Games

I've never heard or seen anybody else mention Suzerain. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure political strategy game, which is pretty unique. You are the new leader of a fictional nation wrestling with corruption. Your decisions will affect the outcome. Game is only $6 on Steam right now and is well worth it.

Also worth mentioning Ostriv, a beautiful city-builder in which you build an 18th Century Ukrainian village, complete with individual little villagers wearing their villager clothes. It's lovely and made by ONE GUY, as best I can tell? Also, last I saw, the entire game was somehow under 1 GB, if I remember correctly. It's absurd.

Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit are two brilliant gems that come to mind by Mimimi Studios. I discovered them a few weeks ago and just learned they went defunct back in August because they were too niche a genre and couldn't make enough sales. They're Stealth Strategy games where you control a group of ninjas/pirates through a heavily guarded level to the objective, stealthily murdering everyone along the way. If you get seen you can easily jump back to a quick save and try again. You're not overpowered and can easily be killed by enemies so save scumming is deliberately built in to the experience to experiment with your approach.

Andor's Trail is a foss roguelike with a twist that it's story based, something quite rare in this genre.

Immortal Life is a farming game but with a Wuxia twist where you can use chinese magic to help you do your chores and there's a twin stick combat inside the dungeon. What surprised me was seeing the game selling well on steam, but never seeing a single article about it, strangely common with chinese indies over here.

OMG-Z It's a playstation mini for the PS3/PSP.

Warp on the PS3.

Donut County isn't really a nobody game. But I never see it mentioned.

After Hades, I hope some folks went back and played Supergiant’s other titles. I love them all. But even amongst them, Pyre is the underdog, unknown, shunned. And I think it’s fantastic. The music and writing is top notch. You can really see the bones of Hades in all their games, but they polished their world building and story telling to perfection in this one.

the Skyrim total conversion mod, Enderal: Forgotten Stories, blew me away, and it's free if you own Skyrim. Even has its own installer and game page on Steam.

Blasphemous.

Fantastic metroidvania meets soulslike game. The art style, the lore, the atmosphere, and by God - the music!

The combat is not super great, but it's capable enough for a metroidvania.

I haven't played the second one, I hear it's kinda hit and miss.

Universim.

Sebil Engineering has a really fun mechanic I've never seen before. Its like those Hot Wheels tracks you always wanted as a kid but your parents never got you, but even better. I guess its a traffic control game? Anyone have other examples of these?

Dominions (Dominions 6 just came out, but it's an iterative game so try 4 or 5 first)

So it's like civilization and battle simulator had a baby, where armies are managed by the unit and there are simulated battles of thousands.

But all the civs are loosely based on different existing mythologies and there's a crazy complex magic system

Oh, and you get to create a god that you can totally battle with.

If you like civ-like games, it's a really unique and satisfying twist on the genre with an incredible amount of sheer depth.

The Witcher 3 (/s)

Shadow of the Forbidden Gods - a strategy game where you play as the ancient cthonic entity waking up because the stars are right. Set in a fantasy world where the forces of good slowly become aware of the coming apocalypse and attempt to forestall your return. You have to get past the janky UI and some dreadful AI art, but the gameplay is unique and satisfying.

From The Depths -- very deep large vehicle design and combat game, prepare to happily lose months of your life

Barotrauma -- help crew a submarine under the command of the captain to perform missions in an alien open world. fun multiplayer with good in game VOIP

Treasure Adventure Game, maybe? I believe it's free, though there's a paid remake of it named Treasure Adventure World now.
Cutesy "kid goes on adventure" 2d platformer with sailing and some Metroidvania-y or Zelda-y factors. Cute pixel art and the music is very well done.

I'm currently totally hooked on Tiny Rogues.

I'll toss 2 mobile games on the list. Desert Golf and Golf on Mars. No ads. No stupid paid trinket nonsense. Just a couple bucks for the game and a very chill and casual 2D golf game.

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine - Ever play ToeJam & Earl? This game has the same core game loop. You're on a treasure hunt, unlike ToeJam & Earl where you are trying to find spaceship parts. In Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, you meant to collect stories and then share stories with major NPCs. The stories that you collect and share, change over the course of the game. The soundtrack is also really good.

Splattercat did a video on the game.

This game isn't for everyone. It's a very, niche game.

LBreakout[1] is the best Arkanoid clone, period. There has been many attempts by Taito (or Square Enix by proxy) to reboot the franchise but each of their releases just flopped terribly because they keep removing features that people come back to Arkanoid for (the latest PC release, Eternal Battle, has no level editor). In similar vein is Apotris[2] (whose developer is being hunted by the Tetris Company like a fugitive the last few months) is the greatest iteration of Tetris IMO, and it is open-source and developed by a one-man team.

[1] https://lgames.sourceforge.io/LBreakoutHD/ [2] https://akouzoukos.com/apotris