Games

Minimetro and Cultist Simulator are my go to "comfy" games, but cultist simulator really does get you feeling like you're chasing a mad eldritch horror when playing at times. It's deliberately obtuse and odd, and then a revelation of the truth takes you over and you push on beyond your wildest expectations.

Slay the Spire and Hollowknight have both been mentioned enough in other posts in case anyone reading this is somehow unaware of either of them.

Faster than Light and Into the Breach are both excellent games. FtL is rng mitigation and crisis control par excellence. ItB is basically chess, and you play out the turns as best you can. It's rewarding, but once you get good you need to ramp up the difficulty somewhat to keep it fun.

Shadow Empire. Best 4X wargame ever. 400 page rulebook included. Realistic logistics and planet generation 6000 years in the future!

The Cat Lady and the other games from Harvester Games 👀

Balatro

Obra Dinn

I am having a lot of fun with Timberborn and Big Ambitions.

Timberborn is a colony builder where you are in control of beavers. You have to survive between times of good water, bad water, and no water.

Big Ambitious is a business sum in new York make by the same person who made Startup Company.

One game I love that hasn't been mentioned yet is Subnautica. The only survival crafting game I ever finished. The story telling and athmosphere are unmatched.

Vampire Survivors

It might just be because I was actually early aboard the hype train for this one; but this one just scratched that “one more go” itch until 2am like nothing else.

Enter the Gungeon

Randomly came across this via a YouTube short, and the art-style just meshed with me. Absolutely love the messy bullet-hell quick-play genre in general.. Hades being another great example of this.

I rarely play platformers and really enjoyed Celeste

I'll put Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead up there with FTL and Dwarf Fortress.

I can't say it's my favorite, but after checking out all of these games, I'm just gonna post one I think all you guys would love.

NOITA

I urge anyone who has not played CrossCode to give it a try. I randomly played it during the pandemic, and I've since not been able to enjoy gaming the way I did it before. For me, it was very close to being a 10/10.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a magical experience that can't be described honestly. On difficult stages, it engages all your senses and you're just 100% inside, enthralled by the visuals, music and rhythm. This is probably the most focused and most precise game ever, everything it has, works. It's not just my favorite indie game, it's one of my favorite games ever.

Also, Night in the Woods and Keep Driving. Both resonated with me emotionally in a lot of ways, touching the things I care about. Keep Driving also has a really fun gameplay loop and an incredible music selection (which works as a boost for that emotional factor).

Honorable mentions: What Remains of Edith Finch (it made me uncomfortable and scared at some moments) and Firewatch (nice way to tell a story, and the characters feel real).

Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.

Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.

Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I've ever played, but to be fair, it wasn't exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn't really take off either.

There are also a handful of indie games that I've played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what's there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.

EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker's Toolkit's game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They're very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.

N++

Undoubtedly the best, most complete 2D platformer I've ever played. Super tight controls and incredible level design, coupled with an episode-long timer mechanic that you can influence makes this one absolutely unmatched. Sure, games like Celeste are flashier, but nothing is a better game than N++. I think I put something like 120 hours into this to get the platinum on PS4. I would happily start over and play the whole thing from scratch again.

Inside

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Eternal Strands

Disco Elysium

All very different and unique. All fantastic!

Slice & Dice is the best dice-building roguelite ever and has a free demo that is only content-limited and allows you to already play an infinite amount of runs. I literally played the demo as much as a paid game for a month until I bit down—so hard that, once, when I had my phone in hand and intended to take a shower, I ended up crouching on the bathroom floor furthering a run for an hour before finally pausing to return to the real world.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone offers awesome online co-op. Noita's world is just endless (people are still discovering new spell permutations years later). I will never turn down someone's offer or request to watch a run of FTL: Faster Than Light.

The AAA world is not impressive to me at all, and if anything gets deprioritized in my book; graphics or a third-person view do not a fantastic game make.

Cave Story, the original 2004 version.

I played it a long time ago and I still think about that game from time to time.

Judging by the playtime, Rimworld. It is such an important part of my life at this point, it's not even funny. I've played thousands of hours, and don't regret it

Slay the Spire

Dungeons of Dredmor! Just a really solid, straightforward roguelike with a ton of stuff and a cheeky sense of humour.

The Binding of Isaac is already a famous title that has influenced so much of the roguelike/twin-stick-shooter genre. This game has permanently altered my taste in video games.

The game I’ve enjoyed as much as TBoI is Tiny Rogues. It’s much smaller, but still fantastic with rich build variety while never losing the need for skill and good reactions.

Stolen Realm is a turn-based tactical RPG that takes place in procedurally generated dungeons that play like little roguelike runs with overarching character progression. It’s multiplayer, but you can also just control up to six characters on your own too. It does eventually feel pretty repetitive and there are points that seem impossible to win, but it’s a unique game where you continually build that roguelike power fantasy and just progressively become more powerful to the point of it feeling game breaking.

Going Under is an adorable roguelite where you fight through various levels themed around a blend of corporate stereotypes and fantasy creatures like a crypto company run by skeletons or a delivery company run by goblins. The combat is a vaguely souls-like with an emphasis on weight and timing, but your weapons are office items found in each room that break down very quickly.

Webbed is a cute puzzle/platformer where you play as a little spider on a quest to save your spider boyfriend. The main gimmick is that you can shoot webs to create platforms, pull things, attach things to each other and more. It’s a short and sweet game that’s still decently challenging. It’s the only non-roguelike indie I recommend and it’s that good that I love it despite it being in a genre I rarely play and almost never finish.

Pyre is my all time favorite, it's the only game i've ever platinumed and still kept playing to see a few more permutations. But by terms of sheer hours put in? Rimworld.

I'll have to go with Selaco, it's not even finished (in fact it's approximately half done) but it feels more complete than any mainline Halo game after H:Reach. Looks better too.

Cult of the Lamb.

Slime Rancher, though most of my library is indie so I could list like ten others.

I won’t list out the “big” famous ones since those get covered anyway (Stardew, Undertale etc.)

There are plenty I love that have a little less polish but charm their way through, like Calico and Yonder. I also just played through Tunic and quite enjoyed it.

A solid indie publisher is Reddeer games - about half my switch titles are by them. Finji is another.

Brotato

It's probably between stardew valley, rivals of aether, or cheaper world.

There's also a number that are almost perfect like wargroove, peglin, and kingdom rush.

I guess either Shovel Knight or Hades

ya know what, I'mma round it out as a Top 5, so let's throw in Bastion, Bloodstained, and Dust: An Elysian Tail as well.