Little Indie Games Worth Knowing About (Probably)

I don’t know if you trust my opinion, but I think that Slice and Dice is an excellent game!

Will happily recommend it to anyone

Another entry in the “low price arena auto fighter” genre, whatever it will turn out to be called.
Just King in EA on Steam since a week ago.

This one is more in the direction of the great (despite insane dev) SNKRX rather than Vampire Survivors.
You traverse a Slay the Spire node map with combats, elites and other events. Earned gold can then be spent in a auto-battler shop for units and items. Those units have individual attacks and abilities and two traits that provide synergies to your whole team if you have several units with that trait (Two units with “tough” give all your units a chunky HP bonus, four units with tough give another huge boost).

Combat itself is SNKRX-ish as well. Your fighting party uses their abilities automatically depending on their class and items, you control movement and orientation of your team in a limited wave-based arena with occasional environmental effects or boosts.

After a couple of runs I like the general approach quite a bit.
It is notably less active than the also great 20 Minutes Till Dawn. Several other factors like the limited arena and the large (evolving over a run) skills of your party make it much more interesting than the samey runs of Vampire Survivors to me.

According to their roadmap they have most of the planned classes and synergies (17/21) and three out of the five planned zones available in the current build.
Content-wise this is pretty good already IMO, it does have some balancing and QoL work still to be done.

It has a demo.

I just saw a YouTube video from Splattercat about Just King yesterday, if anyone needs to see the game in action.

Afterthought has left early access. Speedrunning 2D platformer, great soundtrack, has a demo.

Splattercat had a recent video that featured Zero Sievert, which looks like a single player, top down, pixel art version of Escape from Tarkov and Stalker.

The game is supposed to be released via Early Access in several months, but there’s a limited time demo that can be played now during Steam’s survival theme sale.

Was looking for more mecha since I’ve recently (finally?!) got caught up in Battletech, and I saw that this game was on deep sale because it’s about to imminently going to be removed from Steam(?!) and then multiplayer removed in a couple months(!) Definitely red flags (looks like there’s a good chunk of it that is requires online servers - reviews say that includes the single player campaign?) but there’s jazzy music combo’d with FTL style one-on-one combat and cute animal pilots. Anyone know if the offline bits (there’s a roguelike “Metaverse mode” that’s for sure offline?) are worth it for the long term? Then again, it’s not a huge gamble for $2…

Edit - this was “Volta-X” and it is indeed gone.

Designed by a board-certified psychiatrist…

You might want to specify the name of the game you talk about in your messages, especially when as you specified, the game is now off steam. Just a thought ;)

In what country are there board-uncertified physicians :O

There are lots of board uncertified (board eligible) physicians in the Americas… and then there are DO’s (which are not MDs)…

DOs are still, by and large, board certified. They generally take the board exam in whatever their specialty is just like MDs do. Kind of shocking to me that 15-20% of physicians are not board certified. I guess if you’re going to open your own clinic you can do whatever you want, but I’m going to guess that not being certified would be a real impediment to getting hired at an organization of any real size.

That is indeed bitchin.

Yeah, that track is great. From the look of the game, I was expecting the horrible bleeps and bloops of midi sounds that people love for some inexplicable reason, but this is an actual soundtrack. It kind of reminds me of some of the music from Star Control 2, whose “mod” music was always my delineation point on when game music suddenly went beyond midi to real music.

Out for purchase, no EA!

This looks really cool.

After @geggis posted that Ecstatic track I checked out some of Pentadrangle’s other stuff. The Shotgun King soundtrack is 100% more subdued than I would have expected and would almost make a better Into the Breach soundtrack than the actual Into the Breach soundtrack.

It’s funny that you mention Shotgun King, because I thought the soundtrack was inappropriate and distracting and shut it down almost right away.
I agree it would have fitted Into the Breach if I wasn’t so good at that game though ;D

There’s a thread for Japanese visual novels, but I don’t think there’s a general one. I don’t even really play the things, but I heard about this one somewhere and it sounded appealing and on the phone it was $3?!

It’s on basically every possible device, but on the phone it’s just insanely cheap for the entertainment I got from it. I expected to be annoyed by all the references, but I wasn’t! I liked it quite a bit and for the price I’d say anyone who finds the premise interesting at all should definitely check it out. Played it over the course of four or five days, and the phone was just the perfect way to do it, too.

I finally got my terraforming in Planet Crafter to 175!

I will sit on it now until the next update.

I’ve got my planet up to where it’s moving toward the fish stage, so I’m pretty much waiting until the next update too.

Apparently this is coming out of EA next week. I’m a little apprehensive as the signalling system was pretty broken last time I looked at it, which you’d think would be the first thing to get nailed down in a train game. But I’ll be checking it out to see if they’ve fixed the big issues.