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Elevator7009 @lemmy.zip

What is your favorite indie game?

Given the big swathe of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.

198 comments

  • Hollow Knight

    I love it so much that I can't finish it, I always stop when I'm about to fight the final boss. I just don't want it to end.

    Maybe when Silksong came out I finish it once and for all.

    • Hollow Knight isn't exactly over when you finish the story. There are more flights, especially Godhome. If you can beat all that you're an incredible player.

      You probably know this but just wanted to make sure you're not unintentionally missing out.

  • For me, FTL: Faster than Light still hasn't been topped. Hades II might get there, though. Disco Elysium, Ikaruga, and Papers, Please are also high on the list.

  • Pushing the definition but I started when it was still in beta... Minecraft has gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours put into it.

    Terarria and Starbound are both really good and scratch that same itch as Minecraft. Core Keeper is another one that has some of that feel and I ended up really enjoying.

    Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned but Cave Story was made by one guy doing everything... and everything in it is immaculate. It's still free for the original version as well.

    Stardew Valley is awesome and restarted a genre.

    Crypt of the Necrodancer is awesome, and well worth checking out... also goes on sale really cheap.

    Pacific Drive is a fun one to check out. If you're from the PNW, it will hit even more.

    Really enjoyed Stray. Worth grabbing on a sale.

    OwlBoy was a delightful game with a lot of character.

    Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was a really nice return to form if you like IgaVanias.

    If you like roguelites then you owe it to yourself to check out Enter the Gungeon (isometric) as well as RoboQuest (fps).

    If you want a game that's beautiful, with emergent story and is hard af... definitely check out Rain World.

    Is Black Mesa still considered indie? It's how I would recommend anyone play Half-Life 1 these days.

    Rusty's Retirement... isn't so much a game.. sorta.. but yeah.. check that out.

  • Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don't find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!

    Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.

    Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers' solidarity and union struggle type of plot.

    Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.

    Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.

    Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.

    Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.

    Dwarf Fortress. It's Dwarf Fortress.

    WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot

    Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.

    Descenders. Crazy fun downhill bicycling game.

  • I urge anyone who has not played CrossCode to give it a try. I randomly played it during the pandemic, and I've since not been able to enjoy gaming the way I did it before. For me, it was very close to being a 10/10.

  • One game I love that hasn't been mentioned yet is Subnautica. The only survival crafting game I ever finished. The story telling and athmosphere are unmatched.

  • Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.

    Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.

    Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I've ever played, but to be fair, it wasn't exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn't really take off either.

    There are also a handful of indie games that I've played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what's there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.

    EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker's Toolkit's game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They're very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.

    • Vagante's negative reviews criticize its too-numerous insta-death traps. What would your reply be to that?

      I think you might love Noita!

      • I would say it's a game that requires you to play tactically rather than rushing through it. Especially early game, the traps are very reminiscent of Spelunky, and it's clear where a lot of their inspiration came from, but Vagante gives you even more mechanics to deal with traps, like magic rings that let you go through walls and floors, for instance, but you won't necessarily find them every run. Noita has caught my attention here and there, but I just never made time to try it.

  • Here are the ones that don't get uninstalled from my potato box:

    • Sable
    • Ion Fury
    • Torchlight
    • Ziggurat
    • Baba Is You
    • Edritch
    • Fez
    • Plunge
    • Valley
    • Into The Breach
    • Journey

    (Disclaimer: some are very old, some may not be indie, eh, I did my best.)

    • With the amount of content the main game of Baba Is You comes with, alongside the level editor and custom modded level packs people have made for it, would 100% recommend it.

  • I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:

    • Autonauts and Autonauts Vs Piratebots - Cute automation games
    • Spelunky - Elegantly simple and well executed platformer
    • BPM: Bullets Per Minute - Rhythm FPS. Others have tried. None I have found have been as good.
    • Immortal Redneck - FPS roguelite
    • Ziggurat - FPS Roguelite
    • Receiver II - Unique FPS roguelike. Every part of everything that moves is simulated. The hammer on your gun hits a firing pin which hits the primer on the cartridge. You can get stovepipes, misfires, double feeds, etc. You don't reload by hitting 'reload' but go through the full manual of arms in a shooter where the tolerances for failure are fairly slim.
    • Valley - running game. The feeling of letting a hill propel your running to otherwise impossible speeds, bottled. Nice little story too.
    • Dredge - Lovecraftian fishing game.
    • Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician simulator. Build a network to allow communication between computers in an underground society with unspeakable horrors occasionally destroying your mind/body.
    • Opus Magnum - Programming puzzles
    • Vagante - roguelike with tight tolerances
    • Ruiner - Cyberpunk slash n dash with a soundtrack half by Sidewalks and Skeletons. Very fun.
    • Tails Noir - Detective story. Normally find the anthro thing a bit tiresome but this was pretty good. Well written.
    • Elderborn - First person brawler
    • Webbed - be a peacock spider. Rescue your lady spider. Help insects. Fight a bird. Dance.
    • A Story About My Uncle - Movement game. Jump, dash, grapnel. Simple and elegant.
    • Tormentor X Punisher - Top down twin stick shooter. Everything dies in one hit. All the enemies, and you.
    • Tin Can - Survival game in which you try to keep up an escape pod long enough to be rescued, which is hard when it seems to have been made by the lowest bidder's lowest bidding subcontractor and maintained with all the loving care of a convenience store bathroom.

  • Slice & Dice is the best dice-building roguelite ever and has a free demo that is only content-limited and allows you to already play an infinite amount of runs. I literally played the demo as much as a paid game for a month until I bit down—so hard that, once, when I had my phone in hand and intended to take a shower, I ended up crouching on the bathroom floor furthering a run for an hour before finally pausing to return to the real world.

    Clone Drone in the Danger Zone offers awesome online co-op. Noita's world is just endless (people are still discovering new spell permutations years later). I will never turn down someone's offer or request to watch a run of FTL: Faster Than Light.

    The AAA world is not impressive to me at all, and if anything gets deprioritized in my book; graphics or a third-person view do not a fantastic game make.

  • Slime Rancher, though most of my library is indie so I could list like ten others.

    I won’t list out the “big” famous ones since those get covered anyway (Stardew, Undertale etc.)

    There are plenty I love that have a little less polish but charm their way through, like Calico and Yonder. I also just played through Tunic and quite enjoyed it.

    A solid indie publisher is Reddeer games - about half my switch titles are by them. Finji is another.

  • Monster sanctuary (turn based monster collector) and Roboquest (arena shooter) were a couple from recent years that stood out to me

    For older games nethack and dwarf fortress are great if you can look past the graphics

    • Monster Sanctuary was so good. I tried it when I had Game Pass, and I loved it so much I bought it outright for Xbox, and then again on Steam. Also got the hardcover monster journal.

      Aethermancer, made by the same folks, is looking really good from their demo. Clearly lots of inspiration from Monster Sanctuary but very much its own sort of game

  • Crumble A speedrunning platforming game, where you play as a blob with a tongue. Pleasant experience to play through while learning, while absolutely balls to the walls insane when actually speedrunning, actually 100% achieved this

    Cyberpulse Twin-stick arcade neo style virus slamming game. Great control precision, challenging and colourful. The right thumbstick pressing might take a bit of getting used to.

    Pseudoregalia Such a fun old school platformer. Big bunny girl MC for some reason but SUPER FUN and satisfying movement mechanics and the world is built well enough for the mechanics. A few hour long game, unless you look everything up.

    Actually going to put some indie demos here I played this weekend, that I really enjoyed: Half-Sword Physics based medieval combat game. Reminds me of Exanima but instead of 2.5D, you can play Half-sword in 3rd or 1st person, which is really fun. Can have full gore or turn the gore completely off.

    Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon First person (potentially later also 3rd person) RPG, very much in the vein of Elder Scrolls or Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Really enjoyed the demo, it takes place on the tutorial island/dungeon. Going to buy the full version when it releases, because there seems to be a save wipe for 1.0.

    Bloodthief Reminds me of Neon White and Ultrakill having an even more indie baby. Seemed to be pretty simple and good speedrunning platforming fun.

    Shape of Dreams 2.5D action RPG roguelike. Very pretty and gameplay feels good. Didn't play it quite enough yet, only thing I kinda disliked was the amount of cooldowns on abilities.

    9Kings Small town defense game with waves of enemies led by other kings attacking your kingdom. Really enjoyed this one. Demo isn't too difficult, even when I am really bad with these type of games.

    RKGK (RAKUGAKI) 3rd person platforming game, where you bring some colour to the world with your graffiti. Very fun movement and popping colours. The dialogue isn't necessarily for me but the gameplay felt really fun.

    Unbeatable Colourful rhythm adventure game, style is great and soundtrack slaps.

  • I guess either Shovel Knight or Hades

    ya know what, I'mma round it out as a Top 5, so let's throw in Bastion, Bloodstained, and Dust: An Elysian Tail as well.

  • Top of my list right now is Vintage Story! It's like a serious version of Minecraft, with more focus on realism.

198 comments