If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.
Wouldn't "upvote if you have never heard of it" accomplish the same thing?
I guess it would depend on people reading and following the instructions, instead of just upvoting games they like. Maybe that's a bit much to ask. :P
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.
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.
Copy Kitty: https://store.steampowered.com/app/349250/Copy_Kitty/ has a demo
Fun elimination platformer. If you wish Kirby did more with the power mixing from Kirby 64, you'll probably like it.
Astalon: Tears of the Earth. Really fun 8-bit roguelite metroidvania where you swap between characters to access different parts of the dungeon.
Hex based rouge like deck builder. If we're taking indy gems, this one's probably a nice Amethyst. Not quite the most polished (the game kind of just throws you in without much of a tutorial and the story's pretty bare bones), but overall a solid B. If Slay the Spire and Into the Breach are your jams it'll be right up your alley.
RTS. Kind of reminds me of the ground comabt from Star Wars Empire at War crossed with Starship Troopers. Command a squad of space marines tasked with battling an overwhelming alien horde. Pretty fun campaign (if a bit of a predictable story), plus an endless mode. Not exceedingly difficult, but definitely challenging enough to make you think tactically and keep you on your strategic toes. Somewhat limited replayability makes the sticker price hard to recommend (unless your bread and butter is RTS), but it regularly goes on sale for less than $5, which it is absolutely worth!
Rabbit and Steel - Cross between a bullet hell and roguelite with raid style gameplay. Requires very close co-ordination with your team to survive (up to 4 player co-op). Punishing but rewarding.
D-Day Normandy is a Quake 2 total conversion mod that is a standalone game. Our website is currently reduced to a forum, but we hope to get that back on track soon. The admin is currently unavailable... Anyways, WW2 FPS from around 2000. Class-based, objective or fraglimit (or both in some maps). Runs on everything these days. We have a couple servers worldwide, more info on ddaydev.com.
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.
Hidden and Dangerous
The original was fantastic and v2 built on that. Fantastic 3rd person WW2 tactical shooter. Haven't seen anything like it in over 20 years since.
Clanfolk, a (very alpha and also very playable) game that draws clear inspiration from Rimworld, but has a kind of tech progression that feels spiritually similar to bootstrapping a factory in Factorio, while being set in the Scottish Highlands.
Out of Space a cozy co-op game similar to Overcooked but less chaotic.
Spin Rhythm XD is a highly enjoyable rhythm game where you spin a wheel with two colors and match them with the beats on the game's rhythm track.
Here's a description from Steam:
Enter the Rhythm Dimension. A homage to classic arcade rhythm games (Guitar Hero, DDR), with a modern aesthetic and soundtrack. Match colours and beats, spin, tap, flick and flow through the juiciest beats in the universe. Supports multiple control styles including MIDI DJ gear on Steam!
Edit: at the time of writing this, I didn't realize that this game had 3.5K reviews on Steam, but literally nobody I asked knew about the game, so I guess it kinda counts.
Iron Lung. Everyone is gone. Every star, every planet and every moon. The only people left are those who were on spaceships and stations. With one exception: A moon is found, glowing in the light of a star that doesn’t exist and filled with an ocean of blood. Desperate for answers, the new makeshift government sends prisoners in submarines deep into this ocean with a simple task: make it to a hand full of coordinates, take the pictures and make it out alive. Did I mention it’s an ocean of human blood?
This game fucked me up that one night I played it alone. And no, it won’t take you longer. The dev literally says so in the description. About an hour. But it’s cheap and takes you on a crazy ride. By David Szymanski, the mad genius behind Dusk.
It is a game about building functional computer by combining logic gates. Game arranged in series of small puzzles to make it digestible for people without electric engineering degree like me. You slowly build new components, so you can use them later as higher level abstraction until you get to the point of having to program your own computer to solve further puzzles. If you curious how computers work, this game is a gem.
Globulation2 brings a new type of gameplay to RTS games. The player chooses the number of units to assign to various tasks, and the units do their best to satisfy the requests. This allows players to manage more units and focus on strategy rather than on micro-management.
It's actually quite old and has gone through stretches of inactivity, but appears to be kept in working order in its git repo, and recently has been getting maintenance patches.
Severed Steel is a single-player FPS featuring a fluid stunt system, destructible voxel environments, loads of bullet time, and a unique one-armed protagonist. It's you, your trigger finger, and a steel-toed boot against a superstructure full of bad guys. Chain together wall runs, dives, flips, and slides to take every last enemy down.
Don't know about broad appeal, but Corn Kidz 64.
Requires a controller, looks like an N64 title, and controls like one as well. Isn't as long as some games, but it's long enough that I got hours out of it before finishing. Heard of it from someone on Lemmy a long time ago.
Has 1140 Steam reviews, so I figured it's just barely above the 1000 reviews.
Martha Is Dead is a grim psychological triller about twin sisters, set in Italy at the end of WW2. It's not about war, however. This game left me with deep emotions no other game could do. Heed the warnings given by authors, though. It may come too disturbing to some people.
Ignore that heretical work of The Guild 2/3 et co. Only the ORIGINAL is truly worthy.
It's basically capitalism as a game, but for the Genesis/Mega Drive era it was a surprisingly fun game. When I was a kid I played this before I even knew what McDonalds was, and many people I know thought I was crazy when I talked about a game I played where you collected the Golden Arches while being guided by Ronald McDonald on an environmental quest.
NandGame is a browser puzzle game, where you start of by building basic logic gates from relays and progress from there all the way trough processor design to compiling high-level languages. It does not hold your hand too much, but the invidual puzzles progress so incrementally, it feels almost magical how easily you learn to build computers and compilers.
Hoplite (puzzley turn-based mobile roguelike). Here's a review I found: https://toucharcade.com/2014/01/08/hoplite-review/
I don't like mobile games, but this one is really elegant. It respects you as a customer, unlike a lot of mobile games.
Haven't played in a while, but I really enjoyed it a few years ago.
Well of Souls was a little primordial mmorpg I got in a 100 games CD a while back. I used to have tons of fun making a custom character from sprites and seeing how far I could get. When I played it never felt mmo ish as it was already pretty empty.
A small and simple semi-idle frog collecting game where you simply collect rare frogs and let them generate buckaroos so you can collect rarer frogs. There's a free demo that got me hooked to occasionally logging on and collecting more frogs.
Golf Club Nostalgia(917 Reviews)
This is a game that isn't here for the game play. I think if you are paying at all attention to the boring dystopia, or climate collapse communities then this will hit in a way that is hard to define.
Its a golf game. Simple, could be played on a phone really, but you have to have the sound on for this one.
You are a member of the elite refugees who have fled to Mars and only return back to Earth to use the husk of a planet for a round of golf. And your companion is a lone radio broadcast from Mars of what they have left, which is stories and the rare music that was saved.
The combination of overwhelmingly good world building and consistent vibe even down to the level names and journal entries hits like a train and made me cry at least a couple times.
It made me feel nostalgiac for a world that has not yet come to pass and is a great on sale pick.
Veloren
Veloren is an action-adventure role-playing game set in a vast fantasy world.
We Who Are About To Die
https://store.steampowered.com/app/973230/We_Who_Are_About_To_Die/
Physics based Gladiator roguelike. Work your way up, start fighting with boards dressed in rags in city crossroads for the amusement of peasants, and end a God of Blood fighting in gold in the Coliseum!
Or die along the way. You'll die a lot along the way :)
Cleaning the System is a platformer where you jump through levels as some kind of pogo stick. The movement is really fun and if you bounce well you can build up a lot of momentum, which lends itself to speedrunning.
There is also a free version of it from the GMTK game jam where it placed very well
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