Ew, not like Fortnite, I mean like indie launchers
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Racing simulator that launched in the early 2000s and is still going. There have been some rough times but overall the feeling of admiration is hard to deny for the 3 (mostly 2 now) devs. A couple years ago they updated it to create and allow mods and this year they released a public test for new graphical updates. I don’t even play often anymore but I still check for updates almost daily :)
Starsector is one of my favorites from the last decade.
I’ve probably played a few hundred hours of SuperTuxKart. It’s a mario kart clone except i like it way better than the mario karts I’ve played.
Mindustry is fun, it’s like a space factory builder thing.
I was going to say the powder toy but it turns out its on steam now
So is Mindustry. And it costs $10 on there for some reason…
It’s worth giving the guy ten bucks imo.
It’s a way for the devs to get some revenue. Doesn’t mean that you have to buy it. Same with Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Super Tux is also on Steam but not paid.
And yet I’ve already found multiple reviews stating that they bought it on Steam before knowing the game was free elsewhere. So it seems to me that by not mentioning anywhere on the Steam page that this is a donation to the dev, that’s a little shady.
Steams terms of service mean devs/publishers can’t promote a game as being free elsewhere. It’s likely directed at preventing redirecting people to Epic or a sale at another store, but also by effect includes games like this. Either they put it for free on Steam or they sell it on Steam and can’t mention free downloads from their website, and it’s up to users to “shop around”.
I get what you’re saying, but I think if spending $10 on a game is something that would give someone pause, then the onus really is on them to search around first to see what the best deal is? People act like steam is a monopoly, but there is a lot of choice out there.
Oh what, that’s very weird
An MMO with no micro transactions: Clan Lord
It’s been around since the 90s, the original developer is now a farmer and gave control of the world to the players rather than selling to a larger company.
We could use an influx of newbies, just don’t be a turd.
Starsector, perhaps the greatest 2D space game of all time.
This actually looks really good! I’ll have to ask the missus for an advance on my pocket money 😀
Vintage Story, a Minecraft-like game that focuses on a tough, realistic survival experience. There are climate zones and seasons. Things like smelting ores or growing food are much more involved than they are in Minecraft, which makes for a strong sense of progression when you’ve finally managed to make iron or build a windmill.
Hytale too, completely different direction than VS but another fun minecraft-ish game
There are a substantial number of non-commercial FOSS games that aren’t on Steam.
Many—though not all—of them are packaged in Linux distros.
Luanti, basically a FOSS Minecraft clone, is one example; that’s in Debian.
A number of older games occur to me that aren’t either in Linux distros or on Steam. They aren’t necessarily the top FOSS games, but people may not be aware of them, if they rely on looking in distro packages or Steam to find things.
Linley Henzell, the guy who did Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, which later became the well-known roguelike Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, had a couple of open-source games that he wrote way back. Overgod looks like it’s been packaged and is in Debian. Lacewing is in Fedora, but not in Debian.
There’s a genre of games based on Paradroid. One of the first games I played on Linux was in this genre—NightHawk. It used to be in Red Hat Linux, but it looks like at some point, it fell out of the package repository, as it doesn’t appear to be in present Fedora, and it’s not in present Debian either today. Not on Steam, either.
I can’t find any videos of anyone playing NightHawk on YouTube.
Abuse is a DOS-era action platformer, heavy on jumpscares, that was open-source and had some of the data files (the ones for the shareware version) put into the public domain. Could use the full game’s datafiles too, if you got ahold of them. I think that that used to be packaged and in Red Hat Linux at one point, but it’s not in Fedora or Debian these days, and it’s not on Steam.
Surprisingly, while Empire—a very early game in the genre—is in Debian, xconq is not, and doesn’t look like it’s in Fedora either. Neither are on Steam. You may have played later hex-based strategy wargames in the genre, like Battle for Wesnoth.
There is a very large collection of non-open-source-but-free text-based interactive fiction out there. These are games that are all or almost all text, where one writes instructions to the game in a somewhat-natural-language format and has the game respond. Zork is a (not-free, commercial, but you may be aware of it) early example of a game in the genre. Sites like IFWiki and IFDB catalog these. Many of the runtimes exist on Linux distros; gargoyle-free is a graphical frontend in Debian that can display games written for many different engines, and there are various terminal-based frontends, but the actual games are not generally packaged in Linux distros or on Steam. One notable exception—Anchorhead, a Lovecraftian game, was updated and had a commercial (and graphical) release on Steam a bit ago (which I cannot seem to get running on Proton under Linux, though given that it’s Electron-based, maybe it’s possible to run it natively using chromium…I’m not really long on Electron familiarity). I think that the reason that they haven’t seen more popularity recently is partly because of the rise of the smartphone and touchscreens and onscreen keyboards. It’s a pain to play them without a real keyboard, which many smartphone users don’t have available. If I were going to recommend one particular game that I’ve enjoyed, maybe Babel, for the TADS interactive fiction engine.
Panel Attack is a FOSS clone of Panel de Pon with rollback netcode and modding support.
I know this one! As I love Tetris Attack, its so nice to have this as an Open Source project. Never thought that anyone in the world would recommend this (not because its bad or so, but because usually nobody knows.) But I never played it much beyond testing, to be honest. It’s been a long time… 5 years or so. I guess its improved a lot since then. But weirdly, they have no link to the source code on their website: https://github.com/panel-attack/panel-game
I focus on non commercial free games that are also (for the most part) Open Source too.
- Luanti: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Very close Minecraft like clone (note its old name was Minetest for the longest time). Each downloadable subgame requires extremely low space, in the MBytes range! No account or any online servers are needed (edit: off course its needed to download, but not otherwise). Open Source.
- osu!: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Rhythm style game where you use the mouse. I think the code is Open Source, but not the assets? I’m not sure.
- Taisei Project: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Fan project in the Touhou Project series. Old school bullet hell shmup from top down perspective. Open Source.
Note Flathub is a repository for Linux. If you are on Windows, go to their website and look for downloads.
Funny enough, moving to Linux meant I discovered a lot of cool tools and games that I wouldn’t have otherwise…and then eventually learned they had Windows releases anyway, so it wasn’t strictly necessary to ditch MS for them. But beneficial anyway.
For Luanti I want to especially recommend the Game “Glitch” which is not minecraft like at all, but surprisingly great.
Vintage Story, Voices of the Void
2nded for voices of the void
- 0 A.D.
- Beyond All Reason
- Open BOR (beats of rage)
- M.U.G.E.N
I’ve been playing a lot of Gyakuten Live. It likely can’t be officially monetized because it infringes upon “Love Live School Idols” as well as stealing a few assets from the Ace Attorney games. But, the game has quite an impressive amount of production value, with many emotive character faces, a full custom soundtrack, numerous cinematics between cases, and a lot of artwork to help visualize the scenarios. It centers around what seem like relatively innocuous cases, like a missing treasure, or fraudulent tickets, but (aside from the intro case) tends to dive into some complex character emotions as the motive behind each incident.
The other game that made me think of posting this is Hytale, which looks to basically be an indie, non-Microsoft, pro-modding version of Minecraft.
Seconding HyTale!
Holy shit. As a fan of both Love Live and Ace Attorney I never realized how much I wanted something like this. Unfortunately I don’t have any recs to give, so all I can offer are my thanks and an upvote.
Hyperburner’s a fun arcade flight game (though the iOS release is the definitive version).
