What are some hidden indie gems nobody knows about?
Which indies did you discover and would love more people to know about? I'll start: The Pale Beyond. Not sure if it's a hidden gem tbh, but it's such a good story rich game. I laughed, I cried and felt the characters struggles. If you like story rich games/ choices matter, check it out.
Gunpoint. Story based detective game where you solve a murder. Gameplay mechanics make you feel like a badass. You can pretty much finish it in a single sitting but its great.
Heat signature. A stealth based top down bounty hunter game with roguelike elements. Really well done. Made by the same guy that made Gunpoint.
Neo scavenger. A murder hobo roguelike with a surprisingly long storyline.
Super house of dead ninjas. Great fast paced platformer where you’re a badass ninja. Great to pick up and play in short bursts.
Fez. 2D exploration platformer with to change the perspective. Pretty chill and has a cool art style
More well known games that I’ll list anyway in case someones looking for some awesome ones:
Super meat boy
Project zomboid
FTL
Celeste
Crypt of the necrodancer
Enter the gungeon
Spelunky
Noita. Saw it mentionned in this thread and I am seconding this. Great game. But brutal as fuck.
Cave story. A classic. And it’s free.
Owlboy. Took the developer like 10-15 years to make. I’ve heard good things but I’m only just starting to play it.
Also pro tip: if you want more recommendations go look at what speedrunners are playing. People that spend that much time playing a single game over and over generally choose very good games to play.
I haven't played nearly all of these but the ones I have played are absolutely dynamite. I suspect this is a killer list
Thank you. I will say that I listed a lot permadeath roguelikes and not everyone is into those. They can be very frustrating.
Good list. Also by ftl devs, into the breach
I remember doing a rather long play session of Fez, and by the end of it I had a massive headache from all the camera changes lol. 10/10 game tho
What a great list!
Parkitect - an amazing RCT spiritual successor with cute graphics, some new mechanics (covering operational buildings and logistic routes). I have 100+ hours in it with my wife. It's such a chill experience.
Nine Parchments - its a dual stick isometric shooter with wizards and elemental spells from the creators of Trine. Great co-op, unlockable characters/spells and creative mechanics. You can combine elements and the spells affect everyone, so for example a poorly placed healing spell can restore enemies health, or a misplaced fireball can hurt fellow players. Great fun!
Wildermyth - turn-based rpg with multiple characters and bite-sized modular quests and random encounters. The storytelling is simply amazing and each campaign plays out over a certain amount of time. The heroes age, retire, their kids can become adventurers as well. They can fall in love, compete, or based on the player's choices even become other creatures or die heroic deaths which will also change how the story plays out. The art style is really nice and unique. I had many hours of fun with this one.
I’ve had so much fun in Wildermyth. Definitely recommended.
I love Wildermyth. I really need to check it out again :)
Distance - an arcade racer that plays like a good 3D sonic game, has a cryptic story, and has elements of horror. Completely bonkers combination but it works super well.
Thumper - another very fast paced game, but also a rhythm game. The devs label it as "rhythm violence" and it fits. The music is percussive and ambient, mostly consisting of the sounds of you slamming through turns and hitting the a button with ferocious intensity. Levels can take well over 30 minutes.
The Beginner's Guide - might be more well known but imo this is a must play for anyone who does anything creative. It's a two hour walking sim, but I feel like it's a story best told as a game.
Definitely a gem. So meta
DUDE did you also attend Digipen (camps or real classes)? Nitronic Rush was the fuckin shit and Distance was a massive graphical upgrade. Also hard to deny how great multiplayer is as an addition.
Nah I just found nitronic rush back in the day, and found out they were working on a follow up.
Starsector: It's an Elite style open world space game. What makes it special is that it's been in constant development for over a decade and has a crazy number of ships, weapons, lore and features. And a vibrant modding scene.
Also the devs are vehemently against DRM, so the only place you can buy the game is their own website. Or not buy. They put the full version up for anyone to download.
I'll have to check that out. An indie game in a very similar vein is Evochron Legends. It's available on Steam, too. I have a couple of hours in it, but it's been a while since I last checked it.
Antichamber is hidden gem or simply forgotten? I don't know how much attention it got in its time.
It's a puzzle platformer but I was feeling my brain bend the whole game. And at the same time I never felt like the new mechanic was explained too little or something was artificially dragged out. Very good design.
IMO it was better than Portals
Antichamber is great. Feels like a completely different universe with its own set of rules you need to discover. Also really interesting to see a puzzle game with an almost metroidvania-like progression, with the gates being your own knowledge of the mechanics.
I need to be in the right mood for it. But man is it a blast to play through
In decreasing popularity (estimated by me):
Creeper World: A mix of tower defense and rts (with pause function) against a ever expanding goo called creep. The fourth installment is 3D and the next one will be a side-view spinoff.
Tales of Maj'Eyal: Quite popular among the people who are into traditional roguelikes, but I very very rarely see it mentioned outside that community. It's definitely the (nearly) traditional roguelike I put the most time into thanks to its class/ability system that bridges the gap between roguelike and turn based rpg really well.
The Captain: Technically not indie as it was published by Tomorrow Corp (of World of Goo/Little Inferno/etc. fame) instead of the devs themselves. A mix between old school point and click game, but as a highly episodic space adventure. You travel from planet to planet on an overarching mission and each planet has its own interactive short story. Some are longer, some are very short and you never quite know what you'll find before you land. All of the short stories have multiple endings depending on how you tackle the moral dilemmas it throws at you.
Infinity Wars actually released before the rise of Hearthstone and also before the popular Avengers movie of the same name. It is to this day one of my favorite digital TCGs, and I played so many of them. Before I get into the main thing that I love about it, I wanna mention that every single card's base version (colorless) is free, anyone can build any deck for free the moment they pick up the game and be 100% competitive with everyone else. The only thing they monetize is bling. Unlike in most mainstream TCGs both players do their turns at the same time in secret, once they both lock in, their moves play out. This gives way for some insane mindgames and outplays that eclipse those in any other TCG I've played. It is a bit rough around the edges, so it might be more of a "hidden diamond in the rough" than a hidden gem.
Bombernauts is a really fun party game. To sum it up in one sentence: "Imagine if Bomberman was a platform fighter." If you have friends to play with it, buy it on a sale, crank powerup drops up to the max (they stack, which took us hours to figure out), maybe download a mappack and I'm sure you'll have a blast if the trailer looked any fun to you. There's virtually no chance to play it with strangers through as it is super dead.
Lastly I wanna give a shoutout to Clonk. Clonk is (or was) a 2D sidescrolling game-series that is visually reminiscent of Lemmings. The gameplay is a sort of mix between Minecraft or Terraria (predating it by many many years) and very very very low-pop RTS. It's a mission based game where you control around 1-3 Clonks (the lemmings) and has full online multiplayer support. The missions can range from "build a base in this active volcano", "take out the enemy team's castle", "win this wizarding duel" to "build a bridge across this canyon". What made it truly unique was the community and community creations though. It was created with the explicit purpose to be customizable and users made many, many different maps and modes. It was to me what Minecraft was to the kids in the generation after me (without all the content creators, of course). Some people made an entire RPG in it. Others made what was essentially Among Us, just to give you an idea. Sadly the spiritual open source successor Open Clonk could never recapture the magic for me, and I guess I'm not alone in that because it pretty much died around 5 years ago. If I could make one game popular overnight, it would be Clonk. It did warm my heart to see that some of the celebrated custom map/mode creators from back then ended up getting into gamedev. One of the games developed by someone I remember from back then is Vintage Story.
Holy fuck I rambled a lot about Clonk and I still feel like I'd have so much more to say but this isn't the most fitting thread for that.
I loved Clonk back in the day. Discovered it from the falling sand craze a long time ago and I still have fond memories of it.
shoutout to nice explanation and link. I'm like 5k hours into Tales of Maj Eyal, and confirm it is excellent, especially after unlocking the adventurer, which allow to combine any of the 100+ skill trees.
I will try Infinity war, seems up my alley and less grindy then MtG
Crosscode is one of my favourite games of all time. It's an immensely charming action RPG heavily inspired by the 2D Zelda games. It has some absolutely insane combat and surprisingly challenging puzzles. The story is also very good and really touching at times. The devs spent 7 years making this game and I feel like it never got anywhere near the attention it deserved.
It's just $20 on steam AND it has a free demo, so there's no reason not to check it out!
I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven't looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.
I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don't worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It's purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there's 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it's not for you, it's not for you and there's nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it's something special.
I think if I have one criticism of the plot is that it takes a while to get going. If I may, I'd recommend you to play thorough it at your own pace, possible also at the lowest difficulty just to experience the story. It's well worth it just for that.
I can't even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can't even recall.
Not only that, the combat was also utter jank.
If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I've seen in a long time.
If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.
Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.
Ouroboros - an RPGmaker game where the protagonist is trapped in a looping simulation and tries to escape without alerting his captors. Short and sweet, perfectly executes the power fantasy of being a hyper competent rational character who's gone completely emotionally numb after living for thousands of years. It's an adult game and features some sex scenes but they're not important and I think they can even be turned off. It goes on an 80% discount every steam sale.
For the record, every game by that dev is incredible. One of them is still being worked on but should be finishing this year, and that one is free.
Receiver is pretty good. You have to clear the slide, and remember to count bullets, did your own jams, and otherwise it makes shooting more of a simulation rather than an arcade.
They released two games. The first was just a game jam thing they threw together that established the core mechanics. The second was much more fleshed out and polished.
If I'm not mixing something up, they also created Overgrowth (third-person action platformer with rabbits beating up wolfs). And in order to distribute it without messing with third party services, they've created Humble Bundle. They sold it to some company later but for a long time it was them putting together the bundles.
It's a little off-topic, I know
Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can't recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there's still a massive backlog of online levels to play.
Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It's a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there's a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there's split-screen too).
Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn't say it's the greatest roguelike out there, it's a lot of fun and very unique. It's essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I've played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.
Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.
I know many of those words.
TL;DR you'll enjoy it if you like casual puzzle games lol.
Voxelgram is a spiritual successor to an older game called Picross 3D. Picross 3D is a 3D version of a popular logic puzzle called Nonograms.
Aquaria is a very expansive Metroidvania with great visuals, creative encounters, and excellent music. Certainly one of my favorites growing up.
Shadows of doubt is a sandbox detective game. You are a detective and you have to solve crimes, which are totally randomized. What makes this interesting is that the world does not stop:
It is truly a sandbox! I havent played it too much yet, but i feel if i really start playing it, then i will skip going to bed!
I bought that game a while back, but I couldn't get into solving anything. Maybe I was just playing it wrong or something.
I mean, if Josh from Let's Game it Out fucked around nonstop in almost every possible way and still "solved" a case, I doubt you could be playing the game wrong 😆
Invidious linkie - https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=ckmPfn-KCGg
Griftlands doesn't get as much attention as I think it deserves. It's everything Slay the Spire offers, but better. With plot and characters and two decks to balance.
I bought it discounted because i remember that i have seen it before. I really did not expect it to be this good. The world, the storyline and the combat are just awesome. Highly recommended!
Hacknet. You play as a novice hacker who investigates the disappearance of a character by hacking into other people's computers to gather information.
The hacking mechanic is fairly realistic and requires you to use the terminal a lot, so it really makes you feel like a hacker. Pretty short and sweet game, and the soundtrack is pretty good as well
Oh, I really love Hacknet! Played the main game and the DLC. Discovered it one day while browsing Rémi Gallego's (aka The Algorithm) discography, and found out that he did some tracks for the OST
I bought that game and haven’t started it yet. But your description of it makes me want to do it now!
Mindustry
Oh this is a neat game I'll just build this little gun turret and oh my god 14 hours have passed
yes I've lost hours on that game
Pick your favorite genre:
What The Golf? - A wild and hilarious mini golf game
Miasmata - A horror/cartography game... you heard me right! You have to use the intuitive in-game triangulation system to create your map and find your way around an island while being stalked by a creature as you search for a cure to your mysterious ailment
Rain World - 2D Metroidvania where you're a little slugcat in a post-apocalyptic world filled with dangerous predators and lethal rainstorms
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - Life sim where you're a janitor in a bustling Star Wars-esque spaceport living on the edge of poverty and dreaming of more
One Shot - Emotional story-driven game in a similar vein of Undertale
Night in the Woods - Not that hidden, but I absolutely love this one. Narrative life sim about someone returning from college to their Appalachian hometown and mysterious things are going on
Dreamfall Chapters - Adventure game that spans a sci-fi dystopia and fantasy world with many interconnections
Grow Home - 3D platformer where you're a little robot growing giant beanstalks to return to your spaceship
There Came An Echo - Tactical strategy shooter you control only with your voice
Unciv for Android. It's basically Civilization 5, but FOSS.
Shoutout to Iji, too. Amazing soundtrack and lots of replayability. It's an old game by now, but it's also free. Sidescrolling platformer, killing is optional.
Assault Android Cactus. Dunno how well known the game is, but it's one of the best twin stick shooters/bullet hell I've played, with the android girls full of charm.
I was going to say Iji. Such an amazing game, it's like the 2D version of an immersive sim. I wish there was a remake only so the dev could make the money they rightfully deserve.
I recommend Nex Machina if you enjoyed that one.
Uh, which one? I mentioned 3 games
Sorry, Assault Android Cactus. The formatting in my app made it look like two separate comments when I was skimming quickly.
Citizen Sleeper - From the same publisher as The Pale Beyond, it's another one of those story games that borders on visual novels. It's a game about precarity and personhood set on an anarchic, decaying space station. Gorgeous art, fantastic soundtrack and it's uniquely hopeful. Might be favourite game of the last few years.
It’s old enough that I can’t attest to how hidden it was/is, but Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery is likely the greatest 3 hours I’ve spent in a single videogame. It’s chock-full of confidence and style and atmosphere. The story is nothing unique but the presentation is everything. Pixellated graphics contrasted with vivid sound design and a glorious soundtrack. I love everything about it.
A Robot Named Fight - "Metroidvania roguelike focused on exploration and item collection. Explore a different, procedurally-generated labyrinth each time you play and discover randomized power-ups to traverse obstacles, find secrets and explode meat beasts." Links: Steam - Website (It is also available on Switch, link on website)
I have almost 500 hours of playtime and still go back to it every now and then. Really awesome game with superb music, graphics and feel.
What's extra cool is that the lone developer open-sourced the game code, available here: OpenARNF on GitHub Sadly I've yet to see any mods, spinoffs or anything else come from it.
Cloudpunk - A cyberpunk driving/walking simulator with a good story, great voice acting, LEGO-inspired graphics, and a Blade Runner inspired soundtrack. It’s dripping with atmosphere and I wish I could play it again for the first time.
I liked this one a lot. Waiting for Nivalis to come out.
Plate up : a rogue like kitchen survival game can also be multiplayer , survive as many days as you can getting more customers but also more kitchen gadgets
Back back hero: rogue like dungeon delve with pack management and new story mode where you rebuild a town .
Both are surprisingly addictive and consume my dreams
Signalis
Antichamber
Cave Story
The Beginner’s Guide
Uplink
Hypnospace Outlaw
Exit Fate
The Red Strings Club
Oolite
LocoRoco (not an indie gem but forgotten)
Upvote for Antichamber.
Hypnospace Outlaw is hilarious and perfectly captures the weirdness of the early Internet.
Also don't forget to talk to your kids about the dangers of shonking.
Iconoclasts - really nicely made metroidvania with pixel graphics
Tametsi - a collection of handmade Minesweeper puzzles with additional twists and mechanics. Extremely cheap on Steam
Gunfire Reborn - roguelite FPS with Borderland-ish graphics, decently made 4 man co-op (unlike Risk of Rain 2, you can actually revive teammates that got knocked down immediately) and a lot of difficulty scaling. Notably, still gets new content, both free and paid DLCs (those add new classes and some new weapons)
Edited to add another: Opus Magnum - an automation/optimization puzzle game with alchemy theme. Supports user-created puzzles through Steam Workshop
Tametsi just barely eked out being my most played game of 2023 over, duh duh duh!! Elden Ring. Yes, it took me longer to finish a $1 Minesweeper clone than to finish a massive Fromsoft Soulslike. Haha!
Hypnospace Outlaw
Phoenotopia: Awakening – an amazing metroidvania-related game. Relatively more popular than the other games I list, but is honestly one of my favorite games of all time.
Vision: Soft Reset – a metroidvania, but you can travel backwards and forwards in time and this really matters for gameplay.
Bombe – Minesweeper, but instead of solving the puzzles manually, you create rules ("if there is a cell with the number N and there are N empty cells around it, mark them all as mines") which the game applies automatically.
SOLAS 128 – a puzzle game where you redirect signals in a huge machine, just a great experience if you like puzzle games.
I'll add Noita to the list of hidden gems. And Baba Is You.
I'd say both are pretty well known by indie game standards, especially baba
Baba even has merch from third parties (e.g. fangamer) so yeah. But you know what, screw it, I also love Baba is You. Two votes!
Noita has won multiple awards and made over $61 Million in revenue.
I was playing Orbiter long before KSP came along. It taught me all I know about orbital mechanics. It helped ease the learning curve in KSP a lot. But after KSP came along I completely lost interest. KSP is a lot more fun and there's a lot more to do.
Still had a laugh when my friend who made fun of me for playing orbiter ended up buying KSP, getting frustrated, rage quit and asked for a refund.
For some time, I considered Orbiter to be better at providing an arcade experience of "choose ship/scenario and fly away". But now that KSP also has scenarios, maybe this argument doesn't really stand now. But I still think that Orbiter's MFDs are better than KSP's manoeuvre planner (at least for precise manoeuvres)
I had a great time with a couple card battlers last year, Cobalt Core and Nitro Kid.
Cobalt Core has a similar presentation to FTL, with a turn-based format instead. Plenty to do in it, great soundtrack, charming writing.
Nitro Kid is on a more traditional 2D grid with an isometric viewpoint. It appealed greatly to my love of 80's settings, but I'd wait for a sale as it's thin on content.
I've never heard or seen anybody else mention Suzerain. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure political strategy game, which is pretty unique. You are the new leader of a fictional nation wrestling with corruption. Your decisions will affect the outcome. Game is only $6 on Steam right now and is well worth it.
Also worth mentioning Ostriv, a beautiful city-builder in which you build an 18th Century Ukrainian village, complete with individual little villagers wearing their villager clothes. It's lovely and made by ONE GUY, as best I can tell? Also, last I saw, the entire game was somehow under 1 GB, if I remember correctly. It's absurd.
Hmmm... how about the Rusty Lake games? They're weird. Or maybe Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk? Adventure puzzler and VN respectively.
I probably have a few more if I think about it. My friend and I randomize my steam list to decide things to play and there were quite a few interesting ones I got from who knows where-- bundles and bundles.
And they're also linked. It's a really cool rabbit hole to go down. Definitely recommend them to people who are into games with some meta elements to them!
There's even a recent one that's two player, I guess inspired by the We Were Here games. Which now that I think it it, also recommend.
My friend and I still say "My blood sugar is low" and "Owls" now as again as an inside Rusty Lake joke.
Hmm, ones no one knows about...
Probably Icy: Frostbite Edition. Pretty solid, not something to get full-price necessarily but it was pretty good when I played it like 5 years ago. Interesting turn-based combat.
Also, OneShot. My avatar is from that game, I really think almost everyone should play it.
Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit are two brilliant gems that come to mind by Mimimi Studios. I discovered them a few weeks ago and just learned they went defunct back in August because they were too niche a genre and couldn't make enough sales. They're Stealth Strategy games where you control a group of ninjas/pirates through a heavily guarded level to the objective, stealthily murdering everyone along the way. If you get seen you can easily jump back to a quick save and try again. You're not overpowered and can easily be killed by enemies so save scumming is deliberately built in to the experience to experiment with your approach.
It's in fact three games:
You can notice how each game perfects the formula, but they're overall extremely similar. I would very much recommend the last one if you have to pick one, as the focus on magic allowed them to go truly wild with the character abilities. Gaelle shooting corpses and partymembers around with her cannon is a particularly fun one.
Sidenote: Far as I can tell they didn't go bankrupt or anything, they just ... stopped. They're done or so. Did the same concept three times, happy now, works for them.
I've mentioned these before and I'll do it again:
Just recently started Lunacid, and I'm having a blast. I'm a fan of dungeon synth and its subgenres, and I"ve been looking for a game that has those vibes for quite some time. This one seems to fit the bill quite a bit. And I also have wanted to check out King's Field, but was afraid that it might be too dated to be enjoyable; Lunacid seems like a fresh take on that dungeon crawler style of gameplay. The only thing the game lacks imo is a dedicated pause button
Andor's Trail is a foss roguelike with a twist that it's story based, something quite rare in this genre.
Immortal Life is a farming game but with a Wuxia twist where you can use chinese magic to help you do your chores and there's a twin stick combat inside the dungeon. What surprised me was seeing the game selling well on steam, but never seeing a single article about it, strangely common with chinese indies over here.
I would imagine that most articles about Chinese Indie Games are written in Mandarin, so it's unlikely you'd see them without the ability to read Chinese.
The games are in english and they talk about japanese indies all the time though.
Weird. IDK
Treasure Adventure Game, maybe? I believe it's free, though there's a paid remake of it named Treasure Adventure World now.
Cutesy "kid goes on adventure" 2d platformer with sailing and some Metroidvania-y or Zelda-y factors. Cute pixel art and the music is very well done.
OMG-Z It's a playstation mini for the PS3/PSP.
Warp on the PS3.
Donut County isn't really a nobody game. But I never see it mentioned.
After Hades, I hope some folks went back and played Supergiant’s other titles. I love them all. But even amongst them, Pyre is the underdog, unknown, shunned. And I think it’s fantastic. The music and writing is top notch. You can really see the bones of Hades in all their games, but they polished their world building and story telling to perfection in this one.
I played it when it came out, and I still think about those characters sometimes.
Same. It’s been years and they’re still with me
Universim.
I'm currently totally hooked on Tiny Rogues.
Sebil Engineering has a really fun mechanic I've never seen before. Its like those Hot Wheels tracks you always wanted as a kid but your parents never got you, but even better. I guess its a traffic control game? Anyone have other examples of these?
Doesn't look like it offers the chance to build a "hot wheels track". Feels like that idea of bridge constructor, but applied only to angles of roads
From The Depths -- very deep large vehicle design and combat game, prepare to happily lose months of your life
Barotrauma -- help crew a submarine under the command of the captain to perform missions in an alien open world. fun multiplayer with good in game VOIP
Shadow of the Forbidden Gods - a strategy game where you play as the ancient cthonic entity waking up because the stars are right. Set in a fantasy world where the forces of good slowly become aware of the coming apocalypse and attempt to forestall your return. You have to get past the janky UI and some dreadful AI art, but the gameplay is unique and satisfying.
The Witcher 3 (/s)
Why did I have to scroll down so far for le hidden gem?
Came here for this. My man Geraldo of Rivera.
the Skyrim total conversion mod, Enderal: Forgotten Stories, blew me away, and it's free if you own Skyrim. Even has its own installer and game page on Steam.
Their earlier game Nehrim: At Fate's Edge is also worth a play. It runs on the Oblivion engine so it's a little dated graphically, but story- and gameplay-wise it holds up fine.
rogue Lords: it is inspired by Slay the Spire (StS). Card game with roguelike element. Here, the cards are replaced by your minions skill. But the right set of skill is less frustating to build than in StS. Making it a more fun experience, and the graphics are way above StS(not hard). As in StS , with luck/skill you can manage to build some 'infinite deck" where you never let go of the control of the battle.
Dominions (Dominions 6 just came out, but it's an iterative game so try 4 or 5 first)
So it's like civilization and battle simulator had a baby, where armies are managed by the unit and there are simulated battles of thousands.
But all the civs are loosely based on different existing mythologies and there's a crazy complex magic system
Oh, and you get to create a god that you can totally battle with.
If you like civ-like games, it's a really unique and satisfying twist on the genre with an incredible amount of sheer depth.
Blasphemous.
Fantastic metroidvania meets soulslike game. The art style, the lore, the atmosphere, and by God - the music!
The combat is not super great, but it's capable enough for a metroidvania.
I haven't played the second one, I hear it's kinda hit and miss.
I got this game recently since I got hooked hard on Dead Cells, and needless to say combat was the disappointing part. Coming from DC it feels so rigid and limited, needlessly punishing. But I got the game for art, so that part is great. It's also weirdly poorly optimized. They made the whole game in one resolution and are scaling everything, like whole screen. So your choice of resolution might end up weirdly stretched. An odd decision.
The first one also meh at releast until several patches later. The second one is on the easier side as the penitent one is now more agile.
Null Gravity Labyrinth for everyone who likes labyrinths
Skator gator is a really fun 3d platformer. It has some time trials that I got into when I never care about things like that. It's cute and controls very well.
Paradigm
Black Souls 2
Superfighters (original web game) and Superfighters Deluxe (on steam)
Really good 2D platform brawler based around weapon drops.
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine - Ever play ToeJam & Earl? This game has the same core game loop. You're on a treasure hunt, unlike ToeJam & Earl where you are trying to find spaceship parts. In Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, you meant to collect stories and then share stories with major NPCs. The stories that you collect and share, change over the course of the game. The soundtrack is also really good.
Splattercat did a video on the game.
This game isn't for everyone. It's a very, niche game.
Ostriv, an 18th century city building game. I believe it is just the single developer based in Ukraine.
Live For Speed, this one isn't quite "hidden" but is overlooked by many as it is not on any storefronts. Sim Racing history and still going strong today with the 3 original devs.
I'll toss 2 mobile games on the list. Desert Golf and Golf on Mars. No ads. No stupid paid trinket nonsense. Just a couple bucks for the game and a very chill and casual 2D golf game.
Void Stranger
Can of Wormholes
They are hidden, so I don't know about them. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.