Indie Games

A couple roguelikes I just saw Retromation play. Caught my eye.



sequel to an old flash game. very silly sense of humor.

Pretty amazing looking slay the spire roguelike.


This one has a demo. Ring of pain dev.

I picked this one up in the tower defense fest, and have found it to be pretty fun. It's EA still, but it's effectively a finished game - there's a new biome and a few characters to add, but I would have been happy with what's there at the moment as a full game.

It's kind of a combo of tower defense, roguelike and tetris - the RNG is tempered though, you always have access to all your collected towers, it's only the tetris blocks that you maze with that are random draws each round.

Pros: Colorful, fun, good variety of maps and mechanics, creative multi-phase bosses, wide range of towers.

Cons: Balance needs work - the merchant and tiny-bot are stronger individually than all of the other characters combined. It's single player though, so you can take the character class as an extra difficulty setting ;p
The winter biome's zone effect is obnoxious as hell too - this may not be a con if you like having an extra complicating factor in your building.

A couple more really cool ones. All EA.. cause of course they are.

Sillence of the Siren is a Sci-fi heroes of might and magic. cool factions. great visuals. might be better then songs of conquest.
Theres a demo. (I didnt actually play long. I realized I just don't actually like homm games much. I like the idea of them, way more then actually playing. ha.)

A very cool looking crpg. Banquet of fools. now, this devs old game has mixed reviews. "great ideas, but too obtuse and deep, and ultimately abandoned".

And, Monomyth. Dungeon crawling immersive sim. solo dev... so expect the progress on this one to be VERY slow. a lot of dark and darker influence it feels like.
Demo here as well.

This is kind-of a stardew clone, but damn it is good:

Been playing with a friend and having fun. I've mostly been doing combat, as the controls and fighting are really good.

There's no energy meter and not much inventory pressure like stardew. I kinda miss those and yet I kinda don't. I think the game-dev in me misses them and the game player doesn't

Early convos made me worried there was going to be a Tom Nook, so I immediately began plotting murder, but they turned out to be fairly chill.

During character creation, I was kind of poking around looking at things, and one of the things you need to do is set your birthday. I did that and thought I needed to hit confirm, but turned out it was confirm for the entire process, so I ended up with a very random character.

I finally bought and played a bit of as it is 2 fiddy right now.

I thought you guys would get a laugh out of this screen at the start


It is very romancy (I think it is french made?). So far brown boy is chill and elf lady is annoying and raggy.

The action bit is sort of like playing jet set radio.

I don't really think this one counts as Indie, but I got it for a friend and watched them play through it and it was good. Goody?



It is mostly visual novelly, but with actiony bits. I doubt I would have enjoyed the actiony bits myself.

It feels like a late middle ages kind of timeframe when they burn witches, but they seem ok with homos. The romancey bits are very light. No bear shagging

Kharzette said:

I finally bought and played a bit of as it is 2 fiddy right now. [...]

It is very romancy (I think it is french made?). So far brown boy is chill and elf lady is annoying and raggy.

The action bit is sort of like playing jet set radio.

Click to expand...

Beat that the other day. It's a game with a bunch of cool ideas, nice music, great art, and an amazing animated intro in watercolor, but the implementation of these ideas is a bit meh.

The core concept is that you play a couple stranded on a planet and that the experience system and combat system is about growing as a couple. So you gain xp when you win battles, but you also gain xp when you eat a meal together or chat in bed before going to sleep, etc. The combat system is also designed with the idea of synergy between the two characters.

As I mentioned, on paper it's pretty neat, but in practice it's not great. While the voice acting is good, the writing is a bit bland, so both the day to day life and the minimalistic overarching plot mostly don't hit. The combat system is atrocious, because it's a weird mix of real time and turn based with actions having both a wind up (you charge your abilities using the D-pad for a character and the face buttons for the other) and an execution time. All the while, enemies have different stances that are supposed to telegraph what they are about to do and what they are strong or weak against. And all of this is in sorta real time (it kinda pauses when someone executes an action I guess?). You are supposed to juggle with the abilities of the characters and do the right things, while parsing the visual stances of multiple enemies, but between your decision and the action actually connecting there can be 5 seconds... It's a mess. To make things worse, you have to make a special action to remove an enemy from combat when it's been neutralized, but if you don't do it fast enough it regains some health and comes back in the battle. Add some enemies that heal or that call back removed enemies, attacks that can interrupt you or temporarily remove you from the battle and things at time get very very frustrating. It's not an insurmountable mess though. I could beat the game even if I still feel I have very little control over what happens in the battles.

A big part of the game is also exploring the mostly empty planet that is divided in a bunch of floating islands. It is somewhat cool to glide around, but it's miles away from games with great and super satisfying movement (like Jet Set, Tony Hawk or Journey to mention 3D games).

Note that the game has a co-op mode that might make the battle system more entertaining (or more frustrating if you can't communicate well with each other!).

I didn't hate it, but I would only recommend it to people curious to try something a bit different even if not that well done.

I jumped in the thread to mention sevral indies I played recently and ended up writting a too long review of Haven... meh.

In the past month I also played:

Donut Country: Comedy game in the spirit of Katamcy Damacy but less mechanically interesting. Amusing and short still.

A Short Hike: A retro 3D looking game about climbing on top of a mountain in the middle of an island. There is a climbing and gliding mechanic that is pretty neat, with upgrades scattered on the island. A bunch of mini-games, mini quests, side challenges.... Nothing groundbreaking or amazing, but a pleasant time.

Later Alligator: Comedy game with a lot of classic animations, but the comedy is not too great and the game itself is a bunch of mini-games, but most of them are very simple and boring, some are fake-games for comedy effect, some are so poorly designed it boggles the mind and a handful are somewhat ok. Cannot recommend.

Can of Wormholes: Very cool puzzle game that is, let's say, sokoban-adjacent (movement on a grid with things you can push but not pull and the goal of each puzzle is to bring stuff to the right place) and that operates with the amazing Stephen's Sausage Roll formula, meaning you discover little by little how far the chore mechanisms of the game can bring you through the design of the puzzles. It is very very clever and pretty difficult. On the up side, it has one of the most original help system I have ever seen in a puzzle game: it consists of one or two tutorial puzzles for each puzzle in the game that highlight core ideas to solve the puzzle. Sometimes those are a little bit too on the nose and rob you of all feeling of accomplishment, but still, it is a very cool idea. The game does something I am not very fan of: it's has meta puzzles. So sometimes solving a puzzle is not enough, you need to solve it in a certain way, to allow things in... the overworld (for lack of a better term) to be solved. Luckily, there are a bunch of hints to help solve the meta puzzles so it's not a chore like it can be in other games. It should be noted that this great puzzle game does not look good at all, but it's really a case of gameplay > * here.

Manifold Garden: Another pretty cool puzzle game but that is almost the opposite of the previous one. Here the presentation is 80% of the game. It's an architectural fever dream, packed with non-Euclidean geometry. The puzzle are a bit on the light side, but I suspect the devs had to use a lot of restraint in the design of the puzzles because things can probably become extremely complicated and hopelessly confusing very quickly if you are not careful when using a 3D engine in which the player can change the direction of gravity. Breath taking ending, like 2001 on LSD.

The Rise of the Golden Idol: Sequel to The Curse of The Golden Idol. Both are investigation games where you inspect a scene, find clues and keywords in it, and then have to fill forms with these keyword in a way that explains what happened. It's like super-Cluedo. The art style is a bit odd, the stories are pretty crazy, but it's very original and pleasant to play. It's a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn, but different.

What Remains of Edith Finch: A very acclaimed "game as art" thing by the people who made the very neat Unfinished Swan. You explore a family home and the backstory (well... the cause of death really) of each of the family member is a different gameplay segment. It's well done, but it left me a bit dubious. I feel 90% of the game would be better served by other media. Only a couple of the sequences made me feel "Yes! That's interesting. That's something that could not have been conveyed through another mean than video game", the standout being the guy daydreaming at a cannery. One of the key factor for the aclaim this game received is its emotional impact. It's a bunch of weird and sad stories after all. But I must confess that while my eyes water with ease at the movies or watching TV shows, I can't remember a game that hit me in the feels and this one is no exception. Still, an interesting and original interactive experience.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure: That tag line piqued my interest, but it is sadly not great. The core puzzle mechanic is original (you move on a grid, but moving actually translate the whole row or column you are in so you re-arrange the world as you "slide" around it), and the game adds a bunch of little side rules to create different challenges, but at the end of the day it is mostly easy and a bit tedious and is drown in pages and pages of absolutely inane dialogue that carry a plot absolutely no one with a pulse cares about. Insane. It feels like there is more text in this game than in War and Peace. I would not be surprised if I spent more time mashing through endless drivel than solving puzzles... Can be safely avoided.

Citizen Sleeper: a very cool sci-fi rpg/adventure game. The starting point is original: you sold yourself into slavery to a corporation that put a copy of your consciousness in an android. You escaped as a stowaway on a spaceship and ended up on a semi-derelict space station. Here, first and foremost, you have to survive. Get money, get food and maintain your android body that is designed to die down without corporate approved drugs. The gameplay loop is simple. Each morning (well... new cycle, whatever), you roll up to six dice, depending on your fitness level, and then you allocate those dice to different tasks. First it's all about survival and then you get drawn into the politics, rivalries and secrets of the station. Not to mention that the corporation that owns you is not too keen on having their androids run away. It's very simply done, it's not much of an rpg because you must play the part of the guy trying to help everyone or there is no game, but it works extremely well. While it stays mechanically the same, the game kinda evolves as you play. First it's all about survival, then it's about juggling multiple time critical quests at the same time and in the end, when the character becomes powerful enough and the quest lines slowly dry out, it's more about being engrossed in the plot and the very neat universe that has been created. Highly recommended if you enjoy sci-fi, reading and atmospheric electronic music. A sequel has been released this year that I'll play in a near future.