Indie Game Suggestion Thread - Word of mouth

Locomalitos games, spanish guy who makes retro style arcade games, the most famous one being a ghosts and goblins clone called Maldita Castilla which is fucking great. Lot of other games of his are pretty fucking good as well, personal favourites being Curse of Issyos which is a NES Castlevania clone set in Ancient Greece, the Hollywood movie with Ray Harryhausen special effects version with fantastic fucking sprites and visual design which resembles Jason and the Argonauts and Abbayes Des Morts which is like an adventure platformer, reminds me of early NES games which require key hunting and solving riddles to progress.

I Rule which is a cross between Binding of Isaac and Plants Vs Zombies. I think its feature complete and from what I played of it its really fucking good, 99% polished cause you can still break the game with a bit of stat manipulation and it tends to slow down when theres too many enemies.

Micro Mages is a nifty little platformer which is one of those modern NES developed games which works well and plays well as well.

Battle for Wesnoth is pretty good, open source turn based strategy game which is closer to 4x than traditional turn based strategy.

Heros Hour, nice little HOMM clone which runs better than Songs of Conquest which destroys my pc or crashes every time.

Someone already mentioned Brigador which is pretty good but Desert Strike is better. Brigador has a better soundtrack though.

This is technically cheating but the Descent series, I really like these games and theyre like the only ones of their kind. Its like Tie Fighter and X Wing, First person space combat, but theyre done so much better for some reason, more smooth movement and gameplay with only slightly shit controls. Overload is supposed to be the spiritual successor but it was like 8 GB.

Tooth and Tail, best RTS for casual play and best RTS from the past 15 years.

Shotgun King the Final Checkmate, its Chess but you play as a Black King with a shotgun against the entirety of White. Pretty cool roguelike with really good gameplay, multiple modes/weapons and a pretty good stat system.

Webbed which people might know from Oneyplays, best Nintendo game not from Nintendo as they put all the focus into one mechanic making it versatile and fun to use. Web Swinging is also the best implemented out of any game with the mechanic, including the shitty spider man games.

I think Ive forgotten the rest which Im sure Im one of the few people who played, Garlic maybe which is pretty shit to be honest. Drop Cannon maybe, best Flash game to have come out since 2012 2013. Idk Ive run out, Ill have to come back once I remember more.

Edit: Spectacular Sparky maybe, its not that good, run n gun platformer which plays pretty mediocre.

Cyber Shadow, which is a pretty fucking awesome ninja gaiden clone, really cool gameplay and not that difficult to 100% as well including achievements.

Terra Nil, which is a pretty cool sim management game with too little content. Its not recommendable to buy cause theres only 4 levels so far and they massively fucked up the graphics by making it 3D with Post Processing instead of the small size pixel art demo which was on Itch Io but the gameplay is pretty good.

Volgarr the Viking which is a really old school arcade action platformer, its really difficult and Ive deleted it off my harddrive but it was pretty good when I played it. Its also a Rastan ripoff for those who know what Rastan is.

A Short Hike, this game has a lot of trannies and twitter commies on it like flies but its a pretty good relaxing game. Its like Zelda exploration in an animal crossing like map and setting.

World of Horror, Junji Ito Roguelike, nuff said.

Gish, pretty good platformer, Ed McMillens first Commercial game from 2005.

Im gonna be trying out Tiny Thor, Super Catboy, Probo Rush, False Skies, Thermonuclear and Full Moon rush pretty soon.

Games which Ive tried and got bored of: Dodgeball Academia, Aggelos, Final Vendetta
 
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MO:Astray.

I haven't seen it mentioned yet. It's an action/puzzle platformer where you play as a cute slime guided by a mysterious cute voice through a not so cute environment. You can read people's minds by latching onto their heads (which is where you'll get most of the story from anyway). You also get to rip people's heads off afterwards.
 
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Stuff I actually have played and like:

Door Kickers (Endless War meets Rainbow Six, is famous but I went a long time before getting my interest up enough to try it)

The Shivah (short point and click adventure where you solve a murder mystery as a NYC rabbi, I seem to recall it having genuinely good writing)

Thomas Was Alone (absolutely charming platformer about a bunch of polygons working together)

Apotheon (great Metroidvania that's like God of War with black and orange pottery aesthetics and authentic-sounding Greek music, has good period weapons like throwable javelins and slings too)

The Deadly Tower of Monsters (action-platformer in the style of every sci fi B movie smashed together with director commentary over it like it's a movie; it is SO DETAILED and SO ACCURATE, it's the Cuphead of its genre but never got much buzz)

Roundabout (interesting little gameplay gimmick)

Transistor (the best of Supergiant's game, fuck Pyre, it's bland)




Stuff I haven't played and don't hear people talking about that people might appreciate:

Hellish Quart (With Fire and Sword era swashbuckling dueling game, AAA graphics).

Luckslinger (Western 2D shooter where luck is a resource you can spend tactically, has a hip hop soundtrack)

Empires of the Undergrowth (ant colony RTS with a lot of realistic detail and a nature documentary-style presentation; it's abandonware but it seems to be a reasonably complete product)

Derail Valley (train autism game that doesn't whore DLC and is based around gameplay)

Man Eater (le funny shark game; I prefer whales and squids myself)

Astrologaster (narrative indie game about a real life Elizabethan court case trying an astrology doctor for malpractice)

Deceive Inc (cartoony hero shooter with a superspy theme)

Delta-v: Rings of Saturn (space mining/piracy autism game with sublight, six degrees of freedom, Newtonian gameplay)

Inkulinati (le funny Medieval manuscript illustration game)

Pirate Commander (might be shit for all I know, but it's a pirate game that strips out the 2D maneuvering for something more like an FTL-style crew-and-stations management system)

King's Orders (play various Medieval campaigns like a programmer: you issue orders, there's order delay, the general has to interpret your orders, etc.)

Squad 51 vs the Flying Saucers (is the Cuphead/Deadly Tower of Monsters of alien invasion B movies)

Corsair's Legacy (is actually AA, but looks to be the pirate version of Kingdom Come: Deliverance)

Ozymandias (a simplified 4X designed to be played in one sitting like RTS games usually are)

Thrive (the cell stage of Spore turned into a full-fledged, independent game)

War of the Worlds (one fucking dude making a full on survival game lovingly recreating the movie)

Mouse (looks to be an attempt to do the Cuphead type thing as a shooter, the trailer is total shit but I think they panicked and put out a trailer when it's still in like the most absolute basic alpha stage)
 
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I must recommend Balatro on Steam.
There is only a demo available now but it's like crack for me. It's a poker roguelite where you make hands to get points but you can modify the deck, get power up cards, modify the value of each hand, it's fuckin cool as hell. I've beaten the demo twice. I don't even like card games and I didn't even know poker hands at all until I played this fun ass game. The runs aren't too long and even the demo has enough variety that it's fun trying and calculating what risks to take to get the most points.
 
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Edit: LOL I started rambling long-form and only then realized I've already replied to this thread before. Well fuck it, I wrote it up anyways.


Sure let me just read my Steam library. I'm not listing every indie/AA game I like, I'm leaving off some that were okay but nothing to crow about.

FLIPPING DEATH and STICK IT TO THE MAN
Very fun modern adventure games, not technically a franchise but they are (share characters, aesthetics, general ideas) that are frequently compared to Psychonauts. Themes about mind (mind control, manipulating cartoon thought bubbles), paper cutout aesthetics, jazzy, offbeat humor.

THE PROCESSION TO CALVARY
Short modern adventure game done in a Monty Python like style of European paintings being photoshopped together to make the visuals, classical music, and similar humor. It's short but it's charming.

THE SHIVAH
Short modern adventure game where you play a rabbi in contemporary NYC solving a murder.

CUPHEAD
It's Cuphead.

APOTHEON
Awesome metroidvania in the style of black-and-orange Greek pottery with minimalist Greek music, plot that's like God of War but classy and authentic weapons like javelins and slings.

BASTION and TRANSISTOR
Supergiant's GOOD games. I like Transistor better, beautiful painting-like art style and music and interesting story about people in a computer world. Bastion, cool frontier-meets-Arabian-Nights thing going on. Great narrators.

THE DEADLY TOWER OF MONSTERS
Did you like the narrators from Bastion and Transistor? Did you like Cuphead? This one is to B-movies with Cuphead was to animation, it 100% nails the look of shitty janky sci fi B-movies where the robots look like garbage cans and guns shoot out ring-shaped lasers, narrated like you're watching the director's cut of a movie. It plays fun and is awesome 100% highly recommend.

ROCK OF AGES
Like Procession to Calvary, Monty Python esque painting-like art style (but painting-like, Calvary was literally made from paintings) and classical music and theming, it's sort of like Marbleblast meets tower defense as you take turns trying to slam boulders into each other's castle gates, progressing through European history/art.

DON'T STARVE
King of the roguelikes. Tim Burtonesque survival. Just so unique in every way. Kind of pisses me off it didn't blow up into some major franchise when the likes of FNAF did. There's just nothing like it, whether we're talking visuals, the badass sort-of-klezmer-like music, the quirkiness of everything in its setting, the desperate mix of realism (scraping around picking up twigs and living off berries) with cartoon logic, huddling around a campfire at night feeling absolutely miserable and desperate 100% of the time.

DOWNWELL
A simple roguelike, cheap and insubstantial, about falling down a well. The game is basically structured around the idea that playing well means hitting the right things as you fall and avoiding the wrong things. Managing your velocity. It's not that different from a 2D space shooter type thing, I guess, but even just flipping the perspective to going "down" makes it feel very fresh. Most importantly, it's such a light game it runs great on laptops and is so short you can just pop it up and play it anytime.

FTL: FASTER THAN LIGHT
Also a pretty badass roguelike, has my favorite implementation of (non-realistic) space warfare, space combat based around crew and systems management.

ORGAN TRAIL
Oregon Trail with zombies, but actually really clever at doing that too, like having fording a river be fording a "river" of zombies or your covered wagon being a station wagon. Not a ton of replay value but great fun for a while.

SPELUNKY
The better Mario. The other king of roguelikes. Awesome 2D platformer with great treasure hunter theming.

DOORKICKERS
Did you like Endless War as a little kid? This is like that but actually good. Set up plans for CQC SWAT assaults that execute themselves.

OZYMANDIAS
4X designed to be played in the same time as an RTS. Bronze Age theme and big Age of Empires vibes. Maps of all the classic civilizations (like Fertile Crescent, Indus, Ganges, China, Andes, Mesoamerica, etc.). Pretty good. Has had a grip on me for a while. I like to compare it to Hex Empires. It's a flippant comparison, but I can play it with similar chill unlike Civilization (which feels distressing).

ROUNDABOUT
Fun game about driving a revolving limousine that, like a lot of meme games, is driven by its janky bizarre control scheme being used to make what's sort of like a navigation puzzle. It's trippy to play but it works really well once you get used to it.

SUPERHOT
The campaign is AIDS, the endless mode is an okay time waster. (Muh time moves when you move.)

HOTLINE MIAMI and HOTLINE MIAMI 2
KILL KILL KILL BLOOD LUST
The use of music and one-shot kills was brilliant in Hotline Miami, you basically get psyched up until finally you just get a sort of rhythm about it. HM2 kind of ruined that but it expanded on the gameplay in a lot of other ways that makes it well worth playing if you like HM1.

UNDERTALE
Yes I do like it, fuck you you joyless contrarian shit.

WESTERADO: DOUBLE BARRELED
Wears itself out fast, but a short Game Boy-like RPG with some arcadey shooting designed to be replayed.

MICROCIVILIZATION
Only played the demo, but clicker game meets strategy game that actually works surprisingly well.

DESPERADOS 3
You may not call it indie because it was a company, but Mimimi was hardly some huge studio. Beautiful painting-like aesthetic, very tough puzzle-like gameplay that's built to make cinematic scenes, shallow characters but reasonably fun banter.

DEFCON
I would have never believed that a fixed-force nuclear warfare RTS could actually have tactics - responsive tactics, not just some launch plan that's a flip of a coin if you win - but they did it.

THOMAS WAS ALONE
Cute platforming game about polygon people becoming friends and overcoming challenges together. Really good characterization.

Invisible Inc and Mark of the Ninja: They're okay, I just don't like them that much compared to Don't Starve. I've never felt any real desire to go back to them.

Pyre: Boring. Has some really interesting ideas, but boring. The visual novel aspect is super gay and ruins it. I hate that THIS dreck is what Supergiant got so much praise for.

This War of Mine: Kind of grueling, janky and unfun to actually control, but it's been a long time so maybe I remember it more harshly than it deserves

The Amazing American Circus: God-tier 100/10 idea but poorly executed.

Nantucket: God-tier 10/10 idea, executed okay but could have been much better. Only really worth it if you like Pirates! AND are interested in whaling.

Sunless Sea: God-tier high concept and atmosphere, but having a punishing trial-and-error roguelike based around reading text walls (THAT DON'T CHANGE) of purple prose is retarded.

The Flame in the Flood: I like that kind of Southern Americana and the general concept (riverboating through a sinking American backcountry) but it just didn't do it for me. Just a sort of emptiness about everything.
 
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If you're really REALLY bored, and own a Switch, try digging through the cheapo games ($1.99 - $9.99 price range), sometimes you'll be surprised at what you find because they wind up being decent/O.K.-ish to really good.

140 - Platforming rhythm game. Objects/Terrain/Enemies moves with the music and you have to move at the right time to clear the stages.

Inside My Radio - Another Platform rhythm game, only this time, YOU have to move with the music to do basic things like jump and attack. Shorter than 140

Crazy BMX Rider - See Here

Art of Balance - A relaxing puzzle game in which you stack different objects ontop of each other while making sure nothing falls over into the water.

Color Zen - Puzzle game revolving around colors and shapes. Move the shapes to the cooresponding color to change the background to that color. Background MUST match the border color, or else it's game over.

Brave Dungeon - Made by the same group that made the Dark Witch series (basically an anime megaman clone). This is an RPG using the enemies from Dark Witch as the main characters.

Fairune Collection - Combines Fairune 1 and 2 into a neat package. A zelda-esque Adventure game where you take control of a girl knight that had to unlock statues and seal the evil away.

Mini Metro - You create your own train lines in various real life locations (France, New york, japan, etc...)

Toziuha Nights: Dracula's Revenge - Castlevania but you're a chick with a whip

Polyroll - Sonic except you don't go as fast and you're an Armadillo (no, not Mighty)

80's Overdrive - Outrun but with that 80's asthetic

Reknum - Platformer in which you're a female elf with a sword going to varous "rooms" that lead to other rooms or even back to previous rooms. You power up with gems, and the more you collect, the more your abilities grow, but you loose them when you leave the room you're currently in.

Geki Yaba Runner: Anniversary Edition - You're a garden Gnome, and you're running crazy fucking fast to collect socks. Fast reflexes are absolutely required.

Moon Raider - Metroid, except you're a green alien woman.

Gunman Clive HD Collection. Combines GC 1 and 2 in one package. MegaMan except you're a cowboy in the wild west. Can also unlock a fucking duck to play as, but the duck can't attack.
 
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Calandrino said:
I am entertained by these meme descriptors like "run-based", "survival", and "skill-based". Imagine, if you will, a challenging action game where you play from the beginning each time and rely on your skill at the game to avoid dying. Like land mammals returning to the sea as cetaceans, indies will eventually evolve into 20-minute-long circa-1989 arcade games, and a golden age will begin anew.
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My favorite is "movement platformer" yeah nigger, we gotta separate it from all the platformers where you don't move.

Just call
Judge Dredd said:
Pseudoregalia
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a Mario64 style platformer with metroid progression and thicc Furry MC
 
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Focusing on games made by a single dude:

Astalon Tears of the Earth: Quit frankly the best metroidvania I have ever played. Yes, even better than Hollow Knight. Focusing on a party of 3 adventures you have to use the uniquie skills of each characters to face challenges, explore the map, upgrade your character with new abilities (while finding more) with multiple paths to take through the castle. There is also a great risk/reward system in place since when you die you start at the beginning of the tower making every new short cut, elevator, and campfire a great surprises/relief.

A Robot Named Fight: The most successful (at what is was aiming for) roguelite metroidvania I seen and played. You do start to notice how the world is put together after a couple of runs and the game is a little easy but still fun all the way through. I think most people were put off that all the enemies are 'The Thing" style meat monsters.

Zelda Again: Link is Awesome: A v1:1 translation of the original ASEMBLY code of Zelda 2 so all the physics and character behaviors are accurate with a ton of QoL improvements. The best way I can describe it is playing the rose tinted version of Zelda 2 from your memory in real life. Recent updates have included a Randomized mode along with different music sets to use.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
This War of Mine: Kind of grueling, janky and unfun to actually control, but it's been a long time so maybe I remember it more harshly than it deserves
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This War of Mine's a weird one. It's great for the first few hours. So it's a great recommendation for the kind of person who wants to buy it dirt cheap on sale and mess around for a bit, with no intention on playing through the whole game.

That game suffers from a huge dose of irony, in that that the game's supposed to help you empathize with civilians caught up in the middle of a war. It ironically falls apart after a while because of how the characters end up feeling like whiny robots. It's a shame, too, because I really like the premise, but I can't really think of a way to improve on it.
 
I decided to post again to say that I'm bumping up my recommendation for The Flame in the Flood. I replayed it some time back and enjoyed it a lot more than I did before. However, it does still suffer from a really weak last act and, when I played it, it seemed so easy (could have been luck) that a lot of interesting gameplay systems never really became important. But it fills an interesting space of combining maritime games, realistic survival (the type where you have to splints out of twigs and rags and stuff, can get injuries, and eat weeds you scrounge up), and being a casual, fast-paced roguelike. The closest experience I've had to it is Don't Starve, just DS is Tim Burton wacky Gothic cartoon land while TFITL is artsy/faux-folksy Americana land.
 
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Intravenous 2 Mercenarism.

A little free teaser for Intravenous 2 which is yet to come out. The Game is a splinter cell in bird's eye view, Sneaking and fighting depends heavily on the difficulty level (the hardest is recommended)
 
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If you want a sandbox space strategy game about trying to unite the galaxy through war amd diplomacy I recommend The Last Federation. It's a fuckin old game now but it's very interesting if you're into that kind of stuff. Basically you're the last of your kind and you're more or less just trying to bring peace to the galaxy or something, whatever that entails.
 
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Dr. Ricearoni said:
If you want a sandbox space strategy game about trying to unite the galaxy through war amd diplomacy I recommend The Last Federation. It's a fuckin old game now but it's very interesting if you're into that kind of stuff. Basically you're the last of your kind and you're more or less just trying to bring peace to the galaxy or something, whatever that entails.
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While I love that game I feel like it suffers the Arcen curse of having waaaaaay too many numbers that mean nothing. It's dense for no reason.

Speaking of sandbox strategy, Stars In Shadow is a fairly recentish entry that can be best described as MOO2 lite. Very good for a whirl if you want your MOO fix.
 
I quite like Green Hell, you can pet capybaras and throw spears at brown people.
 
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