This has been doing the rounds on Twitter and there is a lot. There are a few well known things like Night in the Woods in here but I’d love to hear some more obscure things which everyone thinks deserve more recognition.
@Rama I gave the whole list a quick perusal, and plan to play tons of these over the coming weeks, but the ones I know and have heard good things about (or have played myself):
video james
Night in the Woods
A Short Hike
Minit
Oxenfree
Democratic Socialism Simulator
Glittermitten Grove
Mable & The Wood
Signs of the Sojourner
Tonight We Riot
Quadrilateral Cowboy
And All Would Cry Beware!
The Space Between
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!
Astrologaster
Art Sqool
EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER
Luna
Serre
Fortune-499
A Mortician’s Tale
Babysitter Bloodbath
Semblance
Loot Rascals
Catlateral Damage (… okay, IDK if it’s any good, but I liked the Polygon vid)
Super Hexagon
Vilmonic
Pixel Fireplace
Midboss
And a couple of TTRPGs: Lancer, Blades in the Dark. I’ll try to play more of these in the upcoming weeks as well, but quarantine is still fairly active here, so anything that asks for more than 2 people may have to wait.
Definitely eager to see what people recommend, though, it’s a long list to get through!
Bleed 2 is in there and that is enough to justify this.
One of the best action games I have ever played in terms of sheer arcade style thrills. It’s basically a string of 20 boss fights and they’re all fantastic.
One more ttrpg I’ll call out is Anomaly. It’s inspired by Magnus Archives, SCP foundation and has very strong Control vibes. I played it with some folks here in a play-by-post thread and we had a blast!
It is a great starting point for people new to ttrpg, it’s GMless and plays very freely.
(The bundle also include a follow up to Anomaly called Anomaly containment that I’m eager to try!)
Over $1,000,000 and still going strong, pretty stellar. More than any multi-billion dollar game publisher is donating. I’m not on my PC today, but I started downloading a few APKs of games I’ve never heard of. Played a bit of A Snake’s Tale, kind of a take on sliding block puzzles but with snakes, and it’s definitely going in my rotation of puzzle games I play while waiting for my coffee to brew.
Some of the games i’ve tried out enough to have thoughts on so far are: MythBearer
An 8-bit style open world RPG which seems like it’s got a lot of depth in it. A cool thing i like is that the enemies, which never move and don’t attack you unless you attack them first, are treated more like obstacles than what i’d normally think of as enemies, so levelling up is a bit like getting a new item in a metroidvania - you’re level 15 now, so you can backtrack to the starting area and beat up those bandits who were blocking that one door and get to a new area, for example.
Crystal Story: Awakening
A Zelda-like adventure game which seems to have strong Undertale influences, though that might just be because the opening narration has a similar voice effect as the main character of Undertale, Sans Undertale. i think this one is a preview build of the full game, which doesn’t seem to be out yet. Mostly it’s good but not great, though the boss fight (which is a turn-based JRPG style fight instead of fighting on an overworld like all the other monsters) has a cool mechanic of dodging their attacks by playing a warioware-style minigame.
Curse of the Crescent Isle DX
A platformer where you can use enemies as platforms, pick them up and throw them, etc rather than killing them. i’ve only played the first couple levels but it seems mostly good apart from opening in the smallest window known to man by default and having annoying menus.
Midboss
A roguelike dungeon crawler where you can take over the bodies of enemies to gain new skills. It’s a cool gimmick and seems to have a lot of depth to it, though the excessive tutorialising in the first run kind of turned me off a little.
Mable & the Wood
A metroidvania about a girl being summoned(?) into some woods to kill giant monsters with a sword she can’t lift by a strange cult. Movement and attacks are done in the same way, by transforming into different forms which unlock different forms of movement and attacking. The first form is a fairy which can fly for a brief period and then summon your sword to you, killing anything in a straight line between where you started and where you are now. Beating the bosses gives you their form, unlocking new attacks and platforming techniques, but the itch.io page expicitly notes that there’s ways to bypass all the boss fights so you don’t need to kill anything. i’ve only just beaten the first boss (and also not-beaten her on a second save) but so far it seems quite good and the combat/movement gimmick is holding up very well, though if there’s a secret ending for not killing anything that might be a problem as it’s very easy to accidentally kill a bird or something just by platforming around. The one thing i really don’t like so far is that it gives you a tutorial on how to use your new form every time you switch forms, which gets REALLY annoying.
Dujanah They Bleed Pixels Quadrilateral Cowboy Don’t Wake the Night Heavy Bullets Wheels of Aurelia Wide Ocean Big Jacket Glittermitten Grove A New Life The Real Texas OneShot
TTRPGS
Anomaly + Containment Breach Blades in the Dark + “The Sleuth” playbook (Read this game if you’re interested in TTRPGs, its the base system for a lot of upcoming indie games and is really important right now) ECH0 A Long Night in the Mechbay Subway Runners
For players of The Sprawl (unfortunately not in this pack, but worth checking out), the Synth Convergence Mission Pack Spoken Magic
I tried to focus on things not already shouted out earlier in the thread.
Edit: Wow! There are more than 1400 items in the bundle! A couple more good ones I noticed:
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald (worked on by former Waypoint columnist and Friends at the Table cast member Jack DeQuidt!) Runner 3 (sequel to the bit.trip Runner games) PICO-8 (a fictional computer / game making software perfect for making really simple 2D games, very fun to check out even if you only have a passing interest in game dev) Pet The Pup at The Party (Cute game about petting dogs at a party)
I also saw a couple great OSTs in the mix, namely Super Meat Boy’s soundtrack and Grindstone’s soundtrack, but unfortunately didn’t see the games themselves. Nevertheless, very good OSTs that are worth listening to!
I think every light novel written by Alex Zandra is in this bundle? If you’re looking for some cute relief from these times, read some short books about gay trans catgirls.
They added the second batch now, bringing the total to 1000 items in the bundle. I’ll be trying out some other games from the bundle this week, for now though some highlights which have not been mentioned are:
Okay, Hero by Reid McCarter, Edward Smith and Astrid Rose of Bulletpoints Monthly is a collection of essays (twelve in total) on each of the six mainline Metal Gear Solid games. Covering their themes and how they develop over the years. they are good writers
deskspace by npckc, a super cute self care app. Check out her other free games too, like one night, hot springs!
Voyageur by Bruno Dias, text based, one-way travel through space, melancholic, good soundtrack
Ironsworn Delve by Shawn Tomkin is an expansion to a free TTRPG that is designed partly for solo play. There are some other solo RPGs in the bundle, but I haven’t tried them yet.
Yi and the Thousand Moons by David Su is a short interactive musical that I quite enjoyed.
Happy that I get to be the first one to shout out The Space Between. Errant Signal did a video on it that’s pretty good (though I don’t agree with everything he says–c’est la critique), but frankly I recommend playing through it blind. Block out an hour of time, maybe turn out the lights, and crank up the volume for an experience that is simultaneously bleak, sorrowful, kind of inspiring, and definitely very creepy.
48 pages with the games strewn throughout the last 700… haha, I can’t complain but it’ll take a while for me to get through this and offer my recs.
Also, Celeste! Nice, I own it on Switch but I’ve had joycon drift for months and Covid-19 shut down the Nintendo repair places, so I haven’t been able to play anything too precise for a while.