Little Indie Games Worth Knowing About (Probably)

Unconventional action-roguelike. Some youtube footage.

From the developers of Atlantic Fleet and Cold Waters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM-nn2jijtM

This looks great! Love the art direction!

Just a demo but I really enjoyed it. Great small town mystery feel.

Oh nice! Added this to my list of festival demo samples!

has anyone tried…

Now THIS is a game that gets how to play superman!!! It only has about half hour of content, and then random missions thereafter, even still i played it for hours and found myself giggling in joy more than a few times. Its just so darn super heroic, and its free…

Loop Hero is one of the demos out currently and is really neat. Apologies if the below link is incorrect.

It’s a really interesting combo of autobattler, tile layer(!), resource gatherer, town builder, and a bit of deckbuilder. Let me break that down:

Your little goofily represented hero walks around a trail that is a bit like a racetrack. There are occasional critters, at the beginning just slimes. When your hero hits one, they perform an autobattle. After the battle you earn equipment and tiles.

The tiles you can play on the board to either add new critters to the trail or add certain bonuses to your hero. And if you play certain tiles next to each other you get bigger/different bonuses. And as I discovered if you lay tiles in certain formations, you get a new feature; eg, a bunch of rocks and a mountain in the middle, you get a really big mountain peak. Which adds a harpy monster to the map and gives you a much bigger life bonus than the individual rocks/mountains do.

Most every thing you do seems to earn you resources, which once you go all the way around the trail you can go back to camp and use to build up your settlement. Which seems to unlock new classes and tiles and give you other bonuses. And before you set off again you get a little deckbuilding to determine what tiles you are going to be able to draw in the next round.

I really enjoy the discovery feel of finding out what laying tiles in certain formations will do. I’ll be keeping an eye out for its release in March.

Well THAT looks fun. Gonna try it. Thank you!

This puzzle game got a rave review at Buried Treasure. Apparently has an elaborate meta-structure, maybe like Baba Is You, kinda?

UPDATE: There’s a demo. And I can confirm that it is stylish and really clever.

That looks really cool, but even with shake and glitch turned off, it is still headache inducing for me

I follow the pixel artist on Twitter for this so it was a nice surprise to see the game pop up on Steam! The visuals are gorgeous and very distinctive. It sounds really interesting. I may give the demo a spin.

Yeah reviews seem to be positive across the board for this. It reminds me of Micron but more expansive and intricate so I’m excited to play it… at some point. Too many games! I’ve got some big puzzlers still to play, like Baba Is You and Opus Magnum.

Posting a space game here because the Space Game thread seems buried further down. Just ran across this on Steam and am downloading the demo for it. Advertises itself as a trade-focused 4X that you can play in an hour.

Okay so you were right, Undefeated is wonderful. It needs more stuff. I love it.

I’d suggest putting the name of the game somewhere in the post so it will show up in search results. Apparently Discourse can’t see the text in embedded Steam links, and it makes posts like this one difficult to find. Thankfully I did manage to find it heheheeeeeeee.

Thanks. I know that and still forgot.

Steam says I’ve played 14 hours now. Just finished my third successful run and having a blast. Hope you enjoy it too.

Great game. Addictive. Lots of demos available from the Steam Festival I am interested in. I am surprised how much time I am spending with this one.

Are we talking about Astronarch ? Not calling you out but it helps when discussions continue over multiple posts to reference the name of the game we are talking about.

I briefly watched a let’s play of the game, maybe 25 minutes worth, and although the graphic style is not super appealing to me, the game itself looked pretty darn good.

No, Slipways. I should have referenced it in my comment.

Slipways does look cool. If you like that, you may also be interested in Star Ruler 2. It’s colonization development is a more fleshed out version of Slipways with a really neat political system and a really good 4X overall.

Astronarch is fantastic. Truly.

I’ve owned Star Ruler 2 for awhile but haven’t really given it a chance. I’ll give Slipways more time, but so far it’s falling just a little too far onto the puzzley side for me. Maybe research changes that as the game goes on? I’ll confess, the game I played a ways into I forgot about the ability to build labs until much later and so didn’t end up progressing much in tech.