Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don’t know anyone else who has played this game but it’s so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that’s kind of it’s own whole thing so I don’t think that counts.
edit: I can’t believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my “main” and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete “real world” feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that’s not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn’t sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it’s complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
I guess it depends on your definition of indie some, but here are mine:
Guacamelee 1 & Guacamelee 2 - The humor is mixed but the gameplay is just so damn tight
Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don’t know anyone else who has played this game but it’s so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that’s kind of it’s own whole thing so I don’t think that counts.
edit: I can’t believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Oooh, MUDs! I used to play 1 or two, don’t even remember their name now…
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my “main” and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete “real world” feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that’s not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn’t sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it’s complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
If you like Recettear then you would like Moonlighter. It’s the same game but made a decade later.
AND it’s 85% off as part of the spring sale. As a lover of Recettear this was an easy buy for me.
Ooooo good tip, thank you!