Have you heard of Polish indie studiolette CD Projekt and their hidden gem The WItcher 3?
- Blasphemous 1 and 2
- STALKER
- Disco Elysium (awesome game, but the studio got into shady stuff and the game creators were booted. Just pirate it).
- Commandos
- Tzar
- Imperivm
- Tropico 3
- Noita
- Satisfactory
- My summer car/my winter car (I personally have not played them but they have good reviews)
Not very indie:
- Europa Universalis
- Crusader Kings
- Hearts of Iron
- the Witcher 1, 2, 3 (the 3rd one is the best)
- Cyberpunk 2077
Last I heard, the studio that made Disco Elysium kicked out the people who worked hard to make it great and collect all the money now. I think I got it from an Epic Games giveaway, would recommend getting it for free.
Yup, just pirate it at this point. I’ll update that in the list.
mind adding My Summer Car/My Winter Car to the list for visibility?
Yeah, no prob
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Game of the Year, a good chunk of the staff has never worked on a game before, solidly French.
Sektori is a dual-stick shooter (similar to Geometry Wars) made by two Finns.
Factorio is made by a small Czech studio and I’ve never seen a game more polished and bug free in my life.
I dunno last I played factorio my base was destroyed by bugs
If you don’t like the biters you can adjust their difficulty in the game setup settings or turn them off
I think more people need to be aware that the Factorio director is a piece of shit.
I highly recommend Satisfactory instead, which is by a small(-ish) Swedish dev team. (It also has much chiller vibes than Factorio, which I think more people will appreciate.)
edit: to those downvoting, please feel free to reply and explain, since I’m genuinely unsure what part of this you disagree with.
God damn it. And thank you!
Also Shapez 2 if you like factory games. They’re German
No mention of Dead Cells? Play Dead Cells.
Great game but Motion Twin are dicks.
I haven’t heard, what did they do?
Long story short, Motion Twin gave the game to Evil Empire around 2019 (iirc) to handle its development, so they are the ones who made every update and expansion from the first dlc onwards.
After like 5 years of DC being developed by EE they released the “the end is near” update, but said that it was not the last update and that they were working on more stuff, including wrapping up the story.
Then Motion Twin announced a new game, and shortly after they cancelled any work in DC. The goodbye posts included some shutouts to the new game, so the cancellation of DC was seen as trying to kill any competition to their new game. One ex-dev said that MT were being a bunch of dicks to EE and claimed that the cancellation was indeed to give more attention to the new game.
You can always play your AAA games if you pirate them
Noita and Baba Is You are both brilliant games from a few Finnish people. Baba Is You is a puzzlegame involving rearranging the rules of the puzzle you are in. It will make your brain hurt in the good way. Noita is a roguelike in which you are a witch and you build wands with the spells you find along the way. You can make ludicrously powerful wands with some creativity, and the game is ruthless enough that it basically demands you do so.
I’ve already mentioned Heaven’s Vault elsewhere here, so I’ll plug A Highland Song from the same British indie team too. It’s an exploration / climbing game with some simple and really cathartic rhythm sections. The visuals and music are gorgeous
Vintage Story is being developed in Europe. They won’t even host on Steam
My current favorite game (Valheim) is Swedish, I believe.
The studio developing Ori and the Blind Forest is Austrian if I remember correctly.
Make sure to buy on GoG of possible.
CrossCode (Germany), charming 2D Action RPG where you play a virtual MMO.
CrossCode is awesome. Remember picking it up from one of the itch.io bundles a while back and put 30+ hours into it. Never finished the game but it was well worth it.
Just played through Crisol.
Gorgeous game. Gothic Spanish style. $17 on steam right now.Play it in native Spanish. The English dub is terrible.
Mix between silent hill. Resident evil village.
Mostly puzzles and traversing areas. Light combat action.
Has a really unique combat mechanic. Your amo is made from your blood.
Also it’s Eldritch horror. That caught me by surprise and was unexpected based on the trailers I saw.
Took me like 13 hrs to play.
Not a perfect game but def worth $17.
Story could have been developed more but no apparent plot holes.
Probably budget was a limiting factor there. https://youtu.be/5ZjZTQ5-xpM
Owlcat Games - they made two Pathfinder games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, some of my favorite CRPGs in recent memory. Their latest, Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, is supposed to be great as well, but I haven’t had the time to do more than check out the character creation so far.
