Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

I have been playing this game my entire life on/off, and have the most hours in, but I have never beaten it. I came close 1 fucking time, and I will forever remember the one dumb mistake I made that lost it for me just on the cusp of victory.

One day…

https://crawl.develz.org/

Bugsnax. It’s like Pokemon Snap/Legends Arceus, but the Pokemon are food items, like a sub-sandwich centipede or a lollipop dragonfly. You can feed them to people, and when you do, their body parts turn into the food they just ate. It’s great!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/674140/Bugsnax/

Escape Velocity and its open-source spiritual successor, Endless Sky.

Kenshi. Ive only ever seen 1 person mention it in the year I’ve been on Lemmy.

It’s like depressed RuneScape.

Shadowgate / Deja Vu / The Uninvited (NES)

Uniracers (SNES)

Custom Robo (GC)

Lost Kingdoms (GC)

Baiten Kaitos (GC)

Armadillo Run

Robot Alchemic Drive (R.A.D.)

The Saboteur

Kinetica - a racing game where the ‘vehicles’ are people in mechanical suits that make them look like sexy mecha, racing to old techno

Bloody Roar - a series of fighting games where you fight as people who can suddenly shift into other forms, some recognizable animals and some abstract, and with the ability in some arenas to kick people through walls or over ledges into new arenas

Forsaken - 3D hover vehicle battles

Tiny Tank - a game where you play as a sweary AI tank

Megaman Legends 1 and 2 - Megaman as a 3d adventure game with a storyline and characters

Gitaroo Man - a rhythm game I enjoyed, later imitated by some others

Shadow of the Colossus - more known but not cared for these days. A game in which there are only boss battles. A subtly told story. Part of the ICO universe.

Titan Souls - One boy, one bow, one arrow that can be magically recalled to the bow, and giant stone destroyers that he must conquer with nothing more. Kind of a 2D Shadow of the Colossus

BPM: Bullets Per Minute - everyone has the idea for a rhythm FPS. This is the only one that does a good job of it.

Receiver - a game in which you don’t just hit R to reload, but have to go through the full manual of arms, dropping the clip, holstering the weapon, loading each round into the clip, drawing the weapon, seating the clip, racking the round, checking the chamber to make sure it fed correctly, aiming, firing, clearing the jam, all while worrying about killer robots.

Valley - a movement game that has such an amazing feeling of freedom in its movement

Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician game

Rhythm Doctor.

• Brave Fencer Musashi
• Limbo
• ReCore
• The Way
• Inside
• Unravel
• Cat Quest
• Death Squared

Epistory and Nanotales

Both fantastic games with beautiful graphics and good for typing practice.

Enderal.

I’ll edit this later when I can post from my comp (mobile now) with the full pitch as promised:

Enderal

Basically an indie dev crew broke skyrim down to its most basic assets, then rebuilt a completely new game using them. AND IT’S SO FUCKING GOOD. Completely new lore / game universe (has nothing at all to do with elder scrolls, tamriel, etc), new voice acting, terrain, music, you name it.

Steers away from common story tropes to the point that there isn’t really an antagonist in the traditional sense - but it uses concepts, emotions, philosophies, etc as the driving force for the main story line and some of the larger quest chains.

This game is an absolute passion project by the devs, which is something we don’t see often now-a-days.

Note: link above is to the version that uses Skyrim SE’s assets (the 2016 re-release). If you have the original version of skyrim, use this link instead. If you own a different version of Skyrim, there might be a compatible version of Enderal here: https://sureai.net/games/enderal/

Fair warning: the children NPC voice acting is even worse than the kids in Skyrim. The TAI (toggle AI) command can shut them up without breaking them.

Fair warning 2: they redid combat. The OP shit in Skyrim, like the sneaky archer build, will get your ass beat to a pulp in Enderal. Make a save when you get to the point where you can spend some talent points, experiment with a few styles, and go from there.

Fair warning 3: It’s built on Skyrim’s assets, which means it has all of Skyrim’s problems. Step on a basket full of cabbage just right; get launched into low orbit. Quest items clipping through the floor. Bounty that refuses to go away. Shit like that. Save frequently, and don’t be afraid to use the command console to do things like magic in a lost item or force a broken quest to progress to the next stage.

I think I’d have to say La-Mulana.

Endless Sky According to wikipedia it is a space trading and combat simulation game. Its free and open source, has a lot of content (even more with plugins). You do missions to get the storyline forward and to get money, you can also mine asteroid, trade with other planets, attack other ships and plunder them. You discover new species and Outfits to make your space ship better, etc.

The Thief series. I LOVED the first one especially, Thief the Dark Project. Medieval (low magic fantasy?) stealth shooter. The more valuable you pick up directly translates to what you can buy as a load out for the next level so you’re encouraged to explore, though even the low level enemies can kick you ass so you have to be sneaky. Actually great stealth mechanics even for an old game. The world building is amazing, with it’s own lore, culture and slang. The plot of the games are also great.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a game I’ve played almost non-stop since about 2003. Web based and free, it’s based off of old text based games. But it’s fun. Really fun. And hilarious. The currency is meat. The classes are goofy. Saucerer? Disco bandit? Seal Clubber? A lot of games deal with things like power creep or inflation, or how the heck to get people to actually help pay for it. This game solves problems like these elegantly. The user base is fun and friendly and corporative, there’s always new stuff coming out to try, they do a holiday special every year, and all the pictures are crudely drawn stick figures.

Legend of Legaia. It’s a JRPG from the PS1 golden era, but it had a relatively small launch and basically zero marketing. It was completely overshadowed by other games like FFVII and Legend of Dragoon. It has a sort of cult classic following now. The story starts off as a fairly basic “world is awful, kid gets a magic weapon to beat the big evil thing” type of plot, but has a surprising amount of twists and turns.

The combat system is interesting, and hasn’t really been replicated since. You string together a series of small attacks, to make larger super combos.

Fair warning, the US release is significantly harder than the JP and EU versions. For some reason, the devs multiplied all the enemy stats by 1.25, and slashed their exp/gold drop rates by 50% for the US release. So you need to grind twice as long to be properly geared/leveled, and the grinding is 25% more difficult.