The AAA gaming space can often lack innovation, so people usually turn to small indie studios for something fresh. Whether it's for unique gameplay design, b...

The AAA gaming space can often lack innovation, so people usually turn to small indie studios for something fresh. Whether it’s for unique gameplay design, beautiful aesthetics or satisfying combat, these 15 overlooked indie games stood out to me. This is my top 15 list of underrated, hidden indie gems for PC that I enjoy more than any Ubisoft, Activision or EA game.

Whether it’s a classic JRPG like Crosscode, murder mystery Paradise Killer, psychological horror Yuppie Psycho, or cozy RPG Phoenotopia Awakening, I hope that at least one of my handpicked indie game recommendations from this top 15 list piques your interest.

  • e0qdk@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for copying the list out; I’m not visiting YouTube either at the moment. I think I probably saw this video a while ago though – at least, that particular set of games looks very familiar…

    I’ve played some of them and have some things to say about them:

    • Paradise Killer: I liked the music in this one. I’d never encountered the vaporwave aesthetic before bumping into this game via a Let’s Play (back when I was still going to YouTube) which probably enhanced the weirdness factor of the game for me. It clearly took inspiration from Danganronpa, so if you liked that game you might want to check it out (or vice versa if you somehow ran into Paradise Killer without having heard of Danganronpa, I guess).
    • Crosscode: I found this game frustrating. I liked a lot of things the game did – like the interaction with party members (EXCEPT for dungeons) and running around the map searching for secrets – but… the default difficulty seemed to be set to maximize annoyance. I mean, it’s doable. I was very stubborn about not changing the timing setting – probably too much so – and was eventually able to beat the main game, but the way it was tuned definitely reduced my enjoyment. The game claims that adjusting the setting doesn’t matter, but tracks statistics about it (like GTA-style stats) which made me really stubborn about not changing the setting. A lot of the challenges in the game are Zelda-esque timing puzzles – from hell. Like hit the switch then run over and do something before time runs out but with 20 steps instead of the one or two you’d find in a Zelda game. (If you don’t like those sorts of timing puzzles you probably won’t have a good time with this one.) So, of course, the timing is set in such a way that it’s often tricky to actually pull off (particularly with aiming involved) even once you’ve figured out exactly what needs to be done. I did it, but more often than not got pissed off while doing it. The game additionally had the interesting idea of having competitive dungeons. Your party members would challenge you on the overall time to clear dungeons. So, in addition to the time pressure of individual puzzles, there was an overall time pressure to race through the puzzles as fast as possible. I liked the idea of where they were coming from with the party member interactions for dungeons but I’d have preferred to take my time with things frankly. It ultimately doesn’t matter that much whether you win or lose those (I won about half of them), but having the game rub my nose in it for being too slow after getting frustrated at puzzle timing and aiming for an hour or more in each dungeon kind of sucked. The overall plot of the game was interesting enough to go through, and I liked the characters for the most part, but a lot of the gameplay was frustrating. Very mixed feelings on this one.
    • Phoenotopia Awakening: This game was another mixed bag. I really wanted to like it. There were a lot of parts I did like… but it is very flawed. First is the gameplay. It presents itself as a mostly cute pixel platformer/adventure game, but the developers seemed to be thinking “Dark Souls” with stamina and such and… it really did not work for me. Thankfully, you can turn most of that crap off – and I did so unabashedly. (I beat DS1 before playing it, and since playing it I’ve beaten DS2 – so it’s not like I can’t handle hard games. It just did not feel good to play with those mechanics enabled.) Second is the story. There’s a decent enough hook to get the main adventure going fairly early on, but the game doesn’t deliver on it. You get to the end and the big dramatic question of the game is… still unanswered! That is really not ok! (Instead you get a bunch of unnecessary backstory for the main character that I took as a big “fuck you”; I won’t say more than that in case someone does want to play it and find out for themselves, but the ending was really unsatisfying to me.) The game had a lot going for it – the music’s good (and I still listen to some of the tracks occasionally), and there was a lot of charm in places. Some of the areas were really pretty and there were a bunch of fun little interactions – but I really don’t know what they were thinking with some of it!