Gaming

recently got completely addicted to a text-based Indie RPG called Roadwarden. The story and characters are incredibly rich and the gameplay is full of satisfying little moments of "oh, I have just the item for this!" or "another character told me this tavern keep doesn't appreciate jokes; I better get straight to business". I haven't beaten it yet, but I can't wait to see where it leads!

always way too many to list without some guidance on what you're looking for(!)

worth mentioning guacamelee 1 and 2 (notable indie metroidvania games ) are currently free on the epic store: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/guacamelee-stce-7cdbc8 https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/guacamelee-2-ac4977

Thanks for the great, great, great answers and recommendations everyone! Hope that all of you found a new game to enjoy, I sure have.

I would recommend Wintermoor Tactics Club, its a top down turn based tactics game with a cute and wholesome story. I also found it quite funny

Deathtrap is one I think more people should check out - Tower defense mixed with an isometric RPG.

Really fun game with a lot of different upgrade paths for both the towers and the player, plus just a ton of levels.

Superflight

Really engaging game with a short, easy to understand mechanic. It's fun just to put on and fly around for a bit every now and then.

I enjoyed atomicrops tremendously

Owlboy was better than I expected it to be.

Super Auto Pets has replaced Hearthstone for me, it's fantastic.

Gunpoint

S.P.A.Z.

Eufloria

Astroneer

Manifold Garden

Massive Chalice

The Pedestrian

Solar 2

Snakepass

Stacking

If you enjoy city builder games you might wanna try Songs of Syx out. You basically build an empire containing potentially thousands of citizens. There’s no way I could possibly do the game justice in a comment, so you might wanna check out a let’s play or the Steam page

I’ll say CrossCode. 2D hack-and-slash set in a futuristic MMO. Way too good, way too unknown for the genre that it is.

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is a 2D top-down space shooter with RPG text-adventure elements outside of the combat scenarios. I found it a super fun game with an insane amount of content. Probably over a hundred hours worth. There's a bunch of weapon and defense customization when it comes to combat, and there's probably thousands of varieties of ship you can build for whatever duty you need it to do.

If you were ever a fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon, check out Parkitect. It's a phenomenal and fun themepark game!

I'd personally recommend Rain World, although it has a reputation for being hard, and you'll probably die a lot so this game has to be approached with patience

Ooh, I love finding obscure indies. There are an awful lot of games on Steam and Itch and other platforms that are amazing experiences, but that almost no one has ever played or even heard of for one reason or another.

One of my recent favourite zero-budget indies is Sally Can't Sleep, a strange first person platformer with a lot of focus on fun, versatile, and exploitable movement mechanics. The dev sacrificed visual polish for quantity and style, so the game has a lot of interconnected levels with a big variety of different mechanics visual styles - it's a really good example of how much a solo developer can accomplish.

Another one is Worlds, which is a 3D stealth-shooter-platformer-adventure? I like it for the same reason as Sally Can't Sleep, it's ambitious and creative, and you can really feel the developer pushing against their limitations to release something that punches far above its own weight.

Also, both these games are very cheap, even at full price!

I played the hell out of Slipways

Their slogan "Build vast trade empires, still be done in time for lunch" is on point here. You connect planets with different resources and different industries to an interconnected network in a (turnbased) race against the clock. Easy to learn and always great fun to cram into a 30min slot in your day.

Hyper Light Drifter is a really pretty game with tight controls, fair difficulty, excellent music, and some of the best atmosphere of any game I've played.

The Westport Independent is a censorship simulator, in which you play as the editor of a newspaper, choosing which stories to run and how to edit them in order to avoid angering both the authoritarian government and political radicals who want to take them down, while also appeasing your journalists, who may get angry and quit if you censor their stories too much.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

I'll say up front that it's a niche game and isn't for everyone. This is especially true because most of its aspects outside of the gameplay are pretty unremarkable. But if this is your thing, it's really your thing.

What makes it so special is that it's core gameplay loop is a very satisfying meld of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle - essentially a turn-based strategy RPG where you control semi-autonomous squads instead of individual characters. And if that description made you perk up just by reading it, you need to go buy this game ASAP.

Now, if that description didn't immediately pique your interest, I'd check out some gameplay videos instead. Because it fills such an obscure niche, it's actually hard to know if you'll like this game just from a brief description. There's a good chance you've never played anything like this, and it will scratch an itch you never knew you had.

Fear and hunger is the most intense RPG-style horror game I have ever played. It's vile. It's fucked up. And it's honestly enthralling. Pay attention to the content warnings on the steam/itch page if you look it up, they're serious. It's like a game in the Berserk universe, but you're NOT Guts.