If anyone reading this thread hasn't played it, imma give no further information but just...go play Outer Wilds, ok?

Disco Elysium for certain. Everything about it is perfect from the writing to the music.

Hollow Knight and Vampire Survivors are the ones that managed got me hooked in the last few months

Jalopy is such a neat game! Steam recommended it to me after playing my summer car.

My current favorite is project zomboid. It's become my default suggestion when someone asks for a good survival/zombie game just because of how intricate the in game mechanics are. Not only that, it has a massive community of players and modders who are constantly adding to and updating workshop content.

Multiplayer with friends is a blast also.

If you like open source gaming, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

Turn based zombie (and other creatures) survival game with very intricate crafting mechanics. It plays in the same style as a classic roguelike (think stuff like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon) when it comes to movement.

Anything in the game can be broken down into components, and most things can be built back up from those components. The vehicle building system is also very solid, you can make a fully customized hybrid car with remote turrets, a horse-pulled shopping cart, or anything in-between.

The game has a pretty big focus on realism, there's concepts such as sound and smell which determine how you are detected by creatures. I remember reading about a user on the community discord server who researched the properties of bug chitin because they wanted to change the giant bugs you can fight in the game.

The biggest downside is that it's pretty obtuse to get into if you have no experience with similar games. Movement is most efficiently done using the numpad, as the 1,3,7,9 keys work as diagonals. Most keys on your keyboard perform a separate action (e.g. 'e' to examine, 't' to throw, uppercase 'E' to eat etc.). You'll find yourself checking the controls often. Similarly, there's basically no tutorial. Or more specifically, there's no way to make a good tutorial for how much you can do in the game. The mechanics are all so diverse and so deep that the only realistic way to learn about them is either trial and error, or asking questions on the community discord server.

That being said, it's one of the best sandbox games out there. And it's free, so why not try it?

A Short Hike is simply delightful. I just started playing it and it feels so genuine and kind, just a cute and happy little game!

This is a really weird one:

There was a time where I played an unhealthy amount of My Summer Car. The basic premise is your parents are going on vacation and leave you alone in their lakeside house in Finland with nothing to do. Then it is up to you what you want to do. However, there is chassis and engine from an old car in your garage, that's just waiting to be put together. So you go out, buy some groceries from the next local store, realise you forgot to buy lots and lots of beer, go back and buy that and then it's off.

You're building that car in that garage part after part while listening to Finnish death metal and the buzzing of flies if you neglect showering for too long. Swearing, driving drunk on a motorcycle, hopefully not getting caught by police, going out fishing with your motorboat, finding little secrets in the world. The other characters even have some weird backstories that you can uncover.

The game can be very punishing but also super rewarding and funny. It's definitely very time intensive, so that is something you can really sink your teeth in. You do want to have a guide at hand in order to build the car, because that is one hell of a task. If you're in for that kind of experience, it's a very bumpy but funny ride.

My all time favourite has to be The Return of the Obra Dinn. In my opnion it is the single best detective game. Not only is the narrative very captivating, but the deduction process cant be brute forced. It simply is a master piece.

Factorio. The factory must grow
And Deep Rock Galactic. For Rock and Stone

Starsector is a awesome 2D Space Sim that can keep you hundreds of hour occupied.

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.

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.

How has no one mentioned Stardew Valley? Where my farmers at?

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.

I can't give favorites out of everything - too many to choose from, all too different from each other! But some I really like include:

The My Time at Portia / Sandrock games. Super chill crafting life sims for relaxing. Critically, you can increase the length of the day for more chill (in sandrock at least, can't remember if portia has this too).

Hollow Night

The Sea Will Claim Everything. Left of center folks, especially if you fondly remember Freddie Fish and Putt-putt, in particular should play this. It's like an indie, wordily philosophical version of those types of games but for adults. It has so much whimsy, and you can click on everything and anything and get a unique little bit of description or animation. I love it so much but don't recommend it often enough.

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.

Alright, not much to go off of but I'll try based on my playtimes and exclude some very popular games.

• Cook Serve Delicious (1, 2, or 3, my wife and I have probably 400h between the two of us). A fast moving cooking game that tests your dexterity. If you want to understand the flow of the game, I personally recommend trying CSD1 on an iPad if at all possible since the touch controls help you understand the flow of the game, then once you know the flow, you add in a keyboard or controller in CSD2 or 3. 3 is my personal favorite.

• Cassette Beasts (51h). Pokemon always has a special place in my heart and I've bounced off other games that try to emulate it. Cassette Beasts hooked me with their creature designs and awesome soundtrack.

• Zero Sievert (33h, Early Access). I haven't messed around with the big name extraction shooters like Tarkov or Hunt, but the appeal of a single player third person top down extraction shooter with a pretty cool style surprised me at how much I enjoyed it. The only reason I put it down was to save up for whenever it eventually releases.

• Heat Signature (31h). Very run based, but the whole idea is you have to infiltrate ships all over the galaxy and accomplish your assigned objective on that ship. Maybe you need to hijack it, maybe you need to capture/kill someone, there's a lot of options. The fun really came with weird scenarios where you'd have to find unusual answers like breaking a window to launch yourself into space with your target and get scooped up by your ship, or hack the turrets and lure the enemies into a kill box.

• Griftlands (18h). Card game similar to Slay The Spire where you build up your deck and get progressively more powerful against more dangerous enemies. The part I thought was cool is you can try to negotiate with your enemies just as easily as fighting them. Negotiation has it's own separate deck you can boost up over time.

• Everhood (12h). A weird exploration and rhythm game with some good humor injected. I can't even really tell you what exactly happened since it's been a minute since I played it, but all I know is it got really philosophical and after it ended, I felt almost hollowed out at how beautiful/profound it was.

• Antichamber (11h). A portal-like game that plays with spatial puzzles and navigating an ever shifting labrynth.

I could list out a ton more, I love these smaller and weirder types of games, but hopefully something sounds good!

I've been loving Nova Drift. Take asteroids from the late 70s and make it a rogue like with hundreds of enemies, soak it in neon and then blast it's DNA with flow inducing electronic music.

Full of win!

https://store.steampowered.com/...

Roots of Pacha, Sun Haven, Vampire Survivors, Graveyard Keeper, Traveler's Rest, Core Keeper, Halls of Torment, and Coral Island are some of my favorites.

FTL FTW.

So many.

Hollow Knight, Celeste, Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire and Zachtronics games likely need no introduction. Then there's also...

Bug Fables. Incredibly satisfying Paper Mario-like which has thrived into its own thing.

Baba is You/Environmental Station Alpha, hempuli games. The former you've likely heard of, a logic Sokobon with truly mindbending puzzles deeper within (and a level editor!! god, I could gush about level editors for hours). ESA is an older hempuli metroidvania. If you're a fan of that genre, it's among the best.

Caves of Qud -- the best true roguelike IMO. It has so much flavor.

Slime Rancher [2], my beloved serotonin game.

Against the Storm, really well polished citybuilder that emphasizes the first few hours of citybuilding. It's a bit hard to explain here, but I'd suggest looking into it if you're a fan!

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga, my personal favorite tactical RPG.

I could go on but I gotta draw the line somewhere...

This is a weird one, because I think the title of the game is putting people off as it's nowhere near as popular as it should be. However, please give me a chance here to convince you to try it.

Intergalactic Fishing.

You don't actually need to be into fishing games to enjoy it. The fishing, although about as addictive as most good fishing minigames, is only a small portion of the game.

It also revolves around a similar style of exploration to some space games, such as No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous. While progressing through the storyline you will gain access to undiscovered lakes with their own unique species of fish, and information collected about these lakes can be sold.

Catching fish gives you information about that fish's likes in terms of lure, along with a few other attributes. You can then use this information to design a lure to suit it. This becomes a puzzle game, as lures are designed by arranging squares on a grid. Factors such as "shininess" and "noise" are infkuenced by putting more blocks near the edges, or leaving more holes and forming irregular shapes.

It's primarily a sandbox game, but there is a short storyline. Once finished though, the game opens up into an addictive endgame that I don't want to spoil. Tournaments and contracts are a nice diversion throughout the game and can also net you (sorry for the pun, but fish puns are hard to avoid) a decent amount of cash.

It's quickly become one of my favourite games of all time.

Celeste is great! Love that platformer a lot.

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.

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

Frostpunk

I have sunk so many hours into that game. So raw, so satisfying.

Cave Story is still the GOAT for me

I enjoyed TechnoBabylon from Wadjet Eye, an investigation set in a kind of cyberpunk retrofuture : it's point and click, 2D with great sceneries, with some puzzles, and talking comedians reading the text you see on screen.

Edit: also "The Excavation of Hobs Barrow" from the same studio. Pojt and click that takes place in the 19th Century.

A couple I haven't seen mentioned:

-Satisfactory: A first person factory builder and exploration game that scratches an itch no other game can. Made by Coffee Stain Studios, great all around. Prepare your Excel (LibreOffice Calc?) spreadsheets.

-The Witness: A first person puzzle game by Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid, great game too). Many people think it is boring, or that it takes itself too seriously and that it's not that smart. But if it clicks with you, it's an amazing experience start to end, can't recommend enough.

This is such a difficult question to answer since theres so many ways to categorise your answer. But in terms of sheer time played , Slay the Spire wins out for me. That game just swallows days.

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 think my favorites of all time are Slay the Spire and Kingdom: Two Crowns. I've spent hundreds of hours in both and I just can't stop coming back to them all of the time.

Recently I've delved into Dredge, by Black Salt Game. Its a tiny little fishing game, you play as a fisherman and have to go out, fish, come back and sell before it goes bad.

Nothing out of the ordinary, nope, nothing at IA! IA! RLYEH FHTAGN

It IS a fishing game, I didn't lie, but with very distinct lovecraftian undertones. Its got it all, unknown deep horrors, esoteric magic, and ancient lore. I managed to work my way through it in 7 hours. At times it felt a little long, but its a beautiful ride with a small, but interesting cast of characters.

Wholeheartedly recommend it.

I can't put down RimWorld once I start a colony.

hyping a local gamedev here- little hellions! it's a "fighter", you don't actually have any punches or kicks, but you do have a big hook that can essentially swap places between you and someone else...

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

The screenshot reminds me of Donut County so check that out if you haven't already

I really enjoyed Exapunks from Zachtronic games, both the coding puzzles and the Redshift, a fantasy console included in the game.

Dwarf Fortress had it's Steam release recently, so that's worth checking out too.

Recently I've been playing more osu!lazer, the next update to osu!, which is truly one of the best open source games out there IMO.

I'm new here, so sorry if I make a faux pas or something...

I really like Reshaping Mars. There is a legacy version of it I haven't played, but the new version I really like. I enjoy games where you can move slow and not be pressured time-wise. I also enjoy the fact that it will take a long time to terraform Mars, as it should. I'm sure I could double down on making things quickly, but I really like that I can take my time. I haven't finished it, so maybe I'll find out I shouldn't have been, who knows.

I prefer it over Surviving Mars. It's sad it's not getting much recognition.

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

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.

Always looking for teammates

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

Kena: bridge of spirits

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.