These days, Indies are really popping off IMO. Gems like Animal Well are coming out all the time. What are your favorites?
Pyre - I know Hades is amazing but I honestly believe Pyre is Supergiants best game and its not even close. It’s a game explicitly about revolution and solidarity, it surprises me it doesn’t get mentioned on Hexbear more.
Return of the Obra Dinn - “Well that guy got stabbed, that guy got shot, THAT GUY HAD HIS ARM RIPPED OFF BY A GIANT SQUID AND WAS IMPALED BY A SPLINTERED ROWING PADDLE AND GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD WITH A CANNONBALL nobody has ever been MORE dead.”
Balatro - You already know.
I’m also playing Pillars of Eternity again so that too.
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chants of senaar is decent entertainment for an afternoon
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balatro, number go up
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pizza tower, warioware clone but wilder
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yomi hustle, TAS fighting game. Its a fun thought experiment that quickly devolved into which character had the unpatched unblockable loop
I’m a pedantic nerd and just wanna correct you a lil. Pizza Tower is a clone of Wario Land, specifically Wario Land 4. Warioware is a different series based on very quick mini games.
Yomi hustle is really good! Or it used to be, like you said. There aren’t a lot of really good turn based multiplayer games and I wish there were. It’s the only kind of multiplayer I can stomach.
+1 for Chants of Senaar. For anyone reading who hasn’t heard of it, it’s an isometric puzzle game based on linguistics. You control a person trying to climb this megastructure where each level has a different culture and language and so you have to figure out the various writing systems and syntaxes to find your way
I can’t be arsed to figure out which of these are “actually” indie or just seemingly lower budget, so:
- SIGNALIS - unmatched aesthetic & vibes, after finishing it the first time I kept thinking about it so went back for a second round on survivor/classic difficulty
- Pizza Tower - it’s just so peak
- Nidhogg - I think this came out more than five years ago but I finally played it this year. Even though it’s extremely basic and doesn’t have a real campaign it’s just so incredibly polished in its deceptively simple combat system that I kept coming back for more.
- Return of the Obra Dinn - spent a wonderful Sunday afternoon solving this one sitting at my kitchen table with my steam deck and giant ledger notebook
- Into the Breach - extremely fun, every single turn feels absolutely clutch; however you have to play basically perfectly in order to win so it is quite stressful
- Night in the Woods - explicitly leftist game, one of the few
- The Messenger - this one is really fun and has great music. My partner still remembers and talks about watching me play it.
- Katana Zero - it’s got that one hit kill/quick retry mechanic, excellent game. It’s the game that Hotline Miami wishes it was imo.
- Hyper Light Drifter - there are some massive unwarranted difficulty spikes but if you get around those this is a wonderful, beautiful game
The Messenger/Sea of Stars and Hades
