It's said that there are more terrible RPGMaker games than stars in the visible universe, but Lisa the Painful is proof that infinite G*mers making infinite RPGMaker games will eventually make one of the greatest games of all time.
It's funny as hell, decently hard, and the gameplay and story integrate seamlessly in a way that most turn-based RPGs completely fail to do. It's got a dark and memorable story about addiction, violence, and mental illness. It's even got Terry Hintz (CW: Terry is extremely handsome)!
On the topic of obscurity, RPGmaker games that get a lot of attention like LISA are in that weird place for me like... are they really obscure or not? I say this as the game gets nothing but praise from a lot of people, and is one of those games that people think of when you bring up "good RPGmaker games." I do know of other RPGmaker games that are a lot more obscure, as people rarely talk about them, if ever.
I've never heard anything but praise for it either, but everyone in my friend group had never heard about it when I introduced it to them so /shrug
Hylics is also a fantastic RPGMaker game, absolutely worth playing for the creative art style
I liked Jazzpunk (don't think that counts as all that obscure though, lol). It was pretty funny. Costs money.
There was this game called N about a little ninja running around collecting gold, that was fun. Its free.
Aurora 4x (which is free) was interesting, but I don't think I ever got into it. If you're into space strategy sims and don't care about graphics at all it's interesting.
Children of A Dead Earth is another space sim, this one focusing on "realistic space combat." It uses n-body physics, the ships look like long rods, if the enemy ship gets blasted in half they can still fight back, and if you do your orbital maneuvers wrong you'll probably just slide past the enemy in 15 seconds and have to wait a couple days before engaging again. The developer kind of abandoned it, but it is completely finished. Still costs money, rarely goes on sale.
Shapez io was interesting if you're into... automating? I don't know what kind of genre it would fit into, but if you found factorio appealing or making afk minecraft farms you'd probably like shapez.io. Costs money.
Workers & Resources is a city builder with a Soviet republic theme. It's pretty dope taking this relatively poor and agrarian area and bringing them stronk soviet industry jobs and equitable housing and public services. Costs money.
This is actually obscure, but as a kid I had this game cd with like 200 freeware games on it. One of them was Castle of the Winds. It's a janky roguelike that is definitely showing its age from 23 years ago, but I like it if only for the nostalgia. 100% free, since 1993 baby.
Killer7 for the gamecube is a completely bizarre on the rails shooter where you have to kill some weird-ass monsters. Also on the gamecube was custom robo which I remember fondly, don't know if it stands up though.
N/N+ was the GOAT timetheiving platformer, I played so much of it on flash and DS
I haven't seen many people talking about it, possibly because it's still in early access, but Grand Tactician: The Civil War is just about the most grognardiest game I've ever played, and it's amazing.
You start off during James Buchanan's lame duck period, the South is seceding but several forts have refused to surrender their arms. You can raise some militia forces and set a few policies but you can't do much until Lincoln is inaugurated, and that starts the standoff where the Civil War either starts with you triggering the Militia Act or the South firing on Fort Sumter.
If you've ever wanted to play a strategy game where you can track the career of every single one of your army's officers, where securing proper equipment is done on a per-unit basis (and most of those units have contract lengths that start at a very short three months), where you have imperfect information about enemy movements and unit strengths, where when you issue orders there is a realistic delay representing the time it takes for your orders to travel to the front lines, then this is the game that finally answered my prayers.
The only downside is that actually finishing the campaign takes about as long as the actual Civil War. You'll need to have a lot of patience for systematically liberating towns, fighting skirmishes, blockading ports/rivers, moving up and keeping your supply lines intact as you go, one mile at a time all the way from Richmond to Atlanta. It's a very specific kind of satisfying, but it is very satisfying.
I haven't tried playing as the south yet, because fuck that.
I put almost 100 hours into my summer car. It's part car mechanic simulator, part survival game. Something about it just keeps drawing me in. Also there's a sequel coming sometime.
Slime Rancher is really cute and fun if you've got $20 to drop. It's fairly short but you could put some serious time in just vibing.
I don't know if Oxygen Not Included is considered obscure here, but it's a base builder popular with the Factorio kind of crowd.
The Long Dark is a fantastic survival game where you crash-land in the Canadian wilderness and play an open ended survival game where the only point is to live as long as possible.
Quadrilateral Cowboy. Just look up the videos. If it looks like you'll like it, you definitely will. Only took about 5 hours to finish though.
SpaceChem is basically a programming game, lay down complicated paths with operators and decision statements in loops that intertwine to meet the goal of each stage. Never beat it, but its a ton of fun if you're into that sort of thing.
Syberia is on sale on steam for $2 right now, haven't played it in at least a decade but it is my most memorable old school point and click adventure game.
Ngl, My Summer Car turned me into somewhat of a finnophile because of how weird it is and how fun the language sounds.
The game was also made by either only one person or a very small team too.
It may not be suuuper obscure, but Invisible Inc went under the radar a bit and is really up there for my vote for best game ever
Procedural levels and permadeath in turn-based stealthing your way through “dungeons” that are evil cyberpunk corporate offices and stealing all their shit before all the security comes down on you like a tonne of bricks
The turn based stealth is so damn slick, but I think its real achievement is absolutely nailing the risk/reward curve. The clock is ticking to higher security measures and you want to steal more shit so you overreach and fuck up - you’ve got all the time in the world to think it out, maybe you’re fucked but more often than you think you can let out all the stops and pull off the most ridiculously heroic hail mary to get your people out of there, and it feels so damn good when you do. So many “hard” games with permadeath etc just end up making you super risk averse and slow and it’s super boring, this one actively pushes you to ride right on the edge of catastrophe and I love it. Even better with the expansion pack too
One of my all time favorite games is an old space sim called Freelancer. It feels a little quaint by today's standards but it was quite ambitious back at the time and I think it still somewhat holds up. If you've heard the buzz about Star Citizen, this is the last project Chris Roberts did before going into the movie industry. Its kinda dead nowadays but there is still a small modding community still making stuff for it.
Loved that game! I was too young to appreciate the original Privateer, but ever since Freelancer I've pretty much always been playing a space sim. Right now I'm stuck on Elite: Dangerous, which is pretty much the peak of the formula until Star Citizen finally releases (and without all of the insane baggage that that game has accumulated in its decade-long development cycle).
I think it did a good job striking a balance of open sandbox, narrative, and world building. Even at the time there were games like the X series that were far more graphically advanced with deeper systems but they lacked the world building that gave you any sort of investment in it all.
Descent Freespace is still out there with a modding community keeping it up to date. It's more fighter sim than open world.
There's also X4: Foundations, which has some of the same roots as Freelancer and Privateer.
There are some great free (pay what you want) games on itch.io, but my favorite two are:
The Bewitching Revolution is a cute, hour or two long game following a witch who helps a city bring about revolution - it's what it says on the tin and oozes charm!
escism is a musical narrative game by composer Lena Raine (of Celeste and now Minecraft fame) there's about 3 hours of story, set in the near-future dystopic world of a text-based adventure game, with a killer soundtrack.
For multiplayer, 100% Orange Juice is one of my favorite chaotic nonsense titles- it's a turn-based, dueling deck building board game?? It has to be experienced to be understood, honestly.
And one last short narrative game, The Norwood Suite is wacky absurdism for its entire, brief runtime.
I'll also second the recommendations in this thread for Paradise Killer, Thirty Flights of Loving and Invisible Inc
I don't know if these are all proper hidden gems but I have never had a conversation with another person about any of these.
- Dungun of Dreadmore A dungion crawler combining old and new sensibilities in cute and interesting ways. All the enemies have butts as well.
- Necropolis A rougelike souls like, with a ps1 ish aesthetic before it was cool.
- Super house of Dead Ninjas a really crunchy roguelike platformer from adult swim.
- A valley without wind, A really weird indy game that kinda makes no sense.
- Skaufold: Userper A cool lovecraft metroidvania.
A valley without wind
I swear this game was made by someone who has never seen video games, and just created one by parallel invention without any awareness of tropes. It's somehow bizarre in a mundane way?
Right? it has every kind of vibe of being someone's passion hyperfocous like that Ullillia game. The sequel being more or less a regular game broke my heart.
It really is a transmission from another world.
Dungeons of Dredmore is great. Roguelike, easy to play a session in an hour or two, lots of weird items and powers and synergies, and it's all in a goofy, good natured setting that pokes fun at genre conventions.
If you liked Dreadmore, you might enjoy Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It's free and it's fun, and you can play it in your browser if you like.
I'm getting a lot out of X4 right now. It's a German 4x game where you start out doing Uber delvieries in a shitty space jalopy and end up building a massive industrial empire that spans star systems. You can fly all the ships in first person, there's mining, fighting, factory building, some politics, some killer robots, some charming capitalist space lizards. It's also got that classic "This is a weird German sim game with ludicrously complex possibilities none of which are adequately documented" thing going. Like swapping a pilot from one ship to another is never really explained and takes you on a journey across five different menus.
Idk how much of a splash Heat SIgnature made but it's an incredibly slick 2d action game where you have to infiltrate space ships to do missions, and you have a lot of ways to do that. Like "Slow time throw a wrench at a guy's head steal his gun teleport across the room" ninja action stuff, or wacky hijinks with telport traps, some turret hacking. Basically it gives you a set of toys, like a big wrench, or a teleporter that will port you back to where you started after three seconds, or a shot gun, then says "Go figure out how to use these toys to achieve your goal" in procedurally generated space ships. I cannot overstate how well it takes a straightforward premise and executes it in an extremely satisfying way.
X4
Basically EVE online, but offline and with fewer players fucking you over and much faster to enjoy?
I was helping my friend softmod his Wii and we downloaded that game to test it out and he was able to discover his old save file on his memory card still had his Gotcha Force data. He showed me the game a little and it looks really fun.
I love Gotcha Force! I remember always getting stuck fighting the death commanders or dragons and just stocking up on the cheap ninja guys.
I remember this! There was this one robot you could get whose swords got longer and longer for every enemy you killed. I remember using that guy and being able to kill people on the other side of the map by the end of a battle, it was way OP.
Can't believe no one's mentioned Cave Story yet. It's the OG indie game. And it's free.
Return of the Obra Dinn and Va-11 Hall-A take it for some of my favourite "obscure" (like, they're out there, but I don't see them talked about often) narrative driven games. Obra Dinn in particular is awesome but devilishly difficult.
I really like weird and unconventional games
Little Misfortune is really fun, it's mostly narrative based and the mechanics are pretty simple but I like it. it was made by a husband and wife team and their small studio. All the characters are really charming and it's genuinely pretty funny and touching at times. They started with a game called fran bow that some may know. My partner and I played through it a couple years ago and really enjoyed it.
A Bug Fable is maybe not super obscure but if you like Paper Mario it's a good game to scratch that itch. I didn't expect to like it all that much but it's actually really good and kind of is designed more for an adult audience mechanically than paper mario, i.e it includes a hard mode from the start and stuff.
A Place For the Unwilling is a pretty cool little game where you're a rich guy that inherits a friends store and have to run it while exploring a stratified industrial age town. There's a young child that sells a revolutionary newspaper and calls you a scab when you first talk to them if i recall. I never finished it but it's really cool and I keep intending to go back and play it. there's like a mystery or something but I cant remember the overarching plot as much but it hinges on class struggle
Eastshade is really relaxing. It's like an elder scrolls game kind of but without combat. You just vibe around on an island with anthropomorphic animals and do quests for them and paint landscapes. There's a mystery in a hotel at one point and I'm a sucker for quests like that.
If you like beat em ups, Tonight We Riot is a serviceable if a little rudimentary arcade style beat em up but it was designed by a leftist video game workers co-op. You literally beat up capitalists its pretty cool.
A Short Hike is a smaller experiment. It's basically like animal crossing style characters with BotW style climbing and gliding and you work on climbing a little mountain. It's a cute and entertaining little game that takes an hour or 2 to complete
Secret Little Haven is a game where you play it through a windows 95/2000 style interface and talk to friends on AIM and hang out in pre-social media forums. It's about a trans girl discovering she's trans and it's also very nostalgic for me having grown up with that era of internet. It's really emotional and well made.
Aviary Attorney it's ace attorney but all the characters are birds in victorian england clothes
These may not be that obscure but I feel they deserve some more love than they got:
Rainworld: if Hollow Knight was the perfect execution of the classic metroidvania formula, Rainworld is a glimpse into the future of the genre, and some of the possibilities we are yet to explore. If you like weird alien ecosystems, player experimentation, obscure but well thought out lore and/or want to return to monke, check the game out (fair warning, it is also hard as balls).
Sunless series: I can never not mention sunless sea and sunless skies, these might not be for everyone but they are also criminally underrated. Both are story focused roguelites with lots of great writing, some light but enjoyable trading mechanics and a lot of horrifying locations to explore (I think sunless skies is the only game I had nightmares about).
Anarcute: Cute pikmin-style game about beating cops. Short and sweet!
Omori: This one is getting popular, and I predict it's going to get memefied like Undertale (it might have already happened and I'm just posting cringe, but whatever, I want to talk about it and you can't stop me!!!). It is about a hikikomori dealing with trauma through his dreams and reconnecting with his estranged childhood friends IRL. Most of the time it's a charming earthbound style RPG with a solid (if a bit cheesable) battle system, but the game often reminds you that you are not safe, and the dream can turn into a nightmare without warning. Without going into the story, I loved it, it has been some time since any piece of media resonated with me like this game's ending did.
Rusty lake games: Did you like playing those escape the room games? Do you like Twin Peaks? You will love these! My favorite is The White Door for it's ARG elements towards the end. Most of them are free btw.
Also to echo some of the other recommendations in this thread: Lisa the Painful, Spacechem and A Short Hike are all great.
All I really want from Failbetter is a version of Fallen London without turn limits goddamnit. Roguelike (or -lite) is an objectively dumb-as-rocks genre for them to use, because you just keep doing the same stupid ass stories time and time again when you die (it will happen...often). And no, save states in Skies was not an acceptable alternative. It should have checkpointed you every time you dock, at least, and then let you jump back there instead of respawning when you die.
Yeah, didn't really get into Fallen London because of all the timers. It also seems to have kind of a slow start.
I also think the permadeath is unnecessary, and generally bad for the game, but it does add a bit to the experience in some ways, so I see what they were going for. Stuff like losing your child because you told some stranger to head East and angered Salt, or exploring dangerous areas like Eleutheria and Blue Kingdom are improved with permadeath on because the stakes are higher. The flipside is all the wasted time, though in the case of skies deaths were infrequent in my experience.
