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What are some noteworthy games that are not available through the major platforms?
Define “major platforms” and “noteworthy” however you like, but I’m thinking of this as stuff you can’t find on Steam/Origin/GOG, etc.
I’m interested in people surfacing things like small itch.io projects or standalone downloads from the creator’s website or abandonware that’s never seen the light of day in digital distribution or cool romhacks — anything that’s worth a look but that someone would really have to go digging in order to find.
Sorry for posting a "dead" game but this post reminded me so much of one of my favorite indie/ARG-ish game of all time, Extrasolar. Basically, you logged in as a "volunteer" controlling a rover on a planet in a different solar system. You gave it commands, it went there in real time and sent back "photographs", i.e. incredibly detailed 3D renders. Think No Man's Sky but instead of the arcade-y style, a full-on NASA/science feel. Unfortunately, it shut down in 2018. Nowadays, the webiste hosts a retelling of the story in a kind of example play-through but it's hard to capture the excitement of getting pictures back using your own exploration. Such a cool project, unlike anything I've ever seen before (or after).
This is genuinely fascinating. I did a very primitive real-time game-by-email back in college that I've long forgotten the name of that was very similar to this, though it was text-only and this seems much more involved and well-executed.
Also, it brings up another great question that might be worth its own topic: what are some noteworthy "dead" games?
Another dead game- one you could technically acquire still, but only through... Well, let's go with "shady" means- which was unlisted so far permanently by Ubisoft, is Driver San Francisco. Music and such was on a five-year deal, or maybe the cars, or whatever, and now the game is gone from any legally-acquirable method.
Where Driver games often had the ability to get out of your car and steal other vehicles and stuff like that- a kind of GTA-like theme- Driver San Francisco is distinctly different. Instead of hopping out of your car, you have the ability to "Shift", which pans the camera way up into the sky and allows you to take control of another car, hopping straight into the driver's seat... And often right into the middle of an ongoing conversation with the person in the passenger seat. There's a genuinely absurd amount of dialogue and interesting details that they threw in purely for the love of the game, and now it's almost impossible to experience that on your own.
There's a video discussing it in a bit more depth (and... uh... buying a key for it with a subway gift card) here (edit: sorry for not warning earlier, massive spoilers for the actual game happen through the video, obviously): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkxzQDo0ng
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Think of the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, but a zombie survival sandbox. Water melts and freezes as the weather changes, the zombies track you by fully modeled smell, sight, and hearing depending on their capabilities, storage is tracked by size, weight, and volume (so that you can't fit a full pool cue into a paper bag,) combat and noncombat skills alike are tracked in detail, with learning controlled by how much mental focus you have remaining, which is in turn controlled by how happy, rested, and healthy you are. Nutrition and hydration are important, with the levels rising not at the moment that you eat, but at differing rates for liquids and solids as they rest in your stomach. You can fix a car, weld on spikes and solar panels, and drive your doom-mobile into a river. If you've built it with appropriate draft, it'll float. And so on, and so on. It's incredibly detailed in its simulation, and is communally developed, so if you find yourself interested in fixing something or adding content, you can do so.
It's a very special delight, but it is a delight.
Vintage Story has been described as "Minecraft for adults," but I think that really sells it short. I prefer to describe it as "what Minecraft should have been," or in other words, if Minecraft had taken a more hardcore survival bent, and been endowed with a better building system (you can customize almost any block in the game with a "microblock chiseling" system), and had a more interesting and deeply simulated world to explore and a meaningful technology progression, we might have had a game more like Vintage Story a decade ago.
As it is, Vintage Story has an active community, is being updated with new features regularly, and is well and truly alive. I play on multiplayer servers frequently.
Since you were previously interested in Human Resource Machine, you might like Manufactoria, a great little flash game about solving computation problems with conveyor belts. Except, of course, Flash is no more, so you might need some sort of alternative sofware to get it to play (I haven't tested it!)
It appears to be available through Flashpoint!
So these are both on Steam, but are definitely niche.
Achron, to my knowledge the only game with multiplayer time travel mechanics. Have not actually played myself, but every now and then I get tempted to.
Prismata is a strategy nerd's dream. I was thoroughly addicted for about 5 years, when the kickstarter campaign started in 2014, before the steam release in 2018. I've got more playtime on this game than almost any other. It's worth giving a go to play against the surprisingly good AI. Singleplayer is mostly a dud and multiplayer is likely mostly just seasoned veterans (if anyone) at this point.
Here's a bit of obscurity I just dug up: Jason Rohrer's 2010 "game" Sleep Is Death (compellingly described in this feature on Boing Boing). It'd be more appropriate to label it as a collaborative improv storytelling experience, dressed up as a 2d pixel-art adventure game.
In a nutshell, the player has unlimited freedom to interact with any object, go anywhere, say anything to anyone. Actions are not interpreted by the game engine, but by another human, the "controller." This is strictly a 2-person experience. The stories that emerge are surprising, funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes vulgar. If both players are committed to the roleplay, the results can be fantastic.
The game is still available, presumably it works on modern machines but I haven't played it in years. As I recall there's no built-in matchmaking so you're on your own to find a partner, which pretty dramatically limits its playability. However, in its heyday the now-defunct fan site SIDtube was a great way to find other players, share game asset packs, and publish your game sessions as "flipbooks" for others to enjoy.
Through SIDtube, I played a few games with strangers, with mixed results, but really enjoyed the flipbooks others uploaded. So many unique stories were told through there. Unfortunately when the site disappeared so did those — HOWEVER! Looking today I discovered that they have all been archived as YouTube videos (of all formats) in this playlist. There doesn't seem to be any organization to them, so I can't point you to particularly noteworthy ones but I recommend clicking through once you're familiar with the format, to see what gems you can find. You'll definitely want to reduce your playback speed to make the flipbooks readable in video form.
I can't claim to know about many small and interesting ones but here's at least a start for people that want to jump into abandonware with some major titles that I don't think should be forgotten about.
First of all: https://www.myabandonware.com
Black & White and Black & White 2 aren't available digitally, likely due to IP issues since Lionhead was bought by Microsoft and these games were published by EA. The first game was especially revolutionary as a 2001 game since you had a virtual AI pet that you could train through interacting with it and it would develop its own personality.
Simpsons Hit & Run was a surprise cult hit, and a must-play for any big Simpsons fan. A lovingly well-realized 3D Springfield, tons of references, classic humour, and a surprisingly decent approximation of PS2-era Grand Theft Auto gameplay. The game was enough of a hit to inspire a surprisingly robust mod community that still goes on today.
The Operater: No One Lives Forever and No One Lives Forever 2 have not been available since the mid-2000's, even before Steam had started selling third party games digitally at all. One of the quickest abandoned games ever despite being some of the most interesting and creative shooters of the time, especially the second. Also probably one of the earliest examples of a female protagonist that had a real personality, drive, and ambition that wasn't just "a lady that is badass like a man is" as quite a few other female protagonists of the era were. Don't quote me on this, maybe it hasn't aged well, I can't pretend to be an expert, but I remember she stood out to me in the sea of video games for these reasons. A fanmade revival site has been keeping the series alive for a long time.
There's a Hit and Run open source engine in the works, but development seems to be stalled a bit.
Heavy Gear - Licensed and awkwardly Win95. I grew up with Mech Warrior 2 but I admire HG for its reduced scale and increased mobility. I know the sequel reviewed better; give me both.
Heretic 2 - Oh hey, another licensed game, and now MS will own all the relevant stakeholders. Not as dated as HG, but probably a pain to get running today.
KISS: Psycho Circus - The Nightmare Child - No, this isn't a gag. I'm not a KISS fan, but this was a lot of fun. But again, licensed, and both publisher and dev are long dead.
Alien vs Predator 2 - This is the Monolith sequel to Rebellion's first AvP. I loved the way the campaigns intersected. Every other AvP has paled in comparison.
Wheel of Time - Another licensed game by a dead dev/publisher. Super early Unreal engine but tons of spells instead of guns.
OFF has been on my to-play list for a while. Release in French, fan translated to other languages.
Technically, you can get Johann Sebastian Joust on Steam but good luck playing it without also buying a bunch of PS Move controllers. It's very fun but I think it's very hard to get the necessary components together.
On the topic of romhacks, LockSmithArmy's , specifically Red, Gold, and Crystal Emu Editions, and UltraViolet, which recreates the Red/Blue experience on GBA. No fanfiction, no extended story, no major modifications, except to add a separate region to be able to complete the Pokedex with non-native pokemon in Ultraviolet. Most other romhacks I find completely rework one part or another, but these are basically vanilla. You'll want the manuals handy to know what is where, because some locations are changed. In the Red, Gold and Crystal hacks any pokemon not originally in the game have like a 1% chance of being caught, but will still be in their original region. Getting them feels about like trying to catch a Pikachu in Viridian Forest: Takes a while, but doesn't feel like you're suffering for it.
EDIT: Pokemon Ultraviolet is a forward-port of Gen1, not Gens 1 and 2.
I’m not sure whether I dreamed this or not, because I have never been able to find it, but there was a cool game that shipped with Amiga systems. In it, you were voyaging through the mind of a mad scientist, trying to fine the hidden code or something. Brilliant storytelling, gameplay, and puzzles, blew my young mind (friend had an amiga).
Also, fun puzzle game of a digit’s jouney through an early macintosh, 3 in three.