General Indie Games Discussion

Let's be real: barring a handful of breakout examples, most threads about indie games get little to no traffic and almost immediately get buried by more popular games. This thread can be used to discuss any cool, new or upcoming indie games that you want to highlight, and if any one particular game generates enough discussion, it can be spun off into its own thread.

Recently, Wormwood Studios released Strangeland, which I thought was pretty great (I did make a thread here, but barely anyone posted). I loves me a good point-and-click adventure, and it's always cool to see a game with non-violent conflict resolutions. The atmosphere and plot were incredible, too, definitely the best part of the experience. It's honestly my GOTY so far.

After I played that, I was inspired to revisit Primordia, Wormwood's first (commercially released) game. Really cool cyberpunk point-and-click, every bit as good as I remember it, but it's a very different experience on your second playthrough.

Any cool indie games you know of that no one's talking about?

While we’re on the subject of point and click adventures, one that I never see mentioned is Demetrios: The BIG Cynical Adventure. It’s a really solid adventure game with good puzzles and funny dialogue, but the real highlight is the deaths. There are many, MANY ways to get a game over, to the point that the game gives you an award for finding all of them. The best part is that you can go back immediately to before you made your fatal mistake, which removes the element of frustration that usually characterizes an adventure game where you can die.

I just recently began playing Cardiophobia and got totally stuck. The house is a maze and I keep forgetting where those medkits are placed so I end up dying of high heartbeat rate over and over again.

I tried Googling a map of the house with no results. Unless there's some really well hidden one. Anyone happen to know about it?

Played a game called Blood of the Werewolf this past week.

I got this game for $1 on IndieGameStand (back when that was a thing) because I thought the art looked cool, and it's just been sitting in my Steam library for close to a decade now. I was reminded of it recently in an Image Pickin' thread of all places, and decided to finally give it a shot.

It's about this werewolf woman, Selena, whose husband is murdered and son is kidnapped. She has to fight through a ton of monsters to get her son back. She's human when indoors and is armed with a crossbow, and transforms into a wolf when outside, exposed to the full moon.

I was enjoying it at first, but around the halfway point the Fake Difficulty ramps up to ridiculous degrees. The game's got horrendous knockback, legit the worst I've ever seen in a game. It sends you flying, and I swear sometimes it even sends you forward towards whatever it is that hurt you. It's tolerable at first because there's not a lot of hazards in the first half of the game, but the latter half the game throws so much at you it feels more like a Bullet Hell than it does a platformer. The game so badly wants to be a Classicvania, but it took all the wrong lessons from those games.

Even putting the Fake Difficulty aside, the game design is pretty basic. The enemies are all essentially palette swaps with little-to-no variation in behavior, and the level design is pretty generic with the only challenging parts being the aforementioned parts where they throw a million things at you to dodge. There's multiple points where you have to jump off-camera and there's a hazard at the end that you couldn't possibly see so you inevitably die and just have to remember that it's there and try again.

I've read that the Xbox 360 port fixes some of these issues, but I have no real desire to try it out after playing this version.

Edited by Primis on Aug 9th 2021 at 1:25:14 AM

The annual Sonic Amateur Games Expo starts today at 12pm PDT.

Despite the name, it's not just Sonic games that are featured. All sorts of independently developed games get featured here. Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in indie games or just game development in general.

Recently finished (well, "finished", I still need to explore the full map) Axiom Verge 2.

It's a really good game, the core gameplay loop is solid, the soundtrack is amazing, and the graphics are beautiful and much more varied than in the first one, and it's bigger focus on exploration over combat gives it a distinct identity in the overcroweded field of indie metroivanias.

Unfortunately, the lack of challenge means the ending is rather anti-clicatic, there's little indication of the way forward several times, and while the world-building and backstory given by the random documents scattered throughout the map are very interesting, the actual dialogue and characterization is rather thin.

Still, a must play for metroidvania fans.

Been keeping tabs on Fights in Tight Spaces, which I could best describe as "Fight Scenes: The Video Game".

You're a government agent who is tasked with taking down criminal organizations by punching, kicking, and head-smashing everyone you meet. The game is a deckbuilding rougelite, with the usual hand of cards that represent the actions like moving and punching and three actions per turn with which to play the cards, and you and your enemies represented on a tight grid. Your goal is to use the cards to maneuver and defeat your opponents to become the last one standing.

The game lets you know the attack ranges and special abilities of your enemies to better let you plan out your turn. There's a variety of cards that facilitate a variety of strategies. You can choose to be an all out brawler that rushes down enemies, a defensive player specializing in counter attacks, a trickster who repositions enemies so that they hit each other, and more.

It captures that feel of moment-to-moment decision making that goes on in one of those scenes pretty well, I think. A particularly cool thing is that once a level is done, you can replay the entire sequence and watch it play out in real time. It's not completely smooth, but it's a fun feature nonetheless.

Fights In Tight Spaces is currently on Steam in early access, but it can be played from beginning to end in its current state. At the very least, I think it's worth keeping an eye on :)

Edited by AzureSeas on Aug 26th 2021 at 5:22:02 AM

Blasphemous is getting a new DLC and a sequel!

Also, you know an indie made it big when they get an animated trailer.

The developer of the recent horror-game Summer of '58 has withdrawn from game-development for "an indefinite time".

Said departure is apparently due to the game—which is less than two hours long—being broadly refunded under Steam's refund policy. This is despite Summer of '58 apparently having an overall rating of "Very Positive", and good reviews, if I'm not much mistaken. As a result, the dev doesn't have the money to fund their next game.

Here's what I believe to be the dev's statement on the matter, as posted on Twitter.

And here's an article on the matter by Kotaku.

Apologies if this ends up being the wrong place to post this.

A trailer for the upcoming game tERRORbane was released during Gamescom 2021. For those who haven't heard about it, you are essentially searching for bugs in a very bug-ridden JRPG made by a developer who may be a bit too self-confident.

This is a game I've been looking forward to ever since I played the demo on Steam. The game itself will release some time in Q1 2022 and will be available on the PC and Nintendo Switch.

Follow-up on : the dev in question has since received an outpouring of support.

I haven't seen much of it myself, but from what I gather, I'm glad that they have had such support ^_^

Mostly mossbag just rambling about the wait for Silksong.

But fucking Hell, is there a lot of fan-content for this game, I haven't even heard of any of those things before.

Two years ago, we first stepped in the cursed lands of Cvstodia:

As a fan of that game, it's really heartwarming to see the amount of love it got since its release. I definitely recommend it for anyone who enjoys games like Hollow Knight.

I honestly vibe with it more than Hollow Knight.

Not to say Hollow Knight isn't a great game, it is, but the twisted Catholic aesthetic of Blasphemous is much more my jam.

Regardless, both are great games and everyone into metroidvanias should play them.

A plucky little indie platformer called Webbed released just last week.

It's main appeal is the way the little spider you control moves around, by shooting webs all over the place and using them to propel yourself in the chosen direction, and occasionally build bridges with them.

We're getting a spiritual successor to Metal Gear 1/Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake on the 28th, UnMetal, by the Spanish studio who made UnEpic:

Edited by CookingCat on Sep 14th 2021 at 5:47:32 AM

Beholder 3, sequel to Beholder and Beholder 2, playtesting started recently - seems to be closer gameplay to the first game then the second

Since its release on Xbox, I've gotten back into One Step From Eden, which I could best describe as "what if Mega Man Battle Network was a roguelike?"

The overall format is similar — you and your enemies occupy opposite sides of a grid battlefield, and you fling chips spells at them to proceed. Unlike MMBN, you're moving around a 4x4 grid instead of 3x3, spells are drawn and readied randomly instead of pausing battle to select them in a sequence, and you're taken from one battle to another instead of moving around an overworld.

It does get the feel of MMBN, though. There are a wide variety of spells to use, enemies to face, and battlefields to fight on. All the characters you can play as have different primary weapons and passives which encourage different playstyles. Fitting for an MMBN-inspired game, it's got a pixel art style that is getting a pass to touch up some sprites and a soundtrack that is nice and retro-sounding.

While it just came out for Xbox consoles, you can also get it on PC, PS4, or Switch as well :)

I posted this on the Nintendo Switch thread, and I'm posting it here as well.

Card Shark, a card-cheating game from the people behind Reigns, had its release date pushed back from 2021 to early 2022.

I first heard about this game when it was announced on one of Nintendo's Indie Showcases back in 2020, and I've been looking forward to it due to its art style. A bit of a bummer its release got delayed, but hopefully that means the dev team has more time to iron out the final product.

I’d definitely prefer a game that gets delayed to hell and back, but eventually turns out to be great, than a game that gets crunched on to hell and back and becomes shit. See last year’s December release for a crash course on that problem.

Agreed. I'd rather the dev team be able to take their time and not be stressed out due to crunch; my personal enjoyment of a game can wait if it means the dev team has an easier development time.

Apologies for the double-post.

If you are a fan of World of Horror, a new update was recently released. According to the patch notes, we have:

• The "City Planning" feature got reworked and apparently has new actions.
• Two new playable characters are introduced: a "Witch" and an "Ex-Cultist."
• There are some new events that are character-exclusive and meant to explore their backstories.
• Two new mysteries are now in the game.
• There is a new game mode called "Challenges" that put players into pre-selected playthroughs with unique gameplay mechanics.

I'm curious:

What exactly counts as an "Indie."

Can an AA (not an AAA game) be an "Indie" or is the term "Indie" kind of general and vague?