Little Indie Games Worth Knowing About (Probably)

It struck me as an uninspired flip-cards-and-compare-them design with space marines vs bugs theming. It didn’t do much for me, but I confess I didn’t explore the card interactions very far. If anyone knows any better, I’d be curious whether it’s worth sticking with.

-Tom

I only played it once, at a friend’s. With only 3 classes of unit (melee, ranged, and magic, iirc) each with a specific movement radius and angle of attack, it seemed like a series of chess puzzles. I thought it was OK, but didn’t put a lot of time into it.

Are kickstarter’s allowed here? This is an old school adventure game developed in Romania. Looks great and there’s a demo available: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/777841902/gibbous-a-cthulhu-adventure

Thanks for mentioning Axes and Acres. Sounds interesting.

I grabbed it and played the tutorial up to the first mission where the developer no longer holds your hand. Looking at the more advanced units/buildings there seems to be a lot more depth than meets the eye. And I love, love, love the soundtrack.

The only thing I’m a bit wary of is the (apparent) inability to save mid-game. In fact, the game goes out of it’s way to warn you it will be counted as a loss if you quit in the middle. That could be mitigated somewhat if it auto-saves after each stage, but I haven’t played enough to tell yet.

[edit]I guess the first part was just the basic tutorial. I just finished the advanced tutorial, and I’m getting hooked, but I’m not sure I grok the whole tamale yet.

Here’s hoping Tom does a video similar to the one he did introducing Gremlins, Inc.

Oh, I had a quick try of Axes and Acres. Interesting. Makes me want to go hunting in the closet to find Roads & Boats.

Some chaps I know through the local indie scene have announced All Walls Must Fall. It’s being described as:

All Walls Must Fall is a tech-noir spy thriller set in a Berlin of 2089 where the Cold War never ended. A game in the isometric action tactics genre, you command secret agents using time travel, social stealth and combat.

There’s some brief prototype footagehere. It’s their first major project after leaving Yager, however, their Ludum Dare project The Mammoth also has received a bit of press coverage earlier last year.

Ruiner looks like it could be fun. Cyberpunk arena shooter with melee, maneuver powers, slowdown effects, etc.

Katana Zero as well. Side-scrolling samurai Hotline Miami with VCR aesthetics. But not until 2017.

Death Trash could be one to watch:

http://www.deathtrash.com/

RPS stuff here:

Please, Don’t Touch Anything is a “cryptic, brain-racking button-pushing simulation.” (Steam page)

You are sitting before a mysterious panel adorned with a large red button, next to a display showing some kind of city. You are covering for your co-worker who’s on a bathroom break and while you were explicitly told to not touch anything, there wouldn’t be much of a game if you complied. In addition to the big button, the panel contains numerous mysteries that are linked to 25 different outcomes affecting the city, and to trigger them you must find and complete puzzles using various means. Some of the puzzles are fairly straight-forward and others are discovered via experimentation and produce such hilariously bizarre and…meta…results…that I don’t want to even hint about those things here.

Lewis and Sips recently played the game in a six episode Let’s Play. If you don’t mind the swearing and crass humor, it’s an entertaining watch. I especially appreciated observing how sharply their enthusiasm and tenacity increased as they began to realize what was actually going on. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Reviews: PC Gamer, TechRaptor, GameGrin, Metacritic, TouchArcade

Japanese Shogun era wargame thingimajig:

http://www.slitherine.com/games/sjidai

RPS stuff here:

Copper Dreams by Serpent in the Staglands developer Whalenought Studios is up on Kickstarter

PC Gamer article here: http://www.pcgamer.com/cybersneaky-crpg-copper-dreams-hits-kickstarter/

Made a thread here for news and stuff: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?78862-Copper-Dreams-Cyberespionage-RPG-by-Staglands-devs-Whalenought-Studios&goto=newpost

Duskers, an indie salvage-horror-asciilike thing:

http://duskers.misfits-attic.com/

RPS stuff:

GOG stuff:

The games website (first link) is a good read too :)

The thread on it.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?77595-Duskers-drone-operator-Deadnaut-FTL-roguelike-like

Niche. A digital board game about genetics and incest. There’s a demo available (which I haven’t had time to look at yet) and they are taking on beta testers, but apparently only via Facebook, so that killed it for me.

Blueprint tycoon is a hoot. 30 hours played, and it’s 2.99.

It’s a builder, akin to Anno 2070, but with a touch of spacechem built in. Lots of fun.

Kickass music too.

Blueprint does look interesting

Yeah, I’ve been playing quite a bit of Blueprint Tycoon. If he had hired an artist, it would be a $20 game, but he didn’t, so it’s $3. If you can get past the, uh, “developer art”, it is pretty good. I had to run through the tutorials a couple of times. There’s some confusing things – why can workers carry goods to/from some buildings, but other buildings need balloons? What is money for? What does upgrading buildings do?

But once you get the hang of it, there is some cool emergent behavior. The supply chains get complicated, and you can make lots of little adjustments to improve things. I’ve played two different scenarios, and the supply chains are actually completely different between them. Definitely recommended if you like logistics games, and you don’t mind non-existent art.

Oh, and it is real-time, but you can pause it, and you can build, upgrade, and create/edit routes while paused. And there is apparently a scenario editor (there’s one scenario on the workshop already), but I haven’t tried it.

I dove into Blueprint Tycoon for awhile and was delighted to see that it really is an Anno close at its heart. Neat to see a slightly different take on that gameplay. Although I have to admit, I don’t see the point of the SpaceChem-y element. Basically, your factories by default are set up inefficiently? And so you can spend time making them more efficient? But how is there not just some optimal set-up for each building? I appreciate the experiment, but I’m not sure that piece is very appealing. What did you guys think?