Fantastic titles made by people in their bedrooms.
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Stardew Valley by a long shot.
Hollow Knight is up there too.
Don’t forget minecraft was originally just one guy. 15ish years ago. In Java.
Now over 600 people work on it.
I recently bought stardew valley and its fun but the farming grind feels kinda forced, no? I feel like I need to pay attention to not loose myself in the game which defeats the purpose.
What is your experience there?
I used to find it kinda stressful until i realised there was no time limit to the game like the usual harvest moons so once I realised that, I never find myself rushing around or overextending my ability to farm to grind more and just focused on what I was enjoying in the game which was a bit of everything.
Can relate. It’s the same for me but I have to constantly remind myself of the fact which is why I cant relax, sadly.
There is sort of a time limit though, you get your “review” at the end of the second year (at which point no new events happen). Also getting things planted in time for when the seasons change etc is kind of time-limiting.
But that’s all detail, it’s great that people can enjoy it without time pressures!
Really? That sucks I’m sure I’m on year 3 and I’ve had events happen
Were they things that don’t usually happen in years 1 and 2? I guess they could just be stuff that was added since I last played!
I only really played early on, not dabbled with it properly in years but I do remember things happening. It’s not like I could only get things to happen in the first two years in game
You can also get a new “review” whenever you want after that.
Well that’s probably a good thing for playing casually. I think end of year 2 is the earliest though, so that’s kind of a “soft” deadline.
The grind is fun for me, but once you get through a few seasons there’s also so much time to explore and talk to the villagers
Got it. Thanks for chiming in.
I can imagine it gets better but the grind is kind of not for me. The mining and farming grind in minecraft I understand and the grind in factorio as well. Maybe its heightened due to the saving cycle that seems to want you to keep going.
I usually put off doing too much farming until I have a decent sprinkler setup.
There are ways to play (besides mods) where you barely have to grow crops. Unless you’re trying for all the achievements there’s not really a wrong way or a time limit to play.
For me the game only became fun when I started playing with the wife, we split up tasks and got a lot more done and was much funner
Neat, thanks for the info.
FTL and to a lesser extent their second game Into The Breach.
RNG heavy strategy games with lots of micromanaging.
I loved both FTL and Into The Breach but I think I preferred the latter. What makes you like FTL more? (not arguing, just interested)
I had a harder time getting good at and staying interested in ITB. I still really enjoy a playthrough every now and then.
With FTL I guess it just feels more replayable and “on edge” to me. There is just something special about ftl runs, be it overpowered, under powered. There are so many ships, weapons, systems, and crew combinations that no run really feels the same.
The same could be said about ITB and their different mech teams but I guess it just doesn’t have the same feel. ITB feels like I’m selling my services to big corporations with saving people as an after note. FTL feels like a suicide mission for the fate of the galaxy and I think that feeling is what really makes me come back to FTL.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing, I don’t really disagree with any of your points. Maybe I just liked the style of ITB more…I do love isometric tactics games
FTL is the modern Oregon trail in space. It’s just so good.
Personally one of the aspects I enjoy a lot in FTL is managing my power levels mid-fight (Do I need my oxygen powered right now? I could probably turn it off until the fight is over…) I don’t know if any other game that has you shuffling around power like that.
Oh yeah I forgot about that!
I redownload ITB after this thread and have been playing it. I might bust out FTL next because I apparently forgot how to play it lol
No other game has had the impact on my way of thinking more than Outer Wilds.
Came here to say Outer Wilds. That game is a masterpiece and I encourage anyone and everyone to try it. Only two things I’ll say are this: The less you know about it going in, the better the experience. The DLC is also worth it.
It’s one of those I downloaded, played 10 minutes of, and then got distracted by something else. I’ve done a good job avoiding spoilers, I’ll check it out next.
That’s actually very ironic, the game needs about half an hour to get you hooked and yet so many people quit it beforehand. You’ll understand what I mean when you play it
Interestingly enough, I did the same thing. When it launched, I was big into piracy and had a shitty job to pay for games with. Played until I could fly the ship, flew into the sky, then promptly lost control of my ship and didn’t touch it again for at least half a decade. So glad I bought it and played it without spoilers!
The less you know about it going in, the better the experience.
This includes the knowledge that it’s good. You should forget that people praise it everywhere because that has a potential of ruining the experience. It did for me, somehow.
Came here super late to ask: how? I played it and after discovering most of the things in game I couldn’t continue without guides (not good with puzzle games). I also don’t get attached to characters that can’t move with a few lines of dialog (no I’m not a psychopath, OneShot’s endings always give me mixed emotions for a few days). I’m not looking to argue I just want an answer
Slay the Spire. I’ve probably put more hours into this game than any other in my life.
From there, I guess all the usual picks. Hades, Hollow Knight, Braid, Fez, Dead Cells, Celeste
FTL - Faster Than Light
Dead Cells
Factorio. Help I got 4k hours and I still get cravings.
Honorable mentions.
Rimworld, Dyson sphere program, Minecraft (before it became microcrap)
I think we‘re the same person! :D
Jokes aside, I wholeheartedly agree. 500 hrs in factorio but rw and dsp are awesome. Mc used to be. I like mineclone though.
Hit me up if you wanna play something together some time.
Closing to 6k. There is just infinite replayabillity. Then you add mods, and friends.
Minecraft. I know it’s a big company now or whatever, but back when it was just Notch, it was still completely captivating.
Also, Stardew Valley!
Dead Cells
Terraria
Hollow Knight
Risk of Rain (both 1 and 2)
Hades
Factorio
Balatro (my newest addiction)
Balatro but not Slay the Spire?
I’m too dumb for StS, Balatro hits that sweet spot in difficulty for me
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I’m 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I’m pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Playing on the gold stake, I think I don’t make it past the first ante like 80% of the time. I might be too greedy or just bad at the game, but in StS I can make a decent run on ascension 20 at a much higher rate.
You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?
Finding two of those hands with a smaller hand and fewer discards is much harder. I could be miscalculating odds for sure though.
Slay the Spire but no Monster Train?
Slay the Spire is the gold standard for me, at least. I haven’t played Monster Train – it doesn’t look that appealing to me, but I’ve heard good things.
It’s very similar in some ways in the surface, but pretty different in essence. I like both. STS is more hardcore and “strict” and choices matter more, MT is more chill, relying on a single good combo usually, but with very high ceiling for broken fun things. I prefer MT more to unwind.
Hades was actually made by a reasonably large team in an actual office setting. NoClip documented the entire development of the game on YouTube.
Supergiant might not be 3 dudes in an apartment, but it’s still an indie studio. They do put an impressive amount of effort into their games though, I agree on that
Uh… I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another… oh well… :)
Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it’s an exploration game, but what you’re exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.
Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that “huh?” factor where right until the end you’re not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?
Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.
Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).
Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you’re a robotic loader than can put down dots. That’s all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You’re attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.
Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you’re the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you’re up against and that all the corpses stay. It’s not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.
Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It’s 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You’re an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the “freaky alien attack” recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?
Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you’re digging underground for metal and for “lumen.” To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.
Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.
Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You’re a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the “SCP” universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won’t spread again.
Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you’re bording and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn’t grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.
Space Run - 2D base building. You’re a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don’t do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.
Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you’re just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species “gift” to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.
man.
i’m not saying you didn’t run into quality posts on reddit, but this is the kind of post i see way more often here and it makes these spaces way more enjoyable.
nice work, definitely going to try a few of these out!
That’s just anecdotal. Be careful as a lot of these answers are often written by bots / ads in disguised.
this is a great post. I do think the outer wilds description is a smidge spoilery. I know, people figure that out pretty quickly but it’s still a neat experience if going in blind
Rain world is up there with the best games of last decade.
Terraria is amazing.
Dwarf fortress is obligatory.
I really wanted to love rain world since it seemed right up my alley. I bounced off it not because of the difficulty, but I think because the character’s movement feels bad. You’re slow, can’t jump high, a lot of maneuvering is fiddly.
Maybe I’ll try it again at some point though, because the world they made is brilliant and has interesting emergent behaviors.
Did you mean rimworld?
Rain World is a sidescrolling platformer in which you play a small rodent who must survive on a planet of other life forms pelted with recurring lethally powerful downpours of rain. You must learn to control your creature (who moves with dynamic physics, along with all other creatures), and learn to interact with and hunt the various other creatures (who have varied and intelligent AI and are not necessarily hostile) in order to gain food to sustain you through the next rain cycle.
Through all of this you explore a large interconnected world of different areas that show a background lore of a world that previously inhabited intelligent industrial beings (who have vanished) and uncover the mysteries within and find others of your kind.
That was as succint as I could make it to show off the unique qualities of Rain World. Its visual style is beautiful, its gameplay has a moderate learning curve due to the physics, and the AI of the creatures are successful in creating a dynamic ecosystem wherein the player feels like they’re a small incidental piece of a world that has its own goals and behaviors that the player must learn to fit in with and work within.
Awesome! Thank you, I’ll check it out.
No
I guess it depends on your definition of indie some, but here are mine:
Guacamelee 1 & Guacamelee 2 - The humor is mixed but the gameplay is just so damn tight
Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don’t know anyone else who has played this game but it’s so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that’s kind of it’s own whole thing so I don’t think that counts.
edit: I can’t believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Oooh, MUDs! I used to play 1 or two, don’t even remember their name now…
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my “main” and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete “real world” feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that’s not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn’t sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it’s complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
If you like Recettear then you would like Moonlighter. It’s the same game but made a decade later.
Moonlighter
AND it’s 85% off as part of the spring sale. As a lover of Recettear this was an easy buy for me.
Ooooo good tip, thank you!
- Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.
-Will edit with more in a bit.
Balatro has taken that mantle for the moment (over a hundred hours in under two weeks). Other similar games would be Cobalt Core (finished with all characters, don’t feel the need to go back though) and… Monster Train (it’s okay, not as tight as the others).
I’m in love with balatro, but do you think it’s better than slay the spire? I think slay the spire just feels… More of a game than balatro I guess? Maybe I feel that way just because there’s not really a story set up against balatro, and slay the spire at least has you fight an entity that you feel good about.
I picked up Balatro because of this thread and I agree, it’s a great game and something a little fresh, but slay the spire is still probably the best.
I agree about the “more like a game” element. Baltoro feels more like playing cards than playing a video game. I think it’s cause I’m using the same odds/play styles as when I play real life card games.
StS doesn’t really have a story, but yes, it has characters instead; I don’t really mind either direction, Balatro’s fight-against-the-game is essentially the same thing.
They are different, and I do enjoy them both in their own ways. Balatro’s heavy focus on combinations (and regular stores) means decks can shape quite quickly into something very unique. It’s also more accessible as the games are shorter; StS can be an hour if successful, if not more. My comment is more that Balatro is newer and has at least satisfied the itch which - after being out for years - StS has perhaps not been able to do in such a way for a while.
Yeah, StS really ruined me for other deckbuilders, and I’m still chasing that high. Some pretty good ones have been Power Chord and Banners of Ruin. They’re both team-based games where cards are tied to certain characters, and I think that particular mechanic adds enough that it took me a while to crack the code on them.
Wildfrost is a really good one. It’s got a lot of different play styles and has a pretty big learning curve.
Also on android there is Pirate Outlaws. It feels like a slay the spire clone, but has a good amount of content and does enough different to be worth mentioning.
Not exactly the same cause it’s not a deck builder, but has a similar feel is dicey dungeons (both steam and android). It’s a lot simpler and luck is a larger factor, but it’s got a decent gameplay loop and being able to play on Android helped scratch that itch on the road.
I liked Wildfrost, but it didn’t have that much replay value after 30 or so hours, whereas I have 500+ in StS. They have updated it since I last played though, so maybe there’s a bit more to do now?
They’ve definitely added things to it over the year or so it’s been out. Not sure if enough to make it worth it for you. It’s also possible I’m just bad at it, as I haven’t beaten it (although only 12hrs on it).
It’s definitely a tough game. The only thing easy about it is taking your turn, missing something important, then dying.
Wildfrost mention, hell yeah
I’m not too into deckbuilders, so I played it just for that gorgeous presentation lol. The art style falls under an unusual category of “cute, but I’m pretty sure that the artist also draws naughty stuff on the side”
Terraria. My most played game on steam!
Dwarf Fortress.
Not just best indie game, but best game period.
If DF never existed, we would’ve missed out on so many amazing games it directly and indirectly inspired.
Still haven’t played it, seems like too much homework just to get started.
Try keeperRL, DF lite.
The Steam version makes 90% of the learning curve (learning the UI) disappear because it is so, so much better than the legacy version lol
The game itself is really rather straightforward and easy to figure out. It was always the presentation and layout of the UI and hotkeys that made it a challenge to actually start playing since you could know what you needed to do, but not know how to reach the command for it.
Dwarf Fortress is a very good game.
Outer Wilds, and its expansion, is one of the most innovative and interesting games I’ve played. Made by students!
Most games are great because they provide something unique or are polished to perfection, so it’s wild that they’ve made something that manages to be both their first attempt. Really looking forward to whatever they decide to do next.
