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Hell yeah I would.
If you enjoy roguelikes, I got you in spades.
- Slay the Spire is currently $8 USD on sale and is one of my most played games of all time. Deck building roguelike.
- Caves of Qud is the single greatest modern classic roguelike that I’ve ever played and is also in my top 5 of most played games of all time. $20 USD. If you understand what the string of words “modern classic roguelike” means and that intrigues you then you’re in for a treat and a half.
- Dead Cells speaks for itself on its store page and is technically out of price range for this at $25 when not on sale, but it’s worth the extra five bucks. It’s also worth the additional $25 for all the DLCs, after you’ve sunk 200 hours into the base game already.
- Cult of the Lamb - ditto above about the price tag, you actually largely can’t go wrong with most things published by Devolver Digital. I own a significant percentage of their lineup and haven’t been disappointed. Devolver isn’t the dev company, but they take a lot of indie teams for publishing and I like them a lot. They’re good folks that sell good games.
- Risk of Rain 2 - is also $25 but worth the squeeze. I’ll try to keep everything else in the price range.
- Rift Wizard - $14.99, and the very similar but slightly superior Rift Wizard 2 at $17.99 are fun little strategy-heavy games about playing what amounts to wizard chess. The store page videos will describe this game better than I’m able to. It’s actually quite a good little game for people that enjoy games that require you to become ludicrously overpowered to survive.
- Balatro - $14.99, the significant buzz around this game is entirely warranted, cursed poker will consume the next four months of your life. You have been warned.
- Path of Achra - $9.99 A self described “broken build sandbox” that is, and very much looks like, a game made by one dude in his spare time. Don’t let the art fool you, I love it to pieces. Another game for people that enjoy games that require you to get super overpowered to survive.
- Tiny Rogues - $9.99 I only recently got into this one. Great game, great replay value, check out videos to see if it’s for you.
Outside of the roguelike genre there are also a couple good ones that I’ll name, though I do admit this list will probably be shorter:
- Siralim Ultimate - $19.99 is one of the grindiest monster collector games I’ve ever played but if you enjoy grinding that sort of game, you can build teams that would dunk your competitive Uber Pokémon team into the shadow realm. It has a ridiculous number of creatures with a ridiculous number of absurd abilities and you’ll find yourself farming this game on and off for like six years. Or I did anyway, I’ve been following the evolution of the game since Siralim 2 in 2016. You can also play any of them on your phone, which I actually find to be the superior experience for the most part because it’s a good game to play in 10-minute bursts over long periods of time. If you’re going to get any of them go straight to Ultimate, don’t bother with the others, it’s the same game significantly evolved over time.
- Exanima - $14.99 Top down physics based melee combat RPG. Check the store page videos and youtube to figure out if this interests you. It very much did interest me, and after several years of dev silence the game is now being actively updated again, which is very exciting.
- Ultrakill - $25 currently (I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t do this anymore…) Buy it on sale if you’re a fan of fast paced FPS games, say new Doom for example. Don’t read, just buy. Trust me on this one. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, I promise.
- Hollow Knight - $14.99 The greatest metroidvania of our age and spawned more knockoffs than the genre namesakes did. Pls give silksong.
- Sunless Sea - $18.99 This is a very slow and very story driven game about being a sailor in hell. Familiarity with the general setting of Fallen London is very beneficial but is not required. This game is slow. But if you can vibe with it, it will deliver one of the most deeply touching RPG stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. This game is truly a treasure that won’t be appreciated by most people. But even so I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t at least mention it for you to look at.
I have to stop myself here because I could go on about this all night and still not be done. Gaming is my main hobby and indie games are the main games I play. Name me a genre you enjoy and I’ll scroll around for recommendations if none of the above catch your eye.
It’s the golden age of indie games. I’ve got dozens of games on my steam library made by a team of between 1 and 12 people that I bought for $20 or less. Those guys are doing great, and doing great work. I rarely ever even give a second glance to big AAA releases anymore, with a couple specific exceptions.
I remember trying to play Earthbound when I was younger. The story is fascinating, I really want to love the game, but the actual gameplay didn’t really grab me. I remember getting to the first major town area and getting my ass beat by the gangsters or whoever that you need to fight there. Never made it past that point.
Any tips, if I wanted to pick it up again? Is this a game that expects you to grind? I found the early game to be really difficult, and I’m not usually one to be turned off by that but I really felt like I was hitting a brick wall and I think I must have missed something fundamental.
I truly don’t understand how people are playing games like Fortnite or Genshin on a phone and enjoying themselves. That’s probably the single worst possible interface to play the game on, that’s like showing up to a counterstrike tournament with a racing wheel. I can’t even play Minecraft on my phone without getting extremely quickly frustrated and Minecraft doesn’t give half a shit about your reaction time or accuracy most of the time. If you want me to play an FPS on a touch screen I’m just gonna take the L and save myself the trouble, it’s not happening.
I fucking love this post and reference it constantly to my programmer friends. It’s one of my favorite bits of writing to exist, honestly.
For that matter, actually, pretty much everything Peter Welch writes is great. I highly recommend taking a peek through the rest of his blog. I liked it so much I bought one of his books.
Teaching someone the wrong way to do something frequently makes the right way make way more sense. Someone who just copy/pasted 99 near identical if statements understands on a fundamental level when, why, and where you use a for loop much more than someone who just read in the textbook “a for loop is used to iterate elements in a collection”.
I genuinely believe something like this is what some of my professors wanted me to submit back in school. I once got a couple points off a project for not having a clarifying comment on every single line of code. I got points off once for not comment-clarifying a fucking iterator variable. I wish I could see what they would have said if I turned in something like this. I have a weird feeling that this file would have received full marks.
Re: The MUD situation, I know from personal experience that Iron Realms has still been cranking out a few of them in the last few years. I was a big fan of Starmourn but that one just got demoted to Legacy recently, I guess because of lack of players. Shame because it was really neat and polished. But they’ve got a triumvirate of Lusternia, Achaea (my personal favorite) and Aetolia as active MUD worlds.
They’ve also got an Android client called Nexus that you can download from their website. https://www.ironrealms.com/the-nexus-client/
Now granted Iron Realms is a whole ass company, not just some nerd hosting a game off his basement server rack strictly out of love for the game, and open source self-hosting enthusiasts may not be super jazzed about that. But as far as I can tell they’re about as harmless as a company can be and do seem to still be in business more as a labor of love than anything else. At least as far as I’ve ever been able to find out. They mostly exist on donations so far as I know, I’ve never had to buy anything from them or been served an ad. And I do really, really like their Nexus client, the interface is really slick and it adds a lot of features and conveniences that I found lacking in other older MUD clients (though, granted, the only non-Iron Realms MUD I ever put any significant amount of time into was Aardwolf and I think I had to use a third party client for that).
All that said, MUD is a dying genre and any influx of new users would help revitalize many of these worlds. If it sounds interesting to you don’t hesitate to go check it out. Veteran users have always been universally helpful in my experience, unless they have an actual lore appropriate reason to be hostile to you - then, watch out! Although even most of those guys won’t stomp on a brand new noob without warning. Players who enjoy social roleplay will find themselves at home in a MUD. Players who enjoy social roleplay and have, or gain, a little bit of scripting knowledge will find themselves especially at home in a MUD. Give one a shot, they’re free and fun and it’ll raise your typing speed a lot.
There’s been a big revival of that genre over the last 10 years or so and I think Boomer Shooter was adopted as a way to differentiate it from your standard FPS. Turbo Overkill is very different from Borderlands which is very different from COD. You’ll need a way to communicate that difference if you want fans to buy your game.
Fuck yeah, good for Mike. That sort of thing still works sometimes, but you have to be really, really good at what you do. But getting a good portfolio in the right hands at the right time is really all it takes.