilante organization keeping peace in a... Korean slum that’s become its own nation-state, kinda(??). The gameplay is basically like Nu X-Com: 2 actions/turn, move radius, overwatch, etc. The catch is that you’re building your Troubleshooter team as you go. And the interactions and story are fun, and sometimes clever:
If it’s not obvious, the game uses the cool word bubbles instead of Bioware’s little dial thing. So each of those is a separate dialogue option.
There’s also power customization, inventory crafting (not yet), a territory control mechanic, and so on. It’s missing a lot of the optional side-missions right now, but I’ve already put in about 15 hours on the core story and I feel like there’s a lot more, so still good value. The one caveat is that the hit %’s seem even more busted than X-Com’s so if you can’t handle that...
If it’s not obvious, the game uses the cool word bubbles instead of Bioware’s little dial thing. So each of those is a separate dialogue option.
There’s also power customization, inventory crafting (not yet), a territory control mechanic, and so on. It’s missing a lot of the optional side-missions right now, but I’ve already put in about 15 hours on the core story and I feel like there’s a lot more, so still good value. The one caveat is that the hit %’s seem even more busted than X-Com’s so if you can’t handle that...
And lastly, for now, The Flame in the Flood: Not sure if this is still obscure. It’s been a Twitch Prime freebie, it’s currently an Xbox PC Pass freebie. But I really think it does some interesting stuff, so I want more people to play it. It’s a survival roguelite, set in a post-apocalyptic Louisiana, on a river.
You’re on a raft, going downstream. On the river you’re trying to avoid rocks and hazards. Between those sections you have a choice of 3-6 places to stop, and no way to get to all of them, so you have to choose your spots. Each stop has various items - like branches and food - or hazads - like boars and wolves. Notably, your character can’t really fight, so it’s mostly a game about avoiding dangers, scavenging what you can and how much risk you’re willing to take. And it does some really neat stuff with its interface to show what you’re afflicted by and how to fix it, that I’d like more games to steal.
It is a game about eking out survival and slowly being broken down. It’s a score game based on distance travelled and not a game about becoming better and eventually winning (at least I never have won). So, probably not for everyone, but if you like fighting against being slowly ground down, this will probably appeal.
All right, so those are some from me. I’ll dump some more later, since I’m home sick today. But I’d like to see what some of you guys have..
