Gravity Ghost
Gravity ghosts is a 2D long hair terraforming ghost girl star collector simulator! The game can be completed under an hour in a speedrun however a normal run will probably take around 2-4 hours depending on how slow you go through all the content.
Story
+Saving pets bring out memories
The story follows a ghost girl collecting stars in the sky looking for not only her memories but how to help those in her past. Along her adventures she will meet many guardians who will challenge her for the planet cores. Upon returning the cores to the black hole thats formed in the middle of the galaxy, the planets will be return suspended in cryostasis state until terraformed by her powers.
– Real player with 11.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Indie Physics Games.
In each of the far corners of this dreamlike galaxy are the spirits of guardian animals, whimsical creatures that seem close and sentimental to a wandering soul of a young girl who explores ceaselessly through the cosmos. Floating between planets with the most graceful elegance and encountering this realm’s many colorful entities, each with their own history and past of mysteries for the playful space girl to discover.
Each node on our galactic map presents the player with a single stage of different planetary arrangements, some solid, some bouncy, some composed of water for you to splash through to the other side. Each maze of differently sized planet obstacles hides one shining yellow star to obtain and bring to the exit through skillful navigation and manipulation of gravity. Different plots on the sprawling and sparkling map hold the key to important elemental powers allowing you to become light as a feather and floating at a consistent level or heavy as a rock and plummeting towards the surface of a nearby planet. Successfully harnessing the power of these natural elements guides you easily through the galaxy.
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game
Bastion
Lie on my back
Clouds are makin' way for me
I’m comin' home, sweet home
~Darren Korb, Setting Sail, Coming Home
In my reviews I often talk about just how many developers treat their games like products. Well, technically, those are the products, of course, but… you can’t create anything really beautiful just by doing your job. If you’ll do your job good enough, you may come up with a really good product, but that’ll be just that. A product. While we all know that video games can be… something more than that. Much more. When Miller brothers started creating their MYST? It wasn’t because they wanted to make a popular game. Heck, they weren’t even gamers. They just had that certain vision and they really wanted to turn it into reality. To share it with the others. To let the others dive into it and experience it together. And it’s not just words. You can clearly feel such things. From Westwood Studious' magical worlds of The Legend of Kyrandia and Lands of Lore to Cyberdreams’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, based on Harlan Ellison’s short story. That certain artistic touch? That special something that makes a game more than just a game? As long as you treasure it as much as I do, I want to introduce you to one of my most favorite independent developers. Please, welcome – Supergiant Games.
– Real player with 41.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Indie Action Games.
Bastion 2012
When Bastion came out it was at the beginning of the Indie craze. People were first starting to realize that amazingly fun games could come from tiny studios with no budget. Well now in 2017 the term Indie game has all but lost its meaning both financially, and terms of team size. But at the time, a game with such deep combat, definitive flavor, and overall polish was a treat.
Bastion does a good job of grabbing you with the colorful paint-style world that appears beneath your feet as you move forward. Every action you do is narrated by a grandfatherly voice that explains the story and smaller moments. There was a time early in the game when I walked off the edge of the platforms and the narrator said “And that’s the end of the Kid’s story….I’m just kidding.” And I respawn and he says “The kid goes back for another round.” It was a charming break of the 3rd wall.
– Real player with 33.3 hrs in game
Griptape Backbone
Ａｃｃｏｒｄｉｎｇ ｔｏ ａｌｌ ｋｎｏｗｎ ｌａｗｓ
ｏｆ ａｖｉａｔｉｏｎ，
ｔｈｅｒｅ ｉｓ ｎｏ ｗａｙ ａ ｂｅｅ
ｓｈｏｕｌｄ ｂｅ ａｂｌｅ ｔｏ ｆｌｙ．
Ｉｔｓ ｗｉｎｇｓ ａｒｅ ｔｏｏ ｓｍａｌｌ ｔｏ ｇｅｔ
ｉｔｓ ｆａｔ ｌｉｔｔｌｅ ｂｏｄｙ ｏｆｆ ｔｈｅ ｇｒｏｕｎｄ．
Ｔｈｅ ｂｅｅ， ｏｆ ｃｏｕｒｓｅ， ｆｌｉｅｓ ａｎｙｗａｙ
ｂｅｃａｕｓｅ ｂｅｅｓ ｄｏｎ＇ｔ ｃａｒｅ
ｗｈａｔ ｈｕｍａｎｓ ｔｈｉｎｋ ｉｓ ｉｍｐｏｓｓｉｂｌｅ．
Ｙｅｌｌｏｗ， ｂｌａｃｋ． Ｙｅｌｌｏｗ， ｂｌａｃｋ．
Ｙｅｌｌｏｗ， ｂｌａｃｋ． Ｙｅｌｌｏｗ， ｂｌａｃｋ．
Ｏｏｈ， ｂｌａｃｋ ａｎｄ ｙｅｌｌｏｗ！
Ｌｅｔ＇ｓ ｓｈａｋｅ ｉｔ ｕｐ ａ ｌｉｔｔｌｅ．
Ｂａｒｒｙ！ Ｂｒｅａｋｆａｓｔ ｉｓ ｒｅａｄｙ！
Ｏｏｍｉｎｇ！
Ｈａｎｇ ｏｎ ａ ｓｅｃｏｎｄ．
Ｈｅｌｌｏ？
－ Ｂａｒｒｙ？
－ Ａｄａｍ？
－ Ｏａｎ ｙｏｕ ｂｅｌｉｅｖｅ ｔｈｉｓ ｉｓ ｈａｐｐｅｎｉｎｇ？
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Indie Experience Games.
level design: 11/10
music: phire/10
controls: 5/10
felt like driving a container ship on lean.
Steve ol' boy, love your style. came here after playing awkward demension redux. it’s never about the actual gameplay it’s about the art and the feels. games need more phylisophical pointlessness nowadays.
only thing i didnt like were the controls. turning was more of a suggestion rather than an actual control, which made it tough to do the line rides you want. and the gravity is awkward. the wall-riding code made your freefall gravitate toward whatever angle surface you were close to, which would cause mid-air seizures sometimes. but none of these made it unplayable.
– Real player with 2.2 hrs in game
Shatter
Shatter is the best Breakout game I have ever played, It took the best of the classic and improved on it, You can suck, blow, shoot, shield, Fire as many balls as you want and there even are bosses.
The game has a bunch of gamemodes, Story mode which takes you through the 10 chapters which all have a bunch of levels, Some are horizontal some are vertical some are even round, And at the end of each chapter there is a boss level, Which is just super cool, Boss levels in a breakout game, The bosses are very well made, After the boss level you get a bonus level and then on to the next chapter.
– Real player with 104.5 hrs in game
Shatter is a visually amazing brick breaking game with the best soundtrack of its genre. Whether you keep it old school and rely solely on your skills of maneuvering the “bat” and hitting the ball at the right angle or if you use the new “Suck” & “Blow” gameplay mechanics to help guide the ball where you need it to be, this easy to play yet challenging to master game will give you hours upon hours of enjoyment. And don’t forget the “Shard Storm” should you need help taking out some bricks or just want to eliminate the bosses faster.
– Real player with 39.8 hrs in game
ESC
First off, I haven’t spent 14 hours playing (reading?) ESC. I played half of it, went to bed, then played the other half in the morning. Ironically, I was afraid of pressing esc and possibly losing my progress.
First off, the writing, music, and atmosphere are phenomenal. It was so immersive and I felt like I was actually there with the characters (who weren’t actually there themselves). The multiple story reveals felt earned and organic. At times the writing was creepy, at others it was witty, and at some it was so engaging that I forgot to breathe. I laughed out loud at some parts and was on the edge of my seat for others. The ending was bittersweet and the ending of the chapter right before the epilogue made me cry, ‘cause I’m just that sorta person. The themes of the story resonated with me so strongly that I was even more invested in the story that I thought I’d be when I started, this was also due to the fact that I adored all the characters.
– Real player with 14.0 hrs in game
This story is beautiful, a truly enrapturing exploration of identity and social experience. It explores existential themes without losing connection to the grounded experiences of humanity, and it explores mundane experiences without losing appreciation for their greater significance. And on a more personal note, as someone who came into adolescent internet use in the mid/late 2000s, the MUD framing gave me a profound feeling of connection to the mysterious internet experiences of people 10-15 years older than me, contextualizing the many scraps of references I’ve collected through the years to a bygone web I just barely missed experiencing. Then while I was sat there thinking about that fact, the story went and explored that theme of a reality shaped by place and time of birth too.
– Real player with 4.4 hrs in game
Manifest 99
Manifest 99 is a well executed VR story experience. There is no words, and all the characters are anthropomorphic woodland creatures. You are on a train and you rewatch various scenarios where the crow character (who I suppose is you?) steals tons of stuff from the other characters, but then everyone but him dies, and he repents, and returns the objects to their heirs. Har har, spoiled it. I think what you return (at the end cinematic) is based on what you find during the experience. This is a cell phone VR game, where it’s all gaze based, and the scale is that gigantic 3DOF style, but you get used to it after a while.
! Incidentally, it is a Steam app that uses it’s name and not the appid as the trailing portion of the community hub URL. https://youtu.be/vKUI09UeO9M
– Real player with 4.0 hrs in game
According to my library, there are 16 games I would call “Art”. Games that force me to consider something about myself or the world around me, games that elicit an emotional response weather it’s the 1st or 50th time I’ve played. The games in this category range from games like Journey or The Talos Principle to games like Night in the Woods or OneShot.
This is one of those 16.
The game isn’t long at all- my first playthrough clocked in at about 20 minutes- but every second had something for me, be it wondering why something was happening, or (and this actually happened after the second chapter) falling to my knees in despair as the truth set in.
– Real player with 1.8 hrs in game
A Bird Story
tl;dr - Join a mute, lock-and-key boy on his long acid trip where he nurses an injured bird back to health. 11/10 lackluster emotional ride.
A disclaimer before we begin: I have not played To the Moon yet. I currently have a cat, I had rabbits on two different occasions, and also a budgie. I did not play this game for 4 hours, it was more like ~1 - I left the game running while I went out because of its horrible checkpointing system; I refused to play through any scene again.
I got this game gifted to me by a generous friend, and was interested to see what the text/voiceless gameplay would be like.
– Real player with 4.7 hrs in game
A short, whimsical, bittersweet interactive story with surreal elements, lovingly detailed and narrated without any dialogues.
A bird story is one of those games where much of your enjoyment will depend in your pre-existing expectations of games, and in what you will read into the themes and the story. It is only mildly interactive and quite linear, and much of the time you are simply watching scenes unfold, yet I personally found some of the interactive moments all the more impactful because of that. It is simultaneously visually impressive for what it manages to create out of its tools, and pretty simplistic. The sometimes funny, sometimes sad visual story will be very evocative for some and almost saccharine for others, and I can easily understand both points of view. And yet I could vividly remember every detail of the 1 hour experience, a week after first playing the game. Emotionally, it hit all the marks for me. The way it manages to utilize the pixels, the colour palette, the music, the sound, the subtlest of animations to create its unspoken narrative is masterful. A second playthrough made me smile when I realised how much it uses little gaming conventions (taken out of their usual contexts) to help tell the story. There are just so many clever design details jam-packed into this tiny story, that a second playthrough actually felt worth the time, despite the fact that there is no new content to experience.
– Real player with 2.5 hrs in game
Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion
3D open world adventure. It’s a grand Easter egg hunt where every so often you discover secret entrances to areas containing physics-based puzzles.
Controls
The game first teaches you the movement and tools. Oh, and what glorius controls these are! You can use a controller but I found this to be one of those games where you need accuracy, and the right-stick just doesn’t cut the mustard, you need the mouse for accurate targeting. WASD to move, spacebar to jump and tab (or 1234) to scroll through your four mouse-activated tools, which are: Build - set a ‘seed’ block and then extend more blocks from it in any direction - this is by far the most widely used; Cut - mouse wheel to rotate angle of cut and hold to increase length; Push - rarely used; Clean - remove blocks, hold to increase cleaning area.
– Real player with 28.4 hrs in game
This is a game that could have been great if there had been a map, but it is merely good without it. Apparently there is a map room, but I never found it! The world is huge and I went through it twice and completed 98%. Don’t know where the rest is! I completed the epilogue and tried to find more, but was unsuccessful.
Graphics are minimal with a very pallid monochrome world with flashes of colour when you completed a monolith. Be aware that it is very hard on the eyes!! Along your journey, you come across various collectables such as steles which relate the story of The Way and the downfall of an ancient civilisation. I found only half of the 76 of them. There are also echoes (black spots) - I found 60 of the 67.
– Real player with 23.0 hrs in game
Elbub
This game may look very zen on the outside.
When you start playing you might feel like you’re inside a mysterious bubbley type world-
Then you start playing…
You realize you need to be global elite to aim to head towards the bubbles.
Or an experienced austronaut working outside the hubble/space station.
Then you realize you have to follow the ribbon to finish the game xD
Took me 10min to realize that :)
Overall good game, just hard to navigate at the 1st time i guess ;)
It has a nice soundtrack too.
– Real player with 9.3 hrs in game
This thing is weird. Really.
The first thing we see launching the game is a menu written in a fancy font related to being a bubble among skies. I don’t mind the font, but the choice of colors is terrible and it looks really bad.
The game itself is playing with gravity by attracting yourself to nearby bubbles in a weird world. There is only sky, a very weird blob-like construction, some strings that we should follow, bubbles of course. And nothing more. It’s psychodelic. Even more when we hit something. And even even more when we click right mouse button by accident.
– Real player with 4.0 hrs in game
Etherborn
8.5.2020. Game #122
DO NOT BUY THIS AT FULL PRICE. WAIT FOR A SALE
I know this is mean way to start a review but if you are going to take anything with you from this review, take those two sentences. Now with that out of the way, let’s begin.
The human mind, its wasted potential and other nonsense
Etherborn is a game that tries to way too hard to be deep and meaningful. The second you start a new game you will be hit with confusing statements how the human mind and body are wasted potential and how humans could have done so much more with ourselves but how instead we settled on mediocrity and blah blah blah blah, I’m sick of it already. This game pretty much talks about the same thing that those hidden Gods that created the world talk about in Assassins Creed games
– Real player with 4.8 hrs in game
Etherborn is one of those Humble Bundle indie games that will last you less than a few hours. My playtime says 4 hours, 1 of those was me being AFK. I went in fresh, so I would imagine that if you’re better at puzzle games or already know the answers you’d be able to pass this much faster.
The game has a nice aesthetic. I’d imagine that a significant portion of development time was spent getting the art style right. It follows a simple design that comes through with lighting and shading. There’s also a decent soundtrack here. I won’t call it the best I’ve heard, but there’s a variety of instrumentation with an ensemble that clearly knows what they’re doing. And they do it well.
– Real player with 4.8 hrs in game