We also have a Steam curator page, but these are games we like that you won't find there.
If you currently work—or have worked—in a retail job, Night of the Consumers might give you frightening flashbacks. It's your first day at a new job at a general store and a band of ravenous customers have flooded the shop floor minutes before closing time. You'll need to run around keeping the store tidy and restocked as you fend for your life against ferocious customers after a bargain for their buck. It's fun and frantic but beware of the toothless old hag in the cereal aisle.
"Oooooooooh" is the noise you're looking for, perhaps followed by a "cor blimey", if you can muster the energy. Infested is a game in the style of the NES versions of Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited, and it seems beautifully authentic to that style of game. If you've not played those death-laden adventure games, Infested is a first-person (sorta) point and click where you explore a SEEMINGLY abandoned space ship. ('Seemingly' is code for zombies, you understand.)
You can chop down trees, then use the logs to build bridges or rafts. You can dig soil, plant turnips, harvest those turnips, then shove them into your fat gob. You can find maps of the vast procedurally generated world, and other, more mysterious trinkets. The best bit is the sun, which physically increases the size of the game world as it rotates around the screen—or indeed shrinks it as night approaches, and you can't see as far. Wonderful.
Deposits you in a stark, crystalline landscape, home to oddly tilted structures, tantalisingly distant buildings, and various secret little things. It's a place to just be in for a while: a place that envelopes you in atmosphere and with a comforting, shadowy mood.
A striking isometric puzzle game from Terry Cavvvvvvanagh. It starts in a lost town in a mysteriously shrinking world, before moving on to a sort of techno-labyrinth full of tricksy platforms and hidden ledges. To see the real world, you use a scanning device, which reveals the true layout of the environment.
As an intrepid private investigator who appreciates older women, you're in seventh heaven after boarding a train and finding three available women, each with a mystery to solve. In this attractive and well-written visual novel, you can choose which of the ladies to date/assist with their case, before restarting to diverge down the differing routes.
A celebration of friendships between women, of queerness, and of the courage to accept yourself for who you are, all washed down with a healthy dollop of humor.
I've done questionable things. In videogames, of course. But they haven't often gotten under my skin the way they did in cyberpunk game Localhost, which cast me as a cross between a network administrator and a repairwoman in a chop shop.
If Resident Evil 7 is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre then Anatomy is Kill List or Jacob’s Ladder or Under the Skin. It’s a short, slow game that refuses to use closets for monsters, positing the house itself, the medium, the geometry as what you should actually be afraid of.
You're stuck on a rickety ship with a murderous bandit in this inventive, funny, and handsomely drawn visual novel, which begins with the onset of an endless rain. Faced with the possibility of drowning in your home, you build a ramshackle vessel and take to the sea in Disaster Log C, while you wait for the rain to, er, blow over. Yeah, good luck with that.
The premise is a bit hard to parse at first: it’s a game about several generations of dogs developing a videogame opera based on the novel Tristram Shandy while Donkey Koch, their producer, directs and reinforces their tireless work with rambling, empty rhetoric.
If you like puzzlers, and you aren't keeping track of games made in PuzzleScript, then, ooooh, you can't see me right now, but I'm vigorously shaking my head. Anna Anthropy has made the latest PuzzleScript game I'd consider essential: Robot Heist. Robot Heist is a game about some robots doing a heist, and it's one of the few PS titles to feature real-time bits, in this instance enemy robots that move about of their own volition.
At its most basic level it's a bit like Pipe Mania if Pipe Mania's ultimate goal was to unlock the secrets of all existence.
A multiplayer twitch-based arena shooter that doesn't contain any guns. Instead, you fire your robot's hand at other players. If you hit, you'll swap places.
A game about shooting colourful space things with colourful space lasers, as explosions and lights and funny text and arrghhh what's going on happen all around you and now I'm dead.
An investigative "shooter" about crime and social media. Set after an explosion in a town square, your job is to find the perpetrator by searching a timeline of photos and matching them to the scene.
Each of RSSS's 15 minigames is a self-contained challenge of QWOP-like flailing. You must click and drag on your athlete to score in the crude 2D representations of each sport. What do you click? Where do you drag? RSSS never tells you, leaving your experimentation to collide with its basic physics.
You move a single icon in on an grid, solving tile-based combat challenges to progress to the next stage. What makes Ending stand out from innumerable other puzzle games is its randomly-generated roguelike mode, where you explore a dungeon that works on the same principle.
Thirty Flights of Loving developer Brendon Chung took a break from making Quadrilateral Cowboy to participate in the Space Cowboy gamejam. It's exactly what it sounds like: a competition to make the most Firefly of games. Chung's entry, Expat, fits the bill perfectly. You're a lone bounty hunter, taking on contracts and searching through backwater planets to find your target.
A 'supplemental' chapter to Night In The Woods, a tangential bedtime story between two of the game's cat characters. That story is of an astronomer's attempt to reach a frozen lake. Along the way, she meets a variety of unusual characters, gets involved in ancient forces she doesn't understand, and builds a snowman or two.
Games originally made for Kitty Horrorshow's Patreon patrons, and my, what the rest of us have been missing out on. Grandmother is my favourite here, because it's styled to look and sound like an old DOS game, and that is so my cup of tea I'm currently drinking it. Elsewhere, Leechbowl lets you explore a creepy industrial city, Circadia concerns a freaky cassette tape, and Pente takes you to a floating shrine.
You've quite literally got one chance to see this brief point-and-click adventure through to the end. It's set in a future where all life on Earth will be extinguished in six days: what you choose to do, who you choose to spend time with, and whether you accept your fate or try to fight it are the questions you're asked to answer.
It’s a game in the sense that you play on the tiny segment of beach and feel a sense of racing against the tide, but it’s also a relaxation tool. The simple interaction is very soothing when you choose to build but I’ve actually had Sandcastles running while I write this just to enjoy the sound of the waves.
This would be a poor sort of list without a Porpentine game. This one is a by turns surreal, sad and funny Twine story. Porp’s game satirises Tycoon sims, and the pursuit of money.
An inventive horror game that takes over a folder in your hard drive. Every time you boot it up it will place you somewhere new, and somewhere scarier. It only takes half an hour to complete, and the standout moment is a puzzle sequence that remixes the basic item-collecting of Slender.
