Gaming

Celeste is great! Love that platformer a lot.

If you're looking for underrated indies, I'd recommend Ctrl Alt Ego, a fantastic attempt at an indie immersive sim in the style of Deus Ex or System Shock, and Worlds, a unique stealth-action-exploration game that feels like something from the early 2000s, though it does require putting up with some ambitious indie jank. I'm not sure which games I would call my favourites, but those are definitely up there.

I'm not sure Siralim Ultimate qualifies as "underrated", but it's the kind of game where if the idea resonates with you it'll keep you happily busy forever. It's often compared to a Pokemon game, but I think it's better described as Pokemon meets a dungeon blobber.

At its core, you build a group of six creatures and go into a procedural dungeon where you will fight other groups of similar creatures, picking options like fighting and casting spells. The creatures each have special traits which change game rules for them, and your job is to take advantage of this so that you win these fights. Your character also has perks which act as additional modifiers, and fusing creatures and slapping artifacts on them means you can apply even more changes to how everything works.

The interesting part emerges from the fact that these traits are generally not modifiers like +3.5% damage on Tuesdays; they are instead drastic and game-warping options like "If this creature successfully attacks, there's a 50% chance that a dead creature on its team is resurrected." That by itself is kind of hugely impactful.. and it's also kind of basic and boring for Siralim. Now let's fuse it with a monster that immediately gets a free attack if the enemy attacks any other monster on your team, now we're starting to cook.

Your actual goal isn't to play fair, it is to fold, spindle, and mutilate the game's mechanics to allow your team to win in increasingly unfair and ridiculous fights. It's also pretty good at letting you control your level of challenge, incidentally, but you are at some point going to have to win against enemies with their own completely bonkers tricks. If you enjoy figuring out how to warp complicated rules to your benefit and stack absurdity atop absurdity, this game is calling for you. It's absolutely got indie jank, by the way - the graphics aren't amazing, the game sometimes grinds along very slowly processing all the silliness, and while it has lots of reference material ingame there's still just way too much information to take in.

Just got addicted to Path of Achra. Basically think rogue-lite, old school pixel graphics, and you just build around synergies and you can let your character go auto battle. It's sooooo satisfying when you do a turn and it's just 5-10 seconds of pixels flying everywhere. Path of Achra has a demo, which as I understand it is the full game, just 1 revision behind. So you could play it for hours without buying the actual game.

Also Rogue Legacy 2 is wonderful if you like platformers/rogue-lite games.

I know the whole "Open world survival craft" genre is super overdone, and has way too many games now, but Valheim is honestly awesome. The fun scales with more people, me and my friends (3-4 usually) have been having a blast.

Gonna have to be Pokemon Eternity https://discord.gg/TZWNXrxK

You should check out Inscryption. Deck-builder with amazing story.

Nothing crazy, but Spelunky 2 kept me entertained for a few solid hours (+40 hours). Simple permadeath platformer with tight controls. Also has coop and multiplayer, altho I recommend not touching multiplayer until you finished the game.

Since I don't wanna say Terraria all the time, I'll say Crashlands! I've really enjoyed it, it has a fun game loop, crazy NPCs and isn't taking anything seriously. The only gripe I have is that it doesn't have much replayability.

If you haven't experienced the sadistic, rage inducing masterpiece known as Jump King I highly recommend it

I’ve really enjoyed Slay the Princess. Repeat the same three scenes ad infinitum to get all possible outcomes

Pathologic. It's not even close, honestly. If you're the sort of person who reads the novels you were assigned in English class and actually goes "fuck yeah this is awesome and I wanna write an essay about it now", Pathologic is that in video game form.

I've been having a lot of fun with Against the storm. It scratches my base building and resources management itch and the game is updated really often.

Burger Patrol is fun, plays a bit like Dr. Mario/Tetris, gotta make burgers for score. And the music is kinda bumpin.

Oh I'm a huge fan of NGU Idle. It is an obscenely deep idle game, that is fairly unknown outside of idle game fans. Its written with a very self-referencial sense of humor, and I have over 100 hours in it.

I really love Monster Sanctuary by Moi Rai Games. So much so that I played it to 100% on Xbox, Steam, Switch, and the Game pass version on Windows, which for whatever reason is different than the Xbox versions.

It's a metroidvania game with Pokemon-style creature collecting and turn based three-on-three battles (or six-on-six with three at a time plus swapping when a monster faints). It's insane how viable every monster can be with the right build.

Several newgame+ modes to enable too!

I recently enjoyed Above Snakes (Steam). It's a solid 7-7.5, and will hopefully go from good to great with some of the promised content patches. The studio clearly ran out of time or budget towards the end of the questline. It's still a good 15-25 hours of content.

Since so many people have already mentioned Stardew Valley, I'll go for some lesser-known ones:

• Zero Ranger (this links to the demo): no joke, probably one of the best shoot 'em ups (or shmups) I've ever played. Sure, there are more challenging ones like DoDonPachi but in terms of visuals, sound, and even story I don't think there's anything that tops it. It's also really weird at times but it's so, so engrossing.
• Death Trash (also has a demo inside): a 2D action RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world full of eldritch horrors. It starts like Fallout but it gets weird fast. The visuals and the overall sound are purposefully harsh and unsettling, the difficulty is...not easy. But if you like something a bit different from the norm, it's, again, pretty engrossing and think you'll love it.

I want to promote Monochrome Heights. It's a deceptively simple, kaizo platformer based on color.

https://pdyx.itch.io/black-and-white-game-jam-2022

If you liked playing with toy soldiers as a kid, I'd highly recommend checking out Foxhole.