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Recommendations for a obscure newer games
What are some newer obscure titles that you would personally recommend?
Let's say something from a five years ago and that is really unlikely to be known by somone else unless you told them about it. But it really is not that important.
I am looking for some small studio or personnal project that manages to take whatever it is based around and create an entertaining experience.
Also I am posting this as hopefully a way to surface smaller titles that someone considers good.
I've not really got any super hidden gems but...
Noita - Incredible rogue lite with some of the most interesting mechanics and unfolding/emergant gameplay. But it's for masochistics. Be a wizard and try to work out how everything works. Including how to actually win the game.
Blue Prince - The best emergant gameplay I'd say period, more layers than an onion and an ogre put together. Great if you love puzzles, even better if you have a friend or a partner to play alone with to try and solve the game together. You inherit your great Uncles mansion on the condition you make it to the mysterious 46th room in the 45 room house. Except the room layout changes every day. Good luck!
Return of the Obra Dinn - slightly outside 5 years but this has really unique gameplay and really hooks you in if you like a (murder) mystery. Try to find out how 30+ crew members all died after a merchant ship went missing in the early 1800's.
I played this to scratch an itch after playing Outer Wilds. It's a nice game but it also felt very tedious at times. Maybe it's because it didn't quite fill the Outer Wilds void but it didn't do it for me
(imo) It's the book. I irritation-quit the game after the fourth or fifth time the game yanked me out of the scene to watch a full minute of page flipping. That fucking book refuses to let you play the game; you spend as much time waiting on the book to finish flipping its pages as you do playing the actual game.
Aside from the book stealing >50% of the runtime, the game looks (and is) excellent.
God, yes. The way your investigation of the scene is at the whim of that musical piece - either making you wait until it's done, or yanking you out before you're done, at someone else's pace - is one of the most viscerally jarring things I've ever encountered in a video game. I also Alt-F4'd during the one scene below board that happens with a number of sequential deaths. And while I love me some good dithering, I think the one-bit style is terribly matched to a visually detail-oriented puzzle game.
The Case of the Golden Idol scratched my fill-in-the-blank murder mystery loop itch. Also has its own weirdo artstyle, and I liked the message I saw in it.
/offtopic
Return of the Obra Din has a wonderful dev blog for those of you into game dev. Here's a page where the dev works on stabilizing the dither: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.780
Edit: mind that the blog does have spoilers if I recall correctly, the linked page is safe but other pages are YMMV
I second Noita, it's brilliant.
If you find yourself getting frustrated, it is a good idea to go to the Workshop and get Edit Wands Always. Technically it's cheating, but it makes the game so much more accessible and fun when you are struggling to even understand what's going on.
To each their own and by all means do what's fun when you're playing a game! Single player games can be enjoyed in so many different ways and none of them are cheating if you're entertained.
However, my enjoyment in Noita has come from building my skills through the difficulty it presents. That lack of understanding often leads to hilarious interactions and ridiculous scenarios that might get missed otherwise. All of that struggle builds experience, much like any Souls-like game. Finding that Edit Wands Anywhere perk early on after several deaths in a row feels like a blessing, even though you know your next death is just around the corner.
Oh I forgot. Expedition 33 is somewhat Obscur.
1000xRESIST is pretty good. From the blurb
Agreed, it's pretty good. My opinion on the recurring thread Tildes, and @Gaywallet's one
I bet nobody's heard of this one. The Thief, the Witch, the Toad, and the Mushroom is a darkly whimsical choose-your-own-adventure style game, with fantastic art and solid writing. It's a one man project, as far as I know, and when you're done you can check out the designer's blog at https://rottenpulp.blogspot.com.
Mutazione is a most delightful game, one of my favorites I played last year. I laughed, I felt like crying, I felt at peace, I felt at home. The steam description puts it better than I could.
Just so much heart. It's often on good sale if you haven't pulled it as a freebie somewhere already, I got it off a fanatical bundle for $1.
Gedonia is certainly a sort of special. A single dev inspired by the likes of classic WoW and (Old School) Runescape, this single player RPG has heart and eurojank aplenty. Are the graphics good? Nah. Voice acting? Lol no. Plot? OK if I'm feeling generous. But I still kept coming back for more, I had fun with it! The dev is working on a sequel now in early access and just announced bringing on another dev to help finish the expansions he wanted to add to the first Gedonia. I also picked this up for a buck from a fanatical bundle.
Severed Steel was a thrilling, high octane shooter. You're doing full parkour action while shooting the baddies, don't stop or you'll drop. Literally, you don't take damage while doing parkour so you gotta string together your movement. But you've got a bullet time gauge you can activate for a bit to help aim while running around. Ain't nobody got time to reload, we don't do that here, just toss the gun and grab another. Also got this in a fanatical bundle at a good deal.
CrossCode is amazing. A pixelated JRPG with real-time combat, this is a love letter to both classic JRPGs and MMOs. You play on a planet that serves as the setting for an MMO that people load into avatars to play while trying to discover who you are and what's going on here. They do a great job recapturing that feeling of being in an MMO even in a single player game. The puzzles in the dungeons are as hard as I remember dungeons in Zelda being when I was a kid, which is to say they can be hard. I put this one down and come back to it regularly, I've got to wrap up the dlc one of these days.
I can throw in my support for CrossCode! Beyond the amazing pixel art, the characters are all charming and the gameplay is smooth as butter.
I highly recommend Before The Green Moon. I'm surprised to see it only has a hundred or so reviews, but maybe it's because the market is saturated with 'farming' sims. Regardless, if you like old school harvest moon, or even gc era Animal Crossing, this game has a vibe much like that.
Tunic is a fantastic Zelda-like from 2022. I don't know if it's obscure exactly, but I don't think it made a huge splash. There's a ton going on in the game, and one of the really fun mechanics is that they don't immediately explain all of the mechanics, the digital rulebook/guide fills out as you discover them yourself. There are also some wickedly challenging puzzles.
If you like roguelites and/or Zelda (esp. Link to the Past) and puzzles, I very strongly recommend Tunic.
I linked him here before, but https://buried-treasure.org/ is great for this.
I mostly only play smaller indie games these days so I'll sort of work backward over what I have. I'm taking the money from cancelled subscription services and I'll throw some of that savings at indie projects.
The King is Watching. Resource management + auto-chess game where people in the kingdom only work in the king is "looking" at them. So you need to be very deliberate about placement because the vision box can be pretty weird shapes. Brutally unforgiving in the early game but there's a lot of hidden systems and story telling.
Ziggurat 2. FPS rogue lite in the vein of Robot Quest. Wide variety of spells (guns) and playable characters. But you very quickly see all the room layouts, modifiers and enemies/bosses. Also a profound lack of secrets to discover. But it speaks to my love of wonky and unconventional weapons and gameplay is clean. Would benifit from some content injections.
Tower Domination: One of the better rougelike tower defence game where you build out the map on to of randomized tower selection. Plenty of hero characters over 3 unique factions. Herp abilities range from minor to overpowered. Feels like there are very few winning strategies at the highest difficulties but plenty to unlock over a week or two.
Commander Quest. Its shamelessly Slay the Spire Autochess. Early access with a significant map and unit veriety. But its very hard to roll into good synergy because the vast majority of cards are not hero specific. I know it a concern for the devs in the latest patch but haven't played it yet.
Nitro Gen Omega. This is Neon Genesis Evangallion meets persona with time travel. You got a small squad of Mecha Kids. It's turn based combat where you sequence movements and actions on a timeline and constantly be beaten when they act in erratic ways. The trick is to build a profile on enemy strategies to predict when and how they will act. Amazing art-style and vibe but they do a pretty bad job onboarding new plplayers
Nitro Express. A short side scrolling shooter where you are a 2 person task force that specializes in taking out crazy AI robots that were mass produced and forced on an Anime city. Its like a mix of Contra and Metal Slug with a good selection of weapons and level scenarios. Very Saturday Morning Cartoon is theme and humour.
Star Vaders. Another Mecha combat game but this is more combination of sliding grid puzzles, space invaders and of course, deckbuilding. Can get through most of it in about 10 hours but it's fun for 20. Not nearly as much staying power as Balatro or Spire but it's very well put together.
Dungeons of Hinterburg. I'll just say it's 3d Zelda with persona social shenanigans, but as a European holiday.
A Hand With Many Fingers. Investigate a real life CIA Black Op. You get to bring up files from the Archives. You get a conspiracy board with infinite string.
Sheepy: A Short Adventure. Its free and short and I'm not spoiling.
+1 for The King is Watching, that was going to be my suggestion unless someone else mentioned it. I've been hooked on this game since the demo came out in next fest. It may be a bit confusing when you first launch into it, and the tutorial doesn't explain everything to prevent you from getting overwhelmed, but I've never played anything like it. Works super well on the SteamDeck, has a ton of replayability and progression, the works. It's so much fun
edit: I misread newer as older in your title but a lot of my advice still applies:
I enjoy the Chzo Mythos series. It has its own TV Tropes page so I suppose it is not too obscure.
In hopes of finding an uncommon DS game yesterday I went through the full list of physical DS cartridge games spread across multiple Wikipedia pages. There are similar game databases as well like MobyGames. A good way to find something obscure is to get a list of as many titles as you can then deduplicate it and exclude the popular titles. I found quite a few unusual games yesterday by doing just this:
I haven't played any of these but out of the 3000+ DS games list these seemed interesting and I hadn't heard of them prior to this!
Of course there's also super indie and homebrew games which you could construct a similar list by scraping itch.io and GitHub.
The culdcept games are so good, but nobody has heard of them.
Funny to see Fantasy Life listed as obscure. It definitely was when it was on 3DS, but a sequel came out this year that's gained a lot of traction in cozy gaming communities.
Fair enough! I don't have much experience with the 3DS
Sorry, I probably won't explain too deeply here, as I'm tired this morning, but here are a few of my favorites from recent memory:
Pentiment is probably one of my newest favorite games of all time. Taking place in medieval Bavaria, you're an artist off to complete their masterpiece when there's a murder you're suddenly enlisted to solve. Gather as much evidence as you can, try and finger someone, you'll eventually be pressed to do so with incomplete information. Choices that matter and a story that twists and turns, I still need to play it again.
Felvidek is kind of batshit. You're an alcoholic knight in 15th Century Slovakia and, I gotta be real honest, I don't totally remember the story. Don't hold that against the game, as I have a poor memory, but the vibes in this one are just fantastic. The music is excellent, the things you fight are ridiculous, the characters are hilarious and just it's... It's really good. Highly recommended. It's a JRPG in effect, but it's much more story focused, so no worries about grinding or the traditional JRPG tropes.
Skald: Against the Black Priory is grim, just utterly dark and grim. Don't let the graphics fool you, this one is excellent with the images it conveys and the atmosphere it builds; it helps that the gameplay is excellent too. Rewarding exploration, fun tactical fights and fun character/RPG system all compound the dark vibes and grim story, this one is a must play for me.
Bonus round:
Armoured Commander 2 is a WW2 Tank Commander roguelike. I'm not huge into Roguelikes, but I spent a good 5 hours in it and I intend to go back. Choose your period of the war, Early, Mid or Late, choose your country, even minor players being represented here and finally choose your armored vehicle, from tanks, tanks destroyers, half-tracks, the list goes on. From there, enter the battlefield and try to scout before you move so you know what awaits in the next hex, call in support (air, artillery, infantry or armor, as needed) and move into battle. From there positioning is important, don't forget to hull down to make yourself a harder target and it's a good idea to unbutton your Commander, just so he has better battlefield visability to identify targets. Further still, select your ammunition, turret rotation and on and on, it's very granular, even having the ability to level up your crew and select new skills for them. Even if your tank is knocked out, you still have the opportunity to bail out and make it to safety, so you and your crew can fight another day.
Alright, that's what I've got.
Thanks for the review of Felvidek. It's on my radar. Do you think it would play well on a controller? Always looking for games for my SteamDeck due to work travel.
I played it exclusively on the Deck, so yes. All of my listed games were played exclusively on Deck, I should note.
immortality by Sam Barlow is one of a kind. you are piecing together what happened to an actress via live action footage. all your controls are select clip, play, pause, fast forward, and rewind.
it sounds basic on paper but
in all, i am still in awe at how such a thing was made.
trailer
after playing:
Don't know how popular or not they are, but my friends usually haven't heard about:
webbed
A cute sidescroller were you are a small spider that can shot web. Swinging like spiderman. Real fun and quick.
shotgun king
A chess themed turned based top down strategy shooter?
apico
A beekeeping simulation game in a pixel art world. You can selectively breed your beequeens to get better hives...
Teardown
You have to plan a heist, you get as long as you want to prepare but the time limit is tight once you touch the first item on your list... So you have to prepare carefully your route, put ramps and park cars in the right place to catch a few second... Did I mention everything is destructable?
Let me know if you liked any of them!
Gunpoint is a 2D stealth puzzle game where you play as a private investigator who likes to jump out of high windows.
A Short Hike is a game about taking a short walk to the top of a nearby hill - but really it’s about having a fun time exploring a cute island, interacting with charming characters and playing fun mini-challenges.
Jusant is a climbing game about uncovering the history of a lost civilisation.
Outer Wilds is a space exploration game where you need to solve the mystery behind a solar system stuck in a timeloop.
Gunpoint and A Short Hike are very short games (maybe 2 hours or so) and I recommend them especially strongly. For such a low time investment they are incredibly enjoyable.
RiME (2017)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rime_(video_game)
I'd encourage you to go in without reading much at all about the plot.
For some deeper cuts, I think it can be useful to find people who talk about more obscure/artsy indie games. A lot of times these games end up being smaller experiences, which contributes to their being more obscure.
I've discovered a lot of good games like this from watching Power Pak on Youtube. Their reviews aren't exclusively of these kinds of titles, but they've been how I discovered a fair few good smaller, more obscure titles. Other channels that have turned me on to interesting new titles that aren't big and popular even within the indie scene are Khanlusa and PlayItEssays. Each of these channels definitely has a different vibe in terms of the games they'll introduce you to, but you should be able to tell after one or two videos (maybe less) if their approach works for you and the types of games they show you are your jam.
I think these are relatively obscure:
Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia: A dungeon crawler in the vein of earlier Shin Megami Tensei games, but the demons are replaced with touhou characters. Looks like a snes game. Very gameplay focused with the typical smt features (demon fusion, emphasis on buffs and weaknesses, floor traps, etc). Made me fall in the touhou rabbit hole.
Natsumon: 20th century summer kid: You are the child of the owner of a small circus that is spending summertime in a small japanese village for work. You spend a month visiting the mountains, playing with the local kids, meeting the town folks, and looking for adventures. The vibe is very laid back and enjoyable, and you can parkour around a la breath of the wild (so I've read, I have not played BotW) and there are multiple mysteries and quests to do. I enjoyed it a lot.
Little Kitty, Big City: Natsumon but you are a small cat that fell off his apartment and now has to get back up with the help of the local fauna. The scope is much much smaller than Natsumon but it does not have day-night cycles. The parkour puzzles are also a bit more enjoyable. It is also very cute and funny.
I’m not entirely sure what qualifies a game as obscure these days, but here are a few games I’ve played recently. I’m also including a few games that are high on my wishlist, but need to wrap up some games in my backlog first.
Played Games
Infra (3000+ reviews)
Infra has you take on the role of a government worker who is tasked with inspecting the city’s infrastructure. While the game starts out fairly straight-forward it has a pretty interesting story with some cool twists and turns along the way, all while keeping the gameplay around inspecting. I think it’s a cool take on a walking simulator with added puzzles.
Obenseuer (1000+ reviews)
Obenseuer is basically a pseudo-sequel to Infra, but it’s a survival crafting game. You come into ownership of an apartment block, and must renovate it so that you can rent out the units to the citizens of the area. I haven’t played it a lot, but I’m hoping to jump back in once it’s closer to release since it’s an early access game.
Aneurism IV (3700+ reviews)
Very likely going to be my game of the year for 2025, Aneurism IV is a multiplayer-only game that I would consider in the same vein as Obenseuer, but with much lower stakes. You take on a series of roles and build karma to get better jobs. While some of the work may seem boring, it’s more about the social dynamics of playing in a world that is fully controlled by the players. The interactions I’ve had with people in this game have brought me back to the days of playing modded source games and GMod. It scratches an itch I didn’t even realize I had.
Voices of the Void (itch) I recently picked this up and I really have no idea how to describe it, to be perfectly honest. It’s a cross between Infra and Obenseuer gameplay wise, but the story and world it’s created has never made me feel so… tense? A game where you calibrate satellites and record deep space sounds shouldn’t make you feel this much tension. I don’t know a lot about where this game goes as I’m basically playing it blind, but I think that is the intended experience.
Wishlisted Games
Project Silverfish (1000+ reviews) a stalker-like ImSim.
Peripeteia (1400+ reviews) a EYE/DeusEx-like ImSim.
Lorn's Lure (2000+ reviews) - a Blame!-like parkour game.
MIK (unreleased) - Similar to Lorn’s Lure.
Tactical Breach Wizards (steam link) is an XCOM like tactical game, where you play as a group of tactical breach wizards. (Wizards, doing spec-ops-style missions). It's got a good sense of humor that I quite enjoyed. I played through the main game and a couple of the "bonus" missions in ~25 hours, so it's not a huge time commitment.
By a small team, same lead developer as Gunpoint, a 2013 2D puzzle platformer I quite enjoyed (and puzzle platformer is probably not the correct way to describe it). These two games make up two of the three games in the "defenestration trilogy". Because a main gameplay component in both of them is throwing/blasting/pushing enemies out of windows.
Some recommendations, organized from least obscure to most obscure:
A couple games by Studio Bytten:
Lenna's Inception and Casette Beasts
Lenna's Inception is sort of a randomized Legend of Zelda parody/extension with a twist: the "true end" is a mostly pacifist end. It plays phenomenally, and was designed on a randomized LoZ engine the dev made.
Casette Beasts is like an open world Pokemon-style game, similarly seeded and randomized, and absolutely a great experience. There are 144 beasts with a "bootleg" (shiny) for each type at 16 types each if you're into that sort of hunting as well. It's got a great story (that isn't a "We have to stop <bad group> from enslaving pokemon/dooming humanity" like the Pokemon series), and these two have interesting points of connection if you play Lenna's Inception to get the meta lore (Lenna's Inception came first).
I hadn't heard of Lenna's Inception until I got it in the Ukraine bundle on Itch.io, and it blew me away with how well-written the story was, how accurate the gameplay/world was to the SNES Zelda experience and the twists (items/abilities, similar to LTTP but different conceptually) were very well implemented, turning the whole world into a sort of navigational puzzle you progressively unlock like in a 2d Zelda game.
There's a whole world of retro shooters happening right now, as well. Obviously, 3dRealms is staging a comback, and New Blood is the big bad publisher on the block, but I want to call out smaller stuff to stay on topic.
Sprawl is based on Quake with wall running, environmental exploration, tight mechanics, absolutely phenomenal experience. They have a version called "SPRAWL96" that is available for free running on the Quake engine as well (I got it on Flathub on Linux, you can get it from their discord as well).
Hellforge is sort of ground zero for GZDoom-based games, providing showcases, publishing, collaboration for phenomenal games built on GZDoom, all commercial, and all legitimately commercial quality and vastly different styles.
In the same vein as above is Selaco a phenomenal FPS built on GZDoom. Each of these games all feel very different from each other, use different strengths. Don't think of them as versions of Doom or Doom TCs, the engine is extremely extensible.
One last Doom-based mention from me is the game Hedon Bloodrite which was the first experience I had with a commercial GZDoom game. It's got solid shooting sections, the solid 90s puzzle/arena/killroom format, and fascinatingly complex (but still solveable) puzzles. Again, built on GZDoom, sorta wears it more on its sleeves than the others, but does not really play like Doom, with interesting 3d (2.5d?) platforming sections, deep puzzles, and intricate kill zones.
Logistical 3 Earth is a transportation puzzle type game. You move cargo from place to place which is used to upgrade industries so you produce more of something, or unlock new roads/routes. This is the last game in the series, and serves as the culmination of years of development from the solo dev who created the series. I've been meaning to pick this up at some point, as I've enjoyed the other modules in the previous iterations that I have.
The dev created multiple different modules that essentially serve as different maps/puzzles and would often have a unique twist/region specific challenge to them, but the demo for this game captures the core of it the series. If you wanted more for free there are few small free modules he's released over the years that are fun to try out.
Lunacid A first-person dungeon crawler heavily inspired by the Kings Field series, I really enjoyed the exploration as they nailed the atmosphere and environments imo
I was also a big fan of Lunacid. There's a lot to like!
The setting is really moody and mysterious and just gets weirder the further you go.
Tons of secret areas which really reward exploration / seeing if you can actually get to places that seem impossible to go using creative movement / magic applications.
There's a broad range of weapons / magic to find, a lot of which play very differently.
There are a lot of builds you can make which also play quite differently.
It's pretty accessible. You'll lose all progress since the last save point if you die, but the difficulty isn't all that high and there are plenty of ways to cheese it.
My only real complaints:
If you don't look up a guide about what the stats actually do, you'll likely end up with a sub-optimal build. I don't think there's any way to screw it up to the point of being unplayable, though.
The difficulty spike at the last boss is kind of nasty. I got through everything beforehand but my build just wasn't fast enough to dodge its attacks and I ended up having to employ a cheesy strategy to win.
I've been playing Elin for the past week and it has sucked me in. I think this'll be hit or miss; if it's your thing, it's really your thing.
It is a sandbox fantasy life sim. There's two kinds of gameplay that feed into each other - adventuring, and building up your settlement.
I would maybe describe it as "Stardew Valley and a sandbox JRPG roguelike had a baby."
There is a lot of weird and unusual stuff in the game. You mostly don't need to engage with it, but occasionally it's unavoidable.
Children of Morta
Lost in Random
Signs of Sojourner
Little Sisyphus an old school platformer with interesting physics.
It's quite hard but also rewarding
Mika and the Witch's Mountain
Seems to be flying decently under the radar for as good a game as it is.
I gotta recommend Mouthwashing which is a psychological horror game released last year. Run time is 2-3 hours, gameplay is primarily interacting with NPCs and walking around the spaceship though there are a couple puzzle and stealth segments. There are some heavy topics including emotional abuse, narcissism, substance abuse, self harm, s**c*de.
It was very impactful for me and I continue thinking about it.
Perhaps not that obscure but I've really enjoyed The Wandering Village. It's a colony sim with some Nausicaa inspired themes and character art where you have to balance your resource needs that change based on the biome that the creature you've settled on ends up wandering into. It finally released from early access last month and added some fun end-game content too.