I love obscure and overlooked games and want to share a bunch with all of you. Most “hidden gem” threads end up listing titles with thousands of reviews or that got some level of marketing. I aim to mostly avoid that. While you may see a few familiar games here, everything in the list below has under 1500 reviews on Steam and most have far less. Far fewer had any notable marketing push or appearance in gaming shows or directs. And since the Steam Sale is ongoing, it’s the perfect time to try these games for yourself.
If you’d like more recommendations, comment with at least three games you like and I’ll respond with a couple more indie games hopefully suited to your tastes. Hope you enjoy!
False Skies - 37 Reviews
- A JRPG with simple GameBoy graphics but scale matching and surpassing lots of genre classics. It’s most similar to Dragon Quest III, since both deal with custom parties and somewhat open exploration of their worlds.
Hyperspace Delivery Service - 37 Reviews
- A Star Trek inspired take on Oregon Trail. There’s a bunch of minigames based around travel and planets and events like fighting space pirates to make each trip across space feel fresh.
Treasures of the Aegean - 57 Reviews
- Imagine if Tomb Raider was a 2D metroidvania and had a timeloop mechanic. That’s this game. The parkour system feels great too.
DIG - Deep in Galaxies - 79 Reviews
- Terraria/Starbound + Noita + Spelunky = this game. Fly through space to dig through planets and create broken character builds. The first free content update was also just released.
Star Drift Evolution - 169 Reviews
- A racing game with 75 tracks, 51 vehicles, multiple camera modes, and some great handling. Probably most similar to Art of Rally, but this has more variety.
Prodigal - 182 Reviews
- A Zelda-like game with Stardew Valley-esque characters and interactions. Loads of dungeons and a charming (if simple) story all wrapped in a GameBoy Color aesthetic.
Intergalactic Fishing - 211 Reviews
- Travel to infinite lakes and fish in them. Despite the simple graphics there’s a lot being simulated and yet the complexity of it all never makes the game overwhelming.
Elsinor - 235 Reviews
- An adventure game about Hamlet, but you play as Ophelia and she’s caught in a Groundhog Day scenario. While I don’t think this is the best narrative game (that would be Scarlet Hollow), I do think this is the most intriguing one with so many clever and interesting ideas to share.
RITE - 251 Reviews
- A difficult precision platformer like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, and I Wanna Be The Guy. It’s split into dozens of bite-sized levels so it’s easy to pick up for short play sessions.
Ctrl Alt Ego - 350 Reviews
- An immersive sim that stands toe to toe with classics like Deus Ex and Prey. You play as a detached consciousness which can jump between robots to make your way through various missions and levels however you want.
The Eternal Cylinder - 383 Reviews
- This is like Spore, but even weirder and there’s a cylinder that’s going to kill your aliens.
ADACA - 449 Reviews
- Imagine S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with Halo’s weapons and a special move that’s Half Life 2’s gravity gun and you’ve got ADACA. The two current story acts are just an introduction to the more open zone mode with quests and mysteries to explore and solve.
Legend Bowl - 723 Reviews
- If you ever played Tecmo Bowl or Superbowl on the SNES, this is basically an upgraded version. I think this is the best American Football game on Steam. Mutant Football League is a close second.
Environmental Station Alpha - 1046 Reviews
- It’s really difficult, but I think this is the best encapsulation of the Metroidvania formula. Plus the postgame is more substantial than you’ll probably expect.
Heaven’s Vault - 1410 Reviews
- Did you like uncovering the secrets of an ancient alien civilization in Outer Wilds? This offers something like that, with a slower pace, more direct narrative, and focus on learning a lost language.
Northern Journey - 1453 Reviews
- Explore a mystical and mysterious Nordic region. The atmosphere this game builds for itself through environments and music is possibly the best I’ve ever experienced in any game ever. It’s really that good.
Really enjoyed Heaven’s Vault.
Surprised that The Enteral Cylinder only has 300-ish reviews. I remember seeing it all over the new when it launched. How is it?
Oh wow, I missed it early on! The Eternal Cylinder is good, but some occasionally clunky gameplay alongside the very unique alien designs might turn some people away. It crashed twice on me and once you figure out all the systems of play it can feel simple (although there’s a lot of complexity under the hood), so I could see some people giving up on it due to frustration or boredom - especially if the aliens or story don’t hook them.
I loved the environments and alien concept (plus the fun stress of the cylinders approaching) which kept me hooked. Plus it’s much more mechanically involved than Spore was. Spent about 13 hours with the game and left satisfied. If I had to numerically rate it, it’s maybe around 8/10?
Adding some from my library
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Dropsy - 1329 Reviews
- A weird point and click with nice atmosphere. The soundtracks are neat too.
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The Blackwell Legacy - 1122 Reviews
- The Blackwell series are point and click games about ghosts. It’s cool to see familiar characters through out the series and how they change (or unchanged) .
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Railroad Ink Challenge - 65 Reviews
- It’s the digital version of a puzzle board game I highly recommend. High re-play value and fun to play solo or with friends. (The digital version should be solo only but you can compete with online leader boards)
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Railroad Ink Challenge looks really interesting. Thanks for sharing!
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Not sure if I would consider it a gem but this game gave me a good chuckle: Genital Jousting is currently on sale for 69 cents.
69¢, Nice. That had to be intentional.
The Age of Decadence is CRPG set in a post-apocalypse ish, in which an analogue to the Roman Empire ruled most of the world until the collapse of civilisation, now it’s mostly city states struggling to survive and reclaim the old magitek of the empire.
Underrail: Life on earth’s surface has been made inhospitable ages ago, and the remains of humanity now live in the metro system called underrail and the caverns around it.
Both are isometric, turn based games that focus on combat and exploration. And they are hard. Builds are incredibly important, almost min maxing but they have a wide range of viable builds, especially the first one where you can play the entire game without fighting a single battle, all through alternative solutions and skill checks.
Have you played Colony Ship, by the same devs as Age of Decadence? I’ve been keeping an eye on it for a while and looks to be real close to its 1.0 release, but I’ve not heard or read a lot about it.
No actually, I didn’t knew it was a thing. Added to my wishlist for when it’s released.
ΔV: Rings of Saturn
https://store.steampowered.com/app/846030/V_Rings_of_SaturnA hard sci-fi 2D space mining sim.
“A physics-based mining sim, set in the thickest debris field in Sol. Every action has a reaction, lasers are invisible without a medium, and your thrust is a potent weapon. Find trade, adapt your equipment to your playstyle, hire a crew to help. Unravel the mysteries of the rings, or just get rich.”∆V is absolutely fantastic! It just got 1.0 a couple weeks back and the dev is super down to earth, hope people check this out and it becomes a bigger hit.
One of my personal favorites is still Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, a 2D spaceflight shooter with text adventure RPG elements. At first it starts of pretty standard but there’s such an incredibly wide array of customization options that it’s almost daunting. Plus the developers really embrace the comedy over the course of the game to pretty extravagant levels. I mean, you literally fight a boss who manufactures DVORAK keyboards.
Oh that sounds awesome. Thanks for sharing!
These are some deep cuts right here! Thank you for linking and sharing about them!
Of course! Honestly it was tricky to not make the list even longer. There’s a lot of cool games out there people might miss.
I really love sunless sea and sunless skies. They are so beautiful and story rich. Extremely simple game mechanics. You basically explore an unknown map, uncover the story, make choices and allegiances and do your best to survive.
I personally found Sunless Sea to get boring after a while to the point of giving up on it. I think DREDGE might be more appealing, though I haven’t played it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1562430/DREDGE/
DREDGE is great, and does overlap with Sunless Seas in some ways, but is nowhere near as story driven (or weird). That said, it’s a lot easier/more forgiving, and has a simpler (and potentially more engaging) main gameplay loop.
I love the Sunless/Fallen London setting, and really wish Seas had some of the improvements of Skies, as I think I prefer the setting of Seas, but I’ve found it hard to go back to, having played Skies.
Agreed, sunless skies feels so much richer. Especially with the zubmariner portion.
Have you played A House of Many Doors? It’s very similar to the Sunless games, although not as polished.
This is a good list! I’ll be checking some of these out for sure. I also have some overlooked games of my own I’d like to list. No links since I’m on mobile, but I may edit them in later.
Qbqbqb (30): Simple arcade game with nice animation and catchy music.
Goetia (496): Spooky point-and-click with some very good puzzles in my opinion.
Under Leaves (530): Relaxing hidden object game with a nice art style. Great game to play when you’re stressed and want to turn your brain off.
Year Walk (1197): Horror adventure game with an off-putting atmosphere and interesting art style.
The Last Door (1541): Horror point-and-click adventure game with a lovecraftian feel.
+1 to Year Walk, I remember playing that on an iPod Touch when it first came out. I love Simogo, with games like Device 6 and Sayonara Wild Hearts, they make really unique games.
Wow, I can second The Last Door being great, but I don’t know most of these. Thanks for pointing them out!
Thanks for bringing out Goetia. I bought it back when i had to have any sounds as a distraction, Goetia being very silent at times drove me off almost instantly.
Just seeing that you mentioned good puzzles was enough to give a real go. 3 hours later i’m loving it.
Does Cogmind count? Because even when I see people discussing games like it, which are already pretty niche, it never comes up. That’s tragic, because oh my god, just read some of these articles. This developer is obsessive and even if you don’t get too deep into Cogmind it’s an incredible toy to just screw around with and just see what happens.
The visuals with that game are so impressive for what it is. It’s like they captured particle effects in 2D.
Second this, great game! One of the best modern traditional roguelike games right now.
Here are two 3D platformers I haven’t really heard a lot of but still had very fun with last year.
Demon Turf - 335 Reviews What pulled me in initially was the art syle, the games looks a bit like the cartoons from my childhood. This one got combat, exploration, bosses, collectables. A bit of a problem is that the game tried to do a lot of things at the same time, resulting in a bit uneven quality overall. There are also leaderboards if you into speedrunning.
Demon Turf: Neon Splash - 105 Reviews Some kind of standalone DLC/spinoff to the first game. In this game everything is more streamlined and the design feels more focused. Combat have been cut in order to give the platforming more time to shine and a reason to simplify the controls. The focus is on repeating the same levels for better a time on the leaderboard. Speedrunning is not really my thing but I still found enjoyment in the game. Much cheaper and short than Demon Turf.
I can recommend NEO Scavenger (slightly under 4k reviews). It’s hardcore survival game in post apocalypse world. I haven’t finished it yet, 'cause I always die in the process. Still very enjoyable if you’re into post-apo.
Terrible interface, but if someone appreciates roguelikes (technically not one, but much of the same DNA) that shouldn’t be enough to turn people away from a great game.
English Country Tune (153 reviews)
Fantastic super hard puzzle game from the person who would later create the more well known (and equally amazing) Stephens Sausage Roll (1001 reviews).
Both are graphically very basic but mechanically incredible and really well designed!
I recently watched my friend beat stephen’s sausage roll, a game that I have not been able to beat in 10 years. That game is bonkers hard. My arbitrary guess is that the number of people who have beaten the game is under 5,000. If anyone is looking for a puzzle game that will make your brain hurt, that is the game for you.
Thanks for the list, a few games really caught my eye.
Here is my contribution - Tametsi
A minesweeper which has hand-crafted levels so you can always solve it with logic instead of relying on luck when you are out of logical moves.
RUINER: Isometric twin-stick shooter with a 10/10 soundtrack. Basically zero advertisement, i only ever found out about it because I listen to similar music and got the soundtrack reccomended to me by the YT algorithm.
Oh I keep seeing this being recommended to me. How does it compare to The Ascent?
The Ascent is a longer game and leans harder into RPG elements than Ruiner ever does. For me, Ruiner ran better and like @Catastrophic235@midwest.social says, the music is incredible. Blows The Ascent’s soundtrack out of the water. Ruiner might have slightly tighter controls too, but I’d have to replay to confirm since I played it with a mouse/keyboard while I played The Ascent with a controller.
I still remember the Dropsy thread on SomethingAwful. Crazy that it turned into an actual game!
Never played the ascent but heard it was meh. Controls for Ruiner were pretty tight, my only complaint is that I’d sometimes get caught on an object/wall that wasn’t very easy to see, but it was never more than a minor inconvenience.
Hexceed is free, lite Hexcells, I read, if you want to try before you buy.
I bought Tametsi recently based at another recommendation thread. It’s really good - it eliminates the big issue with minesweeper which is that sometimes you have to guess. In Tametsi you always have enough information for your next move which completely changes how it feels. It almost ends up feeling more like Sudoku with the “ok so if that’s true then that can’t be true” type steps in logic.
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All three of those games are fantastic! You might want to check these out too:
- Rift Wizard is all about being an overpowered mage. Kind of like Noita, but more traditionally Rogue.
- Golden Krone Hotel is easier and more approachable than most traditional roguelikes, but I love the sunlight mechanic it plays with.
- Dawn of the Mexica is a mythical Aztec adventure. Wonderfully thematic and got me studying real-world Aztec history and mythology.
- Cogmind has robots building themselves from the parts of other robots. Nice shift from the usual fantasy the genre sticks to.
- UnReal World is one I’ve not actually played, but it looks super appealing if you’re into hardcore roguelikes. Soulash is another that looks neat but I haven’t picked it up yet.
And of course the big ones like ToME, Caves of Qud, and C:DDA are all amazing. But you can get ToME and C:DDA from their original sites for free.
Hope you enjoy Northern Journey!
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I just picked up Mainframe Defenders on GOG last week! Excited to try it out.
And yeah, I kind of wondered if you might know those titles while I wrote them out. Steam is surprisingly good at recommending traditional roguelikes once you own a few. There’s stuff like Door in the Woods, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, or the slightly different Wayward that are also on Steam but after a while your best bet to find new stuff is to search on RogueBasin or r/roguelikes on Reddit.
