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.
Taiji (906 reviews)
Nonlinear discovery-based puzzles
If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you’ll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.
Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place’s secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don’t understand, so you’ll just have to leave it for later, when you’ve learned more puzzle mechanics. It’s like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.
All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.
Minecraft (do your worst)
Space Station 14!
Achron A RTS with time travel. You can actually send troops and orders in the past to change the outcome of the battle.
https://youtu.be/b6YYWCW1wVsIt’s a shame it never got big. The time travel mechanic is awesome.
Sadly, downvoting this based on the rule…
It did pop up in my feed when it was in development. I think the time travel is neat in concept but just becomes too hard to wrap one’s head around - and from what I remember, the core RTS elements were a bit lacking.
The core RTS is very standard like the first command and conquer. The visual were a bit lacking not becaus ugly but hard to differentiate between untis when in the heat of battle. The single player mission is like a large training. And I kept getting destroyed by the AI even on easy.
I might give it a try again to play with my son, now that he is old enough. It’s really the time travel that should be revived by a bigger or more experienced studio. Lots of potential in there.
Also pissed that the Linux version never made it to Steam, now that Proton is a thing I forgot to check it again.
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
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.
Learn the pleasures of loving another human, and the pain of being a programmer — at the same time!
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.
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.
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.
Fun arcade bullet hell survivors (think vampire survivors) type game. Dodge bullets, and survive as long as you can.
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.
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”.
Fork of the older warsow, open source movement shooter. Think quake.
Sadly, it seems to be dead on steam.
A webgl/browser based 3d dungeon crawler with proceduraly generated levels.
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.
Open source idle game, playable in browser. No clicking, just watching numbers go up.
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 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.
Simple bike racing game, although the player is very fragile, which adds some difficulty. Playable in browser.
All the maps are user created content.
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.
this game is really fun
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”.
I found this game a few years ago after playing a remake on Pico-8. The premise is youre an unhoused person who just got out of jail, and you have to collect cans and change, find work, get an education, and a nice job, all while avoiding several hazards like muggers and the IRS.
I found it surprisingly addictive and very fun.
The whole things just a massive labor of love from a relatively small indy studio. At one point it was an RPG Maker game that was delightfully well polished in terms of story, art, and environment. After the devs got tired to rpg maker limitations, they ported the whole thing to Unity and re-released it as a free Enhanced Edition update. Childhood me played the shit out of GBA Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and it very much scratches that JRPG itch.
Bugvasion TD (9 reviews)
It’s a charming little tower defense game where you fight bugs with very fun abilities. I also play tested it so I may be a tad biased but I think it’s underated and fun :3
Underhero is a RPG. There is (bad) 2D platforming and an interesting blend between turn based and real time battles with decent amount of player expression, but I find most interesting the writing and scenarios you will find yourself in during the game. You play as an Underling after the Hero has an unfortunate accident after all, and while technically a silent protagonist, all entries in the journal/hint system/to-do list are just brimming with personality.
I swear I first saw this game in list of “Paper Mario-likes”, but I can’t find a single video with that topic that mentions it, and now I realize that it only has like 600 reviews on steam.
Concluse is an atmospheric horror game which features puzzles, outstanding cutscenes, and something a little twisted…
This one is free! Unfortunately a lot of my niche games are horror, not sure how broad of an appeal that is, but hopefully there’s some horror fans here :^)
Our Adventuring Guild doesn’t look like much on its cover but it scratches all the management sim and tactics RPG urges that I enjoy, while also having some surprisingly cute writing (while still mainlining the classic fantasy RPG themes)
If you’re looking to kill a couple hours and love puzzle games, give 20 Small Mazes a go. I really enjoyed the variety.
Best of all, it’s free.
Azimuth is a metroidvania game, and something of an homage to the previous greats of the genre (Super Metroid in particular). You will need to pilot your ship, explore the inside of the planet, fight enemies, overcome obstacles, and uncover the storyline piece by piece. Azimuth features a huge game world to explore, lots of little puzzles to solve, dozens of weapons and upgrades to find and use, and a wide variety of enemies and bosses to tangle with.
It is open source and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Semi-Rogue-like RPG, flee away from the darkness on the leftside of the screen, try and defeat demonlord and save the world. (Multiple endings)
One of my favorite games ever, guy made his own engine.
It does have design flaws, don’t get me wrong. But this is is really novel and has enough content to get somewhat deep into it.
Eventually you start seeing the same things but for essentially a one man team it’s really impressive.
