Favorite indie game?

[danzibr]

Now, what exactly qualifies as an indie game... I'll leave that up to the judgment of the poster.

Recently I've been playing quite a few indie games (and a few non-indie, but hey). In particular, I just started Hyper Light Drifter and I'm liking it.

Before that, beat Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight. I thought it was a respectable platformer. I'd like to play the rest of the series.

Before that, Undertale. Loved it.

Before that... I'm not exactly certain. I have several games in my Steam library (To the Moon, Space Pilgrim series, Artifact Adventure, EvilQuest, Out There Somewhere). Pretty sure they'd all be considered indie.

Of these, it's hard to choose a single favorite, given their varied genres, but it'd probably go to Undertale.

And you?

EDIT: Browsing Steam, I see Castle Crashers is classified as indie. Definitely a contender for 1st.

[Yora]

I'm quite a big fan of the Witcher games.

[Winthur]

Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok for being free, actually knowing how to do pixel art, and being absolutely gorgeous and engaging. It's a very good Quest of Glory successor and I will never stop mentioning it.

Aside from that, DoomRL.

[danzibr]

I'm quite a big fan of the Witcher games.

They're on my to-play list (along with Fable).

Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok for being free, actually knowing how to do pixel art, and being absolutely gorgeous and engaging. It's a very good Quest of Glory successor and I will never stop mentioning it.

Aside from that, DoomRL.

Thanks for the suggestion! Downloading now.

[Fri]

Renowned Explorer: International Society. The only game I ever 100-percented personally.

It got a bundle in steam with its thematic sibling, The Curious Expedition, which isn't bad but I just don't like as much as REIS. Check both out.

http://store.steampowered.com/bundle...ned_Explorers/

Go try it and kick Velociraptor-riding Charles Darwin on the nuts.

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Shigatari is a new hidden gem that should be much more popular. It's an FTL-style roguelike where you play as a wandering samurai trying to defeat the seven dojo master of the land. It got really distinctive visual that's 100% public domain ukiyo-e, and very interesting timing-based turn-based combat system that's unlike anything else, and honestly funny tongue-in-cheek writing. It's rare to have a writing like this, that's not trying too hard to be funny, but just let the absurdity of the situation take the course. Most people got frustrated trying to learn the combat system at first, but once it clicked, it becomes very intuitive and enjoyable.

It's kinda short, in the line that the amount of random dialogues and events isn't that much, but it's really cheap. With the amount of content and polish in the game, it's honestly a real bargain and asking more content is almost unfair. And since it's a randomized permadeath roguelike, the relative amount of content actually can serve another purpose. It let you map your build and journey specifically to get what you want and build the most powerful and bloodthirsty samurai ever, or get the demon-killing-sword, or run away from encounters and be a pacifist, etc, since there are characters, achievements, and endings to unlock.

Really, do check it.

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/486380/Shigatari/

[Lord Raziere]

Aside from Undertale, I'd say....Shantae Half Genie Hero if that counts. more difficult than the usual platformers I'm used to, the world is enjoyable and I like the humor it uses.

[Eldan]

Witcher is an indie game?

Anyway, Miasmata.

[Meijin]

Certainly Journey.

[Meijin]

It's emotionally powerful, gorgeous, cheap, award winning, and has no combat.

[Meijin]

And it has some unconventional non-western aesthetics which I like.

[Kaptin Keen]

The one indie title I've propably sunk the most hours into has to be FTL. Next, likely ADoM.

I like Banner Saga, and Bastion, and Don't Starve, and Frozen Synapse, and Gunpoint, and Heat Signature, and Inside, and Invisible Inc., and the Shadowrun games, and Sunless Sea, and Volume.

League of Legends honestly has to be considered an indie title.

Uniquely, I am left completely cold by Undertale.

[Silfir]

The most recent one that I completely fell in love with was A Hat in Time. An excellent fit for anyone who loves Shantae games in particular, since it's just as colorful and silly fun. Easily my favorite game of the year.

I haven't jumped into many other indies this year so far. I bought Pyre and played it a bunch before I put it down, and while it's undoubtedly top-drawer stuff (as expected from the studio), I'm not enjoying it as much as the predecessors. I get a little worn out by Visual-Novel-style storytelling, and I need to be really in love with the gameplay sequences that come between story bits to power through them - this is what I suspect is the reason why I only enjoy certain JRPGs.

A Hat in Time, on the other hand, is just not ever boring. Most of the complaints I've heard boil down to it being not hard enough or too short - to me that just means it's exactly the right difficulty for kids. Momodora: Reverie in the Moonlight, in turn, was too difficult for me.

This year was the first time I played Ori and the Blind Forest, and no mistake about that one, it's excellent, too. But not a recent release by any means.



Thanks for the Shigatari mention! It's on my radar now. So far I haven't played any games that cite being inspired by FTL that could match FTL itself, but there's fun stuff to be found in the "genre", if you can call it that. Renowned Explorers, for instance, was quite excellent. I should get back to it someday.

[Fri]

I like to believe that I'm actually pretty interested in the indie game scene, in the line of, I actively search for interesting indie games and used to actually dive through the **** pile that is steam greenlight to find interesting ones. I like to say to my friends that I'm the Spider Georg of Steam, where most people don't really browse steam to find new games and it's often mentioned to be one of steam's failure, that the front page/new release is completely cluttered and useless to actually find new games. Except for the outliers who actually check them one by one. That's me. I check steam's new release weekly.

So anyway, on somewhat related note, I have a steam curator group where I collect tangentially Film-Noir-themed games, and I can say that about 90% of them are indie games. You can check it if you're interested, or even follow it.

http://store.steampowered.com/curato...nd-Detectives/

And that reminds me of some other things I really like.

Gunpoint is really good. I didn't play it as much as my other favourite games, but it surprises me. The gameplay's nice, but what really surprised me was the writing, I thought it's just a plotless puzzle game, but it got actual (funny) story

http://store.steampowered.com/app/206190/Gunpoint

Diluvion is one of the game with best atmosphere I've ever played. The gameplay might have some problems (mostly weird submarine control), but it's still a really good game.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/446790/Diluvion/

Heart and slash is the randomized hack-and-slash lovechild between megaman legends and devil may cry that I never knew I needed, but I don't know how I ever lived without it before.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/326840/HeartSlash/

Luftrausers is, really weird. I don't know how or why I like it so much or how I spent more than 24 hours game time on it. Its literally just a gravity-based score-shooter with one stage, but it's the perfect "one-more-run" game for me that eventhough one run generally only last 5 minutes, I could spend the entire day playing it until my fingers literally is too hurt to hold the controller. But it's really cost too much, I generally tell people to wait until discount to buy it.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/233150/LUFTRAUSERS/

Westerado is a different kind of randomized game. You play as a cowboy that got his whole family murdered. The problem is, who murdered your family is randomized. Literally anyone on the street can be the murderer. So you do quests to find clues on who is the murderer (what they're wearing, what's their hair color, what's the hat they're wearing, etc.) You literally can accuse any single person on the street to be the murderer, and shoot them.

Besides that, it's a top down hat-based shooter. Why hat-based? Because people's hat is their dignity, and if you shoot them off their head, they surrender. Any person can shoot someone's torso and kill them, but only the best cowboy can just shoot your opponent's hat and leave them alive but embarassed (be sure to bring extra hat on you though, so if you got your hat got shot off, you can wear another one)

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Most of the games I play these days are Indie. Here's a few I enjoy the most:

Kerbal Space Program. Then again, I'm a huge engineering/physics nerd, so yea.

Stardew Valley. I'm sure you've probably heard of it. It's a lot of fun, and the modding community is active enough to keep things lively.

Torchlight 2. Like Diablo III, only better. And doesn't take itself seriously.

Factorio. Because Factorio.

FortressCraft Evolved. I like Minecraft, I like Factorio... is this really any surprise to anyone?

Autonauts. It's a cute little game that has a lot of focus on programming robots to do automation. Babby's First Robotics Programming.

[Triaxx]

Huh, last time I saw Fortresscraft Evolved it was pretty early on. Looks interesting now.

Mine's still Dwarf Fortress, though I'm also a huge fan of Rigs of Rods, which is...

It says it's a soft body physics simulator, but... most of my time was spent in the awesome fan made sports cars I'd never be able to afford, crashing them in terribly interesting ways, and then randomly toppling over cranes while trying to pick them up onto a semi to haul them to a pit on the map. Which doesn't sound exciting when I describe it, and yet... half the fun is breaking things with it and the other half trying to unbreak them. It has planes, and boats, and even trains for certain maps.

[The Glyphstone]

My favorite indie game of all time will always be the Exile series of RPGs, and their spiritual successors/remakes Avernum.

[Vitruviansquid]

With major publishers taking fewer and fewer risks, becoming more and more inbred as they chase each other's trends, I'm having trouble thinking of game genres where an indie game isn't my favorite.

But my favorite game ever is Dungeon Crawl, and I'm not sure if open-source might count as indie. Certainly no publisher is involved, but neither can we say there's an indie studio working on it.

[Kaptin Keen]

Oh that reminds me: Arcanum (of steamworks and magic obscura, if I recall correctly) is an absolutely brilliant game wrapped in graphics of dull greys and browns.

Another such game is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Which is essentially unplayable without the unofficial patch.

[GloatingSwine]

Witcher is an indie game?

In that the publisher and developer are the same company. But CD Projekt is rather too big a company to usually fit the "indie" label.



Anyway, I don't really do "favourite X", but a nice little indie that's come out recently that you could try is Bomber Crew.

You command a world war 2 bomber crew running missions bombing the hun for freedom, each mission sees you take off, fly to and bomb a target with a variety of bombs, fight off fighters, dodge flak and leg it home for tea and medals, snapping a recon photo or two along the way if you find the time.

It's quite similar to FTL, in that getting your plane to do anything requires having one of your crew at the right station, but unlike FTL there are more stations than crew so you always have to make tradeoffs in what's active at any one time. It gets especially hectic when things start getting damaged, crew get injured and need first aid, and things are on fire whilst dastardly Messerschmidts are intent on dropping you in the sea.

On top of that more things need doing manually, like dropping bombs or tagging fighters for your gunners to shoot at and they take time and attention. Your plane is flying around in realtime and has a limit to its fuel so you need to make sure you don't fly too long in the wrong direction whilst you're swinging your camera around looking for fighters or telling the engineer to climb out on the wing to put an engine back together.

And you can't give any instructions whilst it's paused.

Fortunately it's more forgiving overall than FTL, as long as you get your bomber home no matter what state it's in it gets repaired for free, so limping home on two engines and an airframe with more holes than plane is fine (but if it goes down you get a fresh one with none of your upgrades, and if you go down behind enemy lines your crew only have a chance of survival which means they can be lost).

So it's more hectic than FTL with more demands on your attention as a player, but only just surviving any mission is good enough and it feels good to get back on fumes and hope.

[Dhavaer]

Eternal Card Game is a lot of fun, and has a generous FtP model.

[Knaight]

I mostly play indie games (the genres supported well by major publishers and the genres I really like don't overlap a great deal. Notable favorites include:

DROD: The Deadly Rooms of Death series isn't particularly well known, so I'm highlighting it first. It's a very clever perfect information puzzle game disguised as a hack and slash game. The core mechanic is that of a grid based game where you have your character and their sword, and every turn you either move one space (rooms are fairly large, so this isn't a lot) or rotate your sword 45 degrees. Hitting stuff with a sword usually kills it (and there are no cases where it just does abstract damage), things hitting you usually kill you. You're then put into intricate puzzle rooms made up of enemies with entirely predictable AI (in a good way) and room elements. This relatively small and easily learned palette is enough to make a wide variety of interesting puzzles.

It's brilliant and I love it. That the series is also consistently hilarious and that the setting is surprisingly interesting by videogame standards (and certainly novel) is just the icing on the cake.

Hollow Knight: Hollow Knight is a masterpiece, well crafted in every regard. It's not particularly original, being a fairly standard metroidvania with more or less the expected set of upgrades - although the setting is more unique. It's just well executed. The controls are tight, the enemies fun and varied, the maps well designed. Then there's the aesthetics, with an excellent soundtrack backing up a beautiful painterly style that I like to call "insect gothic".

Spacechem: Zachtronics makes a lot of really good puzzle games that are explicitly design based (perfect information systems, a perfectly known tool kit, explicit goals, assembly of a lot of parts into a whole), and Spacechem is my favorite. Infinifactory is also good, and I'm optimistic about Opus Magnum, but haven't given it a shot yet.

Nuclear Throne: This list is mostly fairly cerebral games (I deliberately alternated them with real time games, but it's still mostly those), but sometimes I just want to blow stuff up. Enter Nuclear Throne, a fast playing rogue like with a great deal of blowing stuff up. It's very well crafted, but I'm not going to argue that it's some sort of masterpiece.

Tales of Maj'eyal: Speaking of blowing stuff up, ToME is a highly technical roguelike which is spared from the competitive spreadsheets designation only by being single player. It's very powers based, minimizes a focus on long term resources, and generally plays in a fun fashion. It also benefits from having a wide set of classes made mostly out of the bizarre.

Dustforce: Dustforce is a precision platformer, and it's really good at being one. There's a lot to like about the visuals and the soundtrack, but what makes it is a small set of very tight controls that are quickly learned, which are then used in a wide variety of really good levels with a learning curve that isn't particularly steep but is really high. Dustforce isn't a game you beat, unless you're one of the top percent of players or so.

Battle for Wesnoth: BfW is a freeware tactics game, that works well in the quick multiplayer slot. It has some cool ideas and a lot of content, and it's incredible by freeware standards. By commercial standards, it's decent - if you really like the genre, it's worth a look. Otherwise, pass on it.

Endless Sky: Basically EV Nova, and still in progress. If you liked EV Nova you'll like it.

Dominions 3: I'd say I saved the best for last, although the DROD series is a contender here. Dominions 3 (and 4, and soon 5) is a ridiculously convoluted 4x strategy game with one of the worst UIs I've ever seen, a learning curve with several overhangs, and some downright painful micro. It's also fantasy as made by actual scholars of mythology with the degrees and publications to prove it, and the sheer scale of the game plus the mountains of flavor text really show off those mythological chops. This is probably the single game I've played the most of, and it was worth that time sink.

With that said - I'd wait for 5 and pick it up then. If the 3->4 transition was any indication it's probably a lot more user friendly.

[GimsonVanReich]

In particular, I just started Hyper Light Drifter and I'm liking it.

Hyper Light Drifter is awesome imo, definitely worth playing through.

My favorites right now are Stardew Valley and A Hat in Time.

[danzibr]

Thanks for the responses, all! Lots of great-looking games for me to try (or at least look into).

And Knaight, in particular, thanks for mentioning Hollow Knight! I remember seeing a video quite some time ago that had Hollow Knight, and I thought man that looks cool, but didn't remember the name or the video. Finally :D

Now just to wait until it comes out on PS4...

[Silfir]

I haven't jumped into many other indies this year so far. I bought Pyre and played it a bunch before I put it down, and while it's undoubtedly top-drawer stuff (as expected from the studio), I'm not enjoying it as much as the predecessors. I get a little worn out by Visual-Novel-style storytelling, and I need to be really in love with the gameplay sequences that come between story bits to power through them - this is what I suspect is the reason why I only enjoy certain JRPGs.

Well, scratch that big time. Turns out I just have to enjoy the story enough and I'll like a VN just fine. Like Butterfly Soup. A romantic comedy that's also about baseball ticks just about all of my boxes.

Not sure what holds me back from Pyre then. Might be too gloomy? Lack of lesbians?

[Fri]

That reminds me. If you like VN or even curious for a bit, and haven't tried VA-11 Hall-A, you should. It's a VN like no other, a cozy cyberpunk simulator where you play as a bartender in a dimly lit cyberpunk bar and talk to people and got involved in their life and get them drunk (or not). Great premise, great art, great music.

[VitaliusSch]

I like FTL, FEZ, Stardew Valley, TBOI, Owlboy, LIMBO, "Papers, Please", Darkest Dungeon, etc.
GL! HF!

[Istarial]

AI War: Fleet Command.

[Sandsme]

Don't Starve is my favorite one :)

[ufo]

I tend to forget that some indie games are indie or even games because they become so easy to spend time with.

Foremostly, goddamn FTL. Between buying the game 4 times and the occasional pirated copy to grab a quick game on a computer where it was otherwise unavailable, I have thousands upon thousands of played hours in this game. Absolutely legendary video game and the darn soundtrack, ffs I love this game.

Battle for Wesnoth mentioned, I don’t have any praise other than accesibility, but playtime doesn’t lie, something has made me invest many hours here.

Dwarf Fortress. If you can get into it, you’re in for a LOT of fun. Even if you don’t, you’ll still get an idea of why it’s interesting and an important detail in video game history, and it’s worth playing for that alone.

ToME/Tales of Maj’Eyal. For all the roguelikes, this is the one that rubbed me exactly the right way, purely for how it presents you with all the math and other info and let’s you experiment with character builds from there. I don’t have a lot of hours played, but it’s one I always come back to.

[NRSASD]

Rimworld: A simplified Dwarf fortress in a sci fi setting. It still models psychology, temperature, resource management, and chunky body part based combat systems, but it has a much more approachable interface. It’s Dwarf Fortress for those who are afraid of ASCii. Which one is better? Tough to tell. It’s like comparing the LOTR movies to the LOTR books. You can see where they looked at the same problem of ease of access vs detail, and took opposite paths. Both are excellent works in their own right nonetheless.

Barotrauma: A free pre-alpha “cooperative” submarine survival game. Boring alone, but it’s absolutely a blast with friends. Whether you die because your idiot captain piloted the sub into a mountain, the doctor injected you with alien parasites, the reactor overloading due to drunken engineering stunts, eaten by benthic horrors, or just crushed by water pressure, it’s a hilariously good time. Not on steam yet.

Age of Decadence: A serious RPG with serious consequences. Set in a post-nuclear apocalypse Roman Empire, your character is a nobody struggling to survive and thrive in a world full of scheming and conniving factions eagerly trying to reach the top. Since each playthrough only takes about 10 hours total, it has no compunctions whatsoever about killing off characters and entire factions and letting the dice fall as they will. I’ll just let my characters speak for the game itself: an archaeologist who accidentally became the most evil person I’ve played; an idiot assassin who survived poisons and psychic attacks by being too dumb to notice them happening; a messiah for a fake religion who may have sold out Rome to the Huns; a thief who destroyed an entire city with a nuke; and more. Played through this one ten times already and I have at least 4 more playthroughs I want to try.

Subnautica: Equal parts relaxing and terrifying. A person from a Star Trek level civilization crash lands on a waterworld and tries to survive and leave. Playing this game feels like being in a Finding Nemo movie, at least until the lights go out. Then it becomes Jaws. One thing I really appreciated is how combat is not the solution to most or even some problems. Makes you feel less like a one man industrial center and much more like an explorer or researcher. Also, I discovered I now have thalassophobia.

Highly enjoyed Sunless Sea, Dwarf Fortress, FTL, Don’t Starve, Invisible Inc, Kerbal Space Program, Xenonauts, Talos Principle, and many, many more.

Undertale didn’t click with me either, but that’s probably because I didn’t grow up with the games it spoofs.

The heck is ADoM? A Dance of Mooses?