this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

There's a lot I could list here, but I'll focus on a few that I've played recently, that don't seem to be getting as much mention.

Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There's not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.

OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There's really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.

Vampire Survivors - It's super cheap, it's super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you're telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).

Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don't actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It's rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated "city" (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age... And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You're a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 ("The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia"), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say "solve crimes" I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There's no Arkham "Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues" going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it's all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you're the brains. It's on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I'm slightly scared of the people who made it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

If I had to pick one it would be Terraria. But there are many good options.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Haven't seen these mentioned, Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters by Jump Over the Age are incredible games, beautiful artistically and really great world building

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Undertale. It was the best game I've ever played and I can never play it again. This game lives rent free in my head, in my fanworks, in the music I listen to and make. It's a game that combines technology and art.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Undertale. I was blown away by the soundtrack and the cleverness of it all. The twist was good too, but I hated the total completion grind a bit. But it is optional.

Crypt of the Necrodancer. Again, blown away by the soundtrack and how confidently it pulled off the idea of a rogue-like rhythm game.

Insurgency: Sandstorm. This might be stretching the concept of "indie" a bit, but its predecessor was definitely an indie game. This is an excellent arcade/realistic FPS shooter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

+1 for Insurgency. It's more "mid shelf" than "indie", but either way it's an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.

I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they're not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they're in. No one ever yells "Allah akbar" or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Battle Brothers: Battle Brothers is a turn based tactical RPG which has you leading a mercenary company in a gritty, low-power, medieval fantasy world. You decide where to go, whom to hire or to fight, what contracts to take and how to train and equip your men in a procedurally generated open world campaign. The Godfather of Squad-Management-Games!

Songs of Conquest: If you like Turn-Based-Strategy and know HoMM3, you will love this game! Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy game inspired by 90s classics. Lead powerful magicians called Wielders and venture to lands unknown. Wage battle against armies that dare oppose you and hunt for powerful artifacts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Hollow Knight

Hyperlight Drifter

Ori series

Dead Cells

Banner Saga series

Into the Breach

Bastion

Monument Valley

Child of Light

Gris

Limbo

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

OMORI is incredible. The gameplay is okay (typical JRPG stuff), the music is okay (I've heard better in other games), but the storytelling is some of the best in all of video games, up there with Silent Hill 2 and 3.

The Binding of Isaac is an incredibly addicting game. It's basically rougelike 2D Zelda dungeons, and upgrades stack on top of each other. It's the game that I have the most hours in on Steam (specifically the much better-programmed remake, Rebirth). The DLC is great as well, adding a ton of content. Its replayability is damn near unmatched.

Super Meat Boy is just a really fun, fast paced 2D platformer, that is challenging, but fair. The controls are some of the best of any 2D platformer out there, beating out both Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island IMO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Universal Paperclip

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