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  • Showing only topics with the tag "hidden gems". Back to normal view
    1. Steam Summer Sale 2024: Hidden gems

      Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta: What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend? Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations...

      Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

      • What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

      • Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

      If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

      For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.


      An update for this topic: I've always used the number of Steam reviews for a game as a rough proxy for the game's audience size. It's not perfect, but it works well enough. Steam effectively made this canon in one of their recent sales. They had a Hidden Gems category and then broke the game list out into different tiers based the number of reviews each one had. I saved their taxonomy so I could use it here.

      Feel free to tag or group your recommendations based on these if you like:

      Category Maximum Review Count
      Shockingly Overlooked 20
      Under the Radar 50
      Buried Treasure 150
      Underrated Great 500
      Cult Classic 1000
      Gem Graduate 1000+

      All the categories above, except for the last one, are how Steam defined their different tiers. I have some qualms with them using "Cult Classic" there, but I'm going to follow suit for consistency's sake.

      I myself added the last category, because I think there are plenty of games worth mentioning with more than 1000 reviews that still have a solid Hidden Gem vibe but have since found bigger audiences and "graduated" from the label.

      65 votes
    2. I want to hear about your unknown favorites!

      Hey y'all! I'm finishing up a work (academic) project, and, to my delight in the near future I will have time to read for fun again! In talking with a friend, I realized that many people have at...

      Hey y'all! I'm finishing up a work (academic) project, and, to my delight in the near future I will have time to read for fun again! In talking with a friend, I realized that many people have at least one or two favorite books no one's ever heard of before.

      Fiction, nonfiction, weird, old, whatever! What're your favorites?

      I'll start: Karl Kerenyi's book on Hermes, and Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman. The Kerenyi text is lovely because he dwells in this between-place of pure academic and personal experience, and it reads almost like a memoir of a man who is still very much in the midst of his love affair with his research. The Fadiman book is a lovely (if tiny!) volume of essays that I've come back to time and time again about what books mean to a reader, and how they have shaped her life.

      26 votes
    3. Steam Winter Sale 2023: Hidden gems

      Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta: What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend? Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations...

      Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

      • What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

      • Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

      There’s no hard requirement for what counts as a “hidden gem.” Any game that you think deserves more attention counts.


      For general and popular game recommendations for the sale, please use this topic instead.

      79 votes
    4. Steam Summer Sale 2023: Hidden gems

      For every big Steam sale r/gamedealsmeta does a Hidden Gems topic which is always one of my favorites to browse through. Given that the July 1 reddit fallout is upcoming though, I figure it's...

      For every big Steam sale r/gamedealsmeta does a Hidden Gems topic which is always one of my favorites to browse through. Given that the July 1 reddit fallout is upcoming though, I figure it's worth trying to roll our own version here too.

      The purpose of this thread is for game discovery: surfacing games that are hard to find about elsewhere. As such, try to recommend things that are less well-known.

      For general game recommendations of all popularities, use this thread. For general Steam Sale discussion, use this thread.

      93 votes
    5. What are your favorite "hidden gem" RPGs?

      Was recently feeling nostalgic over some RPGs I used to play back in the PS1 era and was wondering if anyone had some "hidden gems" they've been wanting to get off their chest? A couple of mine...

      Was recently feeling nostalgic over some RPGs I used to play back in the PS1 era and was wondering if anyone had some "hidden gems" they've been wanting to get off their chest? A couple of mine are:

      Suikoden II

      ===========
      Game of Thrones meets JRPG. Super fun story with just the right amount of twists and turns. Lots of loveable characters, both standard turn-based and tactics style combat, and fun little mini-games throughout (feudal Iron Chef fans rejoice)! The only real downsides to this game are the now outrageous price for an original copy, and the "need" to have a completed save file from Suikoden 1 to get 100% completion (and a different ending). On the brightside that means you get to play Suikoden 1, which is an excellent game in it's own right!

      Azure Dreams

      ===========
      A fun little RPG that is equal parts rogue-lite, Pokemon, dating sim, and city builder. You traverse a large tower collecting monsters that assist you in battle. With the spoils of your expeditions you can grow out the town that sits at the base of the tower, and maybe woo some love interests along the way. Character progression resets each tower expedition, but your monsters retain their levels (and it's possible to retain some gear as well). Overall was a fun game that I sunk a bit too much time into back in the day.
      44 votes
    6. What games would you consider "hidden gems"?

      A "hidden gem" is a game that is considered to be great but not well-known at all. It's something you believe deserves far more recognition and reach than it currently has. A diamond in the rough....

      A "hidden gem" is a game that is considered to be great but not well-known at all. It's something you believe deserves far more recognition and reach than it currently has. A diamond in the rough.

      Though a hidden gem certainly can be a highly polished experience, the term also allows a bit of roughness, leaving room for clunkiness or flaws on account of the game's scope and production values (hidden gems are rarely, if ever, big-budget). It also seems to place a slight premium on novelty and innovation, favoring but not requiring games to be fresh or experimental for their time.

      With this in mind, I'm curious to hear people's opinions and hopefully get some new stuff to check out for when I find myself needing to take a break from Crash and Spyro.

      • What games would you consider "hidden gems"?
      • Why do you feel they fit the criteria?
      • Why do you think they aren't more widely known?
      21 votes