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.

  • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

    You play as a poverty-level janitor at a bustling space port. Scrounge by while longing for a better life, seeing wonderous things that are beyond your class/wage level to experience! It sounds depressing, but this is a very charming game.

    Smushi Come Home

    Cozy 3D platformer with no combat and tons of chill little dudes to talk to and help out.

    PictoQuest

    Nonogram RPG. The story is nonexistent and the dialogue is laughably bad, but this is one of the better picross games I’ve played because the puzzles do actually look like stuff, and the completed puzzles even have animation! Plus the added elememt of combat gives puzzle solving a fresh twist.

  • marxismtomorrow@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Gunz: The Duel is planning a comeback some time this year; tl;dr extremely niche 2005 korean team/solo shooter famous for the playerbase essentially creating a hyper-mobile fighting game but with guns out of the incredibly glitchy but consistently glitchy movement and animation system. If you’ve never played it it has a huge skill barrier to entry (that I’m sure will be tutorialized in this modern reboot) but is incredibly fun and satisfying with a huge skill ceiling.

    • Katana314@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Tricky technicality. I knew of the old game, but did not know someone was planning a remake.

    • Feyd@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Echo point Nova is great. Like what I imagined future FPS would games would be in 2010 before they all just became military sims

      • forestbeasts@pawb.socialEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Ooooh this looks fun as hell. I saw “released 2024” and expected online-only PvP nonsense, but no, it’s singleplayer + coop? and the movement looks SO GOOD.

        And it has a demo! This recent trend of games having demos is pretty awesome. Would be nice if the store page didn’t hide it in the sidebar, though. Wonder why it did that (I saw reference to a demo in the reviews and assumed the demo had been delisted at first).

        – Frost

  • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Reassembly, a fantastic and beautiful simple shipbuilder with a great modding scene. My go-to game when I’m high and just want to chill with some pretty particle explosions…

    (should we be upvoting the games we haven’t heard of? Or just downvote only?)

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I liked that game until I realized that the enemies were just spawning random attacks rather than playing against a peer level opponent, which meant there wasn’t any strategy involved in taking the enemy positions. It’s just whack a mole on the attacks on you while you take their bases (also defended by random fleet spawns).

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        That’s a fair criticism - there’s mods out there that improve the AI situation, but I don’t know of one that really changes the fundamental nature of the gameplay eventually becoming progressively moving through the map.

        I have longed for years for the devs to revist the game and add something like a campaign or story mode - or to make it more focused on survival and exploration. Pretty much a total overhaul I realize, but still I dream…

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Yeah, the game was exactly what I wanted prior to realizing how the enemy AI worked, but then it just took all the wind out of my sails and I didn’t even want to scale up to overwhelm that increasing resistance. That momentum is what I love about strategy games, where at some point you get over the hump and things get easier because you’re strategically dismantling your opponent’s war machine. They should obviously push back, which then becomes a part of your strategy, where to defend to prevent a halt to that momentum as much as where to attack to continue building it.

    • Janx@piefed.socialEnglish
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      3 months ago

      I would humbly suggest you upvote quality games you’re interested in. I’m sure I could go find a dozen AI asset-flip games no one’s ever heard of, but that doesn’t mean they are worth sharing!

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    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

    • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Take pride in the fact that this good game is well-loved, and is in my top three. It needs to be at the bottom of this list though.

      • Lydia_K@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        3 months ago

        It is such a good game, and I figured it would be fairly well known, but it needed to be here for those who have not heard of it.

      • Lydia_K@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        3 months ago

        I knew it would be way more well known, but I had to include it for those who have not heard of it.