Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.

Golf Club Nostalgia(917 Reviews)

This is a game that isn’t here for the game play. I think if you are paying at all attention to the boring dystopia, or climate collapse communities then this will hit in a way that is hard to define.

Its a golf game. Simple, could be played on a phone really, but you have to have the sound on for this one.
You are a member of the elite refugees who have fled to Mars and only return back to Earth to use the husk of a planet for a round of golf. And your companion is a lone radio broadcast from Mars of what they have left, which is stories and the rare music that was saved.

The combination of overwhelmingly good world building and consistent vibe even down to the level names and journal entries hits like a train and made me cry at least a couple times.
It made me feel nostalgiac for a world that has not yet come to pass and is a great on sale pick.

In Grotto, you play the role of a soothsayer living in a cave who is occasionally visited by members of a tribal society living nearby. They come to you with problems, and they want you to present your opinion, but you can’t speak. You have access to constellations of stars, which each hold different meanings, and you must present your answers in the form of a single constellation, which the petitioners are left to interpret.

You’ll feel a bit of frustration as your intended message is missed completely in favor of something that the petitioner wanted to hear, and the same constellation might mean different things to different people, but that’s just part of the game. The story unfolds around you and its progression is communicated to you only through the explanations your petitioners give for their visit. Each is a uniquely unreliable narrator, so what you believe is for you to decide.

Two endings, and an interesting story with some occasionally unexpected consequences that might make you feel bad, so if a game giving you a case of the sads is unappealing, maybe take that into consideration.

Ooh, I’ll play.

Final Profit: A Shop RPG is an RPG about a deposed elf queen who opens a humble shop and slowly advances through the ranks of the Bureau of Business with the eventual goal of defeating Capitalism from within. It’s unique. It has some incremental game like mechanics, and can get a little repetitive in the mid-game, but it has a surprisingly compelling story and a lot of unfolding mechanics that keep it interesting all the way through.

Roughly a 30 hour playthrough with many endings, NG+ and some optional challenge modes that remove or change some of the most obvious strategies for advancement, so if you finish it and still want more, you can play through again with a somewhat different experience.

I don’t have any suggestions but I do like this prompt and I see a lot of games I’ve never heard of

This one isn’t super new, but Druidstone. It’s a story based tactics game with some RPG elements and it’s just excellently done. I’ve never heard anyone else mention it and I think more people should know about it.

Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.

Pioneer is a great remake of the original Elite Space Sim.
It simulates the entire galaxy (core systems are hand-built, everything else procedurally generated), allows landing on planets, trading, combat, etc.
It features the original game’s Newtonian physics, so actually arriving safely at your destination is a challenge in itself, similar to flying in Kerbal Space Program. But the HUD gives you all the info you need for that.

Oh, and it’s fully open source and moddable.

I think this is the only thread where I actually haven’t seen any of the games before.

Another game I enjoyed was The Eternal Castle (remastered). It’s a remake of a game from 1987. The animation is great and the visual style is really cool.

Tactical Breach Wizards

It’s made by the Developer who made Gunpoint and Heat Signature (also amazing games if you somehow haven’t heard of them BTW).

It’s a turn based tactics/puzzle game where you command a squad of wizards with different magical abilities to dispatch a room full of enemies. A bit like Into the Breach but hand crafted scenarios, not procedurally generated.

It also has a fun story, character customisation, and ability unlocks. Almost every scenario has a bunch of optional extra goals, so you decide how hard you want to wreck your brain. Highly recommend it!

Edit: It seems people are aware of this one, I really thought it was a bit niche.

The Black Pool is a game I decided to try recently. It reminds me a lot of Returnal in terms of visuals and gameplay, but I don’t expect the story to evolve much beyond the initial “kids lost in the woods trying to get home.”

It’s a 4-player roguelike where you get to choose random elements to slot into different abilities, namely a Primary, Secondary, and AOE attack as well as a jump, dodge, and once-per-world ‘rally’ buff. Each element makes the ability act differently, like a light primary is a slow charging piercing laser while wind is a projectile with knockback, and you also get to upgrade your elemental abilities after each stage you clear. I’m only about an hour into it so far, but I definitely think it deserves a little more than the 29 player peak it got right after it launched.

I always like to give a mention to Your Spider. There are very few reviews (one of which are mine), but the game definitely deserves more attention.

CrossCode, great characters and great story. Really good game.

Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.

ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.

Trailer

You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.

You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)