With the Steam sale running, this seems like a good time to try this thread again. We don’t often use the downvote button much in Lemmy, but the idea is this: Do your best to present game suggestions that no one has heard of before. If, in reading other people’s suggestions, you spot one that you’re familiar with, then put a downvote on it. Ideally, if the game is past a year old, it may have a discounted price during the Steam sale, and others will be able to check it out.
I’ve made this thread once before and it generated some good suggestions, but the rate of indie publishing on Steam has only accelerated with time, so it seems to be worth trying again.
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Plain Sight - These flying ninja robots fight each other in small maps you can kind of orbit around. Fast paced and fun.
Hellkind free short artsy horror themed top down walking sim
Beyond All Reason is an RTS inspired by Total Annihilation.
Hundreds of units, 2 factions (+1 WIP), vehicles, bots, sea, air, amphibious units, terrain matters a lot
It’s not on Steam yet, but it’s free & open source. (It’s on Flathub)
Mega Knockdown a turn-based fighting game that successfully adapts the best part of fighting games: throwing rock four times in a row because you’ve gotten in their head well enough to know they’re gonna throw scissors four times in a row.
(note the above is an old clip, the placeholder frames have since been filled in)
Looks like a slower-paced YOMI
Sword of the Necromancer : Resurrection.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2782880/Sword_of_the_Necromancer_Resurrection/
Best played co-op. Wonderful story with a great ending. Truly beautiful and solid game play. Short 12hr game to 100% complete.
Only like 150 reviews.
I thought of another one. This is an odd one, because I think the dev is actually quite well known: it’s Yahtzee Croshaw, formerly of Zero Punctuation and now of Fully Ramblomatic. He’s made a number of games over the years, but one that almost nobody ever mentions anymore is Poacher. (Note: link is to Archive.org rather than Steam; I don’t think the game is available on Steam.) I didn’t actually beat this one, as it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as it goes on, but the basic controls and whatnot are very nice, and the humor is great. Here’s Wot Rock, Paper, Shotgun Thought about it, since it’s a bit of a faff to actually install at this point and Archive doesn’t offer reviews and whatnot.
Not For Broadcast. Take control of editing live news (i.e. managing the broadcast) while withstanding your unscheduled rapid promotion from janitor, certainly one of the casts of characters of all time, and the devs’ great Britishness (and humor!). And maybe it’ll get political, who knows.
Spoiler
It does.
You’ll eventually find yourself in something a little similar to “Papers, Please”.It could be interpreted as anti-communist but that’s not how I take it.
There’s a ton of very impactful choices, both in the visual novel sections and the advertised FMV sections. Devs botched the ending and first DLC but I highly recommend the rest of it, especially the other DLC.
Not nearly as niche as the other responses but I love this game.
Very unique game
Abiotic Factor is a game i hear way too little about despite it beeing one of the best survival crafting games i ever played. If valheim and Halflife had a baby it would be this.
Very good in Singleplayer but amazing in Multiplayer.
Edit: Oof this is more known than i realized.
Enshrouded
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203620/Enshrouded/I blindly pirated this for a completely unremembered reason. I blew thru 30 hours before getting a chance to buy it. Im addicted to it.
Its early access, but it’s releasing in October, so its pretty much finished. Highly recommended if you like valheim and zelda and building things and lots of fighting (but no base raids thankfully)
Monday night combat.
edit
I should have read the instructions. Though Monday night combat is still a fantastic and forgotten or unheard of game, its from a bygone era and probably unplayable in any state. Stop killing games.
As for steam games on sale that may not have hit the general water cooler talk - Kenshi.
If you never played it, it’s 60% off now and worth every penny.
A game that holds a fantastically emotional spot in my heart is Jason Oda’s CONTINUE?9876543210. It has a mixed rating by the general public, but holds the very core of my faith.
At the start, a video game character dies, and is scheduled for deletion. Eventually, the garbage collector that filters through the computer’s RAM, deleting levels that have served their purpose, characters of memory damage and mangled speech, and reflections on what it it is to be dying, all deleted. The goal of the game is to find peace in the milliseconds of afterlife, however that happens.
we all fear deletion
those who were deleted
i took with me
their lightning, their prayerhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/263340/Continue9876543210/
(yes! I got a downvote! Someone else knows this game!)
Hyperrogue
Elder Scrolls Skyrim, really niche indie game. Just kidding!
Nikoderiko - really fun platformer that’s kind of a mix of Donkey Kong and Crash. Currently on sale on gog (linked) and steam
Caves of quid
Crosscode.
Fantastic RPG with an amazing story.