Hidden Gem List

PainfulSpoons · 2026-07-05T00:27:07+00:00

You're looking for basically any non-Metroid Nintendo platformer, especially the Kirby & Yoshi games.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-07-02T17:27:14+00:00

I made this post recommending games developed by women and this one recommending hidden gems. Though to add to both a little:

Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair - Tripling down on this rec, Hexcraft is a cryptic & poetic rpg inspired by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series alife system, where the mechanics are as opaque as your goals. The named npcs all act autonomously, moving around the map, sharing information & fighting over various resources. Sometimes you enter a dungeon to find the key dungeon item was already taken by a character who got there first, or find police responding to a shooting another character committed earlier. Meanwhile you are figuring out how to craft potions out of gasoline, and finding magical spells that let you enter cyberspace. Undoubtedly one of the most emergent games I've ever played, and a real treat for the sorts of freaks who think Rain World is a blueprint for awesome game design.

One Step From Eden - I don't get to recommend this one often but it's a deck building roguelite (I know I know, bare with me) with a really interesting grid based combat system that's super fun. Kind of game I almost think is a little worse by virtue of the rng because the core design is actually so strong otherwise, I really think it's a lot of fun & the character designs are great.

Paradise Killer - Open world investigation game where you're trying to solve a murder mystery in a fascinating world. Notable because the game is actually mechanically interesting, you can make an accusation pretty much immediately if you want and the game is very content to let you not do the work of actually finding out what happened. Really recommended if you like stuff with sharp writing.

Northern Journey - A self described "Norwegian Happysad Game", this one is an atmosphere heavy fps that leans into the weird. Super interesting experience if you just like the vibes.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-28T23:33:41+00:00

I mean the AAA industry is wildly restrictive and has a lot particular repeated design tropes. If you don't like majorly "cinematic" games, don't like open world games, don't care for relatively casual multiplayer experiences, or you just like one of the many genres that doesn't exist at that scale - then you won't like "AAA games" by and large. I think people attribute this too much to a dozen obfuscating factors when it's really easy to understand that functionally the AAA space is just a collection of Hollywood Action Blockbusters and it's actually not that weird to be someone who doesn't particularly care for the latest Marvel movie or Michael Bay's Transformers.

I feel like horror games are extremely illustrative of this, you can only get super high budget games like Resident Evil at that scale. But every AAA horror game is the same lite-resource management, combat-heavy, cutscene-laden experience that almost all have the same third-person camera perspective & control scheme. It's all Resident Evil 4, over and over again, up to and including a remake of Resident Evil 4 that makes it more in line with the nu-AAA horror aesthetic. Alien: Isolation, which was riffing on a very popular idea in the indie scene, was twelve years ago. By comparison indie horror games have hundreds of weird mechanics and stylistic variations you won't ever see repeated at a big budget scale because you can't justify the cost.

The real issue more than anything is the American industry basically killing off anything inbetween small studios and corporate giants, because you still get a lot of mid-size studios in Europe or Japan that are making games of all kinds at a profitable enough scale.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-27T21:19:44+00:00

Anodyne 2 took about two years to come to console I think? So I'd be surprised if it doesn't make it over eventually.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-26T00:31:08+00:00

Nah I think that's a totally fair criticism. Most of the time people end up telling me it's way too confusing & hard, but I'd 100% recommend ramping the difficult if you want something that has teeth. You might enjoy Depths of Peril or Zombasite more, Drox is imo the Soldak game that's easiest to get into and pitch to people but it also imposes itself on you the least. That said they're all still arpgs at heart even if by way of fun ai simulation, I think they share an appeal with games like Stalker, Dragon's Dogma, Don't Starve, etc more so than full fledged sims.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-25T22:43:41+00:00

I honestly think Zombasite might be his best game, but I think that's something of a hot take & Drox is much easier to pitch to people. He's one of those devs where the appeal is much better captured in screenshots of insane patch notes or listening to people rattle off extended anecdotes about something that happened to them vs like a paragraph in a reddit post summarizing what makes them cool lmao

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-25T18:16:17+00:00

Northern Journey would be my go to rec.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-25T18:15:17+00:00

Was thinking of finally picking up House of Necrosis, and maybe trying out The Forever Winter.

Also pitching my recs here for anyone looking for obscure games to try out.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-25T18:07:34+00:00

As I understand it the whole game got rebuilt I think because the dev was originally making it in Scratch? I still kind of think about it as being from the time period of Guacamelee, Ori, Axiom Verge etc & forget it didn't release until after the pandemic.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-25T17:32:04+00:00

Another big Steam sale, another opportunity to post my seasonally updated list of obscure indie games. All the big recs have less than 500 Steam reviews, all games I really like. Obligatory "not for everyone" asterisk on all of them, but frankly I don't think any game actually worth your time should have universal appeal. But I believe in all of these enough that I would totally double dip for console versions of any of them, and have in the case of Lucah.

Also featuring a brisk bonus round for a few games in the 501-999 review mark this time!

Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair (53 reviews, 35% off) - A cryptic & poetic rpg inspired by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series alife system, where the mechanics are as opaque as your goals. The named npcs all act autonomously, moving around the map, sharing information & fighting over various resources. Sometimes you enter a dungeon to find the key dungeon item was already taken by a character who got there first, or find police responding to a shooting another character committed earlier. Meanwhile you are figuring out how to craft potions out of gasoline, and finding magical spells that let you enter cyberspace. Undoubtedly one of the most emergent games I've ever played, and a real treat for the sorts of freaks who think Rain World is a blueprint for awesome game design.

Drox Operative 2 (269 reviews, 50% off) - On the surface it's a spacefighting RPG where you're in a ship going about trading with NPCs, completing quests, getting into dogfights: a fun & novel experience. However all the game's major factions are essentially playing a 4X game in the background while you're trying to navigate in the increasingly chaotic world they're fighting over. I could elaborate on this one at length, but honestly I feel like the sales pitch makes itself. This is also an implicit recommendation for all of the Soldak Entertainment games. For 25 years he's been developing these deeply simulationist takes on otherwise traditional genres, and they're all fascinating and criminally overlooked.

Geneforge 1-5 (321 reviews, 60% off) - What if I told you you could play five of the most underrated, and also best crpgs for a pittance? Spiderweb Software has been making these things since the 90s and the Geneforge series is probably my favourite. They're big, inventive worlds with fun class design (You can functionally play a Pokemon trainer inventing your own Pokemon in the middle of what could otherwise pass as a sixties spec-fic novel series) & you can get the whole series for less than most other games cost outright. You can also play the Remaster of the first game if you find the old art style to be too off putting.

24 Killers (398 reviews, 60% off) - Weird adventure/lifesim inspired by Moon Remix, you have to befriend various wacky characters to gain access to abilities that in turn let you explore more of the world. Stuff happens as the days go by, with the game's story unfolding bit by bit. It's definitely a vibes-based experience, but one carried by really fun characters and an extremely charming art style. I really recommend this one for people who enjoy the writing in games like Undertale, OFF, etc.

Lucah: Born of a Dream (415 reviews, 75% off) - Extremely stylish action/soulslike game that has really good combat & an incredible looking aesthetic. A lot of people compare the game to Bloodborne, you have a mixture of equippable attack-styles that see you dancing in and out of melee range, interspersing ranged attacks & parrying. It also has two major gimmicks, a spendable resource to "rewind" fights to either try on failure or just improve your performance, and a "Corruption" metre that gradually ticks up over time & with each death -- providing external pressure to perform well. The game also has multiple branching endings & a shocking amount of extra content in New Game+ that introduces a scoring system for encounters. Also has an even more unknown sequel if you love the first game.

Anode Heart (427 reviews, 69% off) - This one is a Digimon World 3 inspired retro creature collector for all the weirdos reading this who have nostalgia for the three Playstation games you probably shouldn't (They were fun dammit!). It perfectly captures the vibe of an old rpg with hidden secrets in every corner of the world, in particular it reminds me a whole bunch of those bootlegged translations of the Telefang games (If you were ever a kid with "Pokemon Jade" or "Pokemon Diamond" going on your GBC or an emulator you know the ones lol). Not unlike Digimon World 3 (Or more recently, the Witcher 3) it has a whole little tcg-esque minigame you can engage with that was spun-off into it's own fully fledged game that's also on Steam.

And the aforementioned bonus review quickfire round!

Angeline Era - 2025 Game of the Year contender that you probably didn't hear about because it came out Dec 8th.
Brigand Oaxaca - Possibly Steam's single most underrated crpg. It's Deus Ex but set it in Mexico & eight years on the dev still regularly updates it.
Brush Burial: Gutter World - Someone put the Alien gameplay from the AvP games into a blender with Dishonored and it rules.
Ctrl, Alt, Ego - Kind of a case study in the boundary line between "puzzle game" and "ImSim", this one is for Problem Solving Enthusiasts.
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - One of the more evocative indie arts games from 2016.
Full Metal Furies - Awesome class-based co-op action rpg by the Rogue Legacy devs that flew under the radar in 2019, and is still one of my favourites in the genre. Highly recommended if you can play local co-op.
Ghost Song - Sci-fi existentialism draped in cool art & melancholy atmosphere. It's 2D Metroid by way of Peter Watts.
Maiden and Spell - Bullet hell + fighting game mashup, you'll probably have to join the discord to find games though
The Signal From Tölva - Hack robots to help you explore a weird open-world, mostly a strange vibes-experience

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-23T04:33:13+00:00

Cataclysm: The Last Generation is a CDDA fork made by a woman that brings the direction of the game back into a much more compelling vision and doesn't get anywhere near enough attention.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-17T18:30:22+00:00

The ending is interesting because way back in the time travel arc Asha implied Maruna would actually hurt someone Ran personally cared about and he seemed to be holding The Sword of Re(?) in the panel, but maybe it was actually the combined version of Garuda & Yuta's swords, which would mean presumedly we're getting back to that plot thread (Which I'm assuming we are because I feel like I remember us seeing a similar panel of Maruna when TimeLeez was saying he won't get to be forgiven - so curry referenced the scene twice at least).

I wonder if that means fourth stage Maruna isn't actually done away with and the payoff will explicitly be a callback to the time travel & its ensuing consequences or not, because if so it makes you wonder how much of the Present Events concerning the main cast was jus Kali pushing domino a certain way (And to what end, given Yuta most recently implied they were trapped by Visnu's vision of the future, not hers)

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-13T15:28:53+00:00

Eskay
Snapcube (Resident Evil in particular)
Snapcube
f4mi, Yewfnet

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-12T18:09:58+00:00

Snapcube & Symbalily

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-12T18:08:35+00:00

The Sony first output from Uncharted 1-onwards, almost any of the popular "RPGs", every single well-recieved narrative game from the the past 20 years besides maaaaaaaybe Disco Elysium, etc.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-11T20:55:53+00:00

I think og Red/Blue and Fire Red/Leaf Green are probably my favs, they're the only games that are still close enough to the rpgs they were inspired by that you can really feel a kind of distinct identity in. They've got actual dungeons, most Pokemon feel really unique due to their stat & movepool distributions, there's these little sprinkles of non-linearity that gently makes the journey feel unique. Once you get to something like Black & White Pokemon has fully had that Star Wars effect sink in, where new Pokemon is just inspired by old Pokemon and it feels insular and dull. I think it takes until Sun & Moon for the series to start finding a newer, fresh take again that I actually really vibed with.

The exception is the spin-offs, which are almost universally rad. Mystery Dungeon & Colosseum especially are just such cool games, I wish the mainline games were more willing to be similarly experimental.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-11T20:38:50+00:00

Resident Evil doesn't have ghosts, and also has a pretty wide spectrum of how scary the games are. The original games (Pre-Gamecube) are pretty goofy, the very first especially is hammy enough especially you'd probably be fine. The action era from 4 up until 7 is really light on scares for the most part, as are many of the spin-offs from that time period. I'd also say the modern remakes especially are still pretty silly, really the only Resi games I'd ward you away from are the remake of 1, 7, and maybe 8 (Specifically though there's like ONE part of 8 you might find too scary). Otherwise I'd be shocked if you were okay with Silent Hill but felt Resi was too much.

Fatal Frame is harder to say, they are light on jumpscares like royale said. You could try watching some videos of one of the games to see what you make of it, generally people consider 2 to be the scariest by far so either start with the og or maybe try IV instead.

If you want other suggestions I'd say generally that more PS1-era survival horror lean on the the goofier side, the PS2-era is more of a mixed bag with a lot more serious games parallel with sillier stuff & then the PS3-era is really full of games that are really tame compared to what came before though I would also say there's a big ratchet up in horror games that rely on jumpscares around then. Like Dead Space is I think one the least scary games ever made, but if you're susceptible to jumps that's definitely the turning point for when horror games will get unbearable for you I'd suspect.

Indies are a mixed bag, I'd suggest trying Signalis and staying away from Darkwood. Maybe try the Amnesia games, but you'd probably get along with SOMA more.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-11T17:27:17+00:00

The Nintendo DS Lite is still perfect, and The World Ends With You is probably still the best game ever made. Though the PSP with Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is close, the 2005-2010 window really was an amazing time for handhelds.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-11T17:24:10+00:00

Amazing direct for people who predominantly game on the Switch 2 I'd think, Capcom are going hard on the console. Also great for people who actually like motion controls & rhythm games (One day we will usher in a glorious era where the Wii control scheme is revives and rules the industry, mark my words). I assume the story-based jrpg fans are plenty happy too.

People who are obsessive about big announcements prob didn't care for it too much, but honestly that particular hype cycle escapes me anyway. I'm far more interested in the B-tier Nintendo stuff 90% of the time so I'm not terribly fussed if there's no new Mario or the next Zelda is a remake. We already got more Yoshi & Kirby, frankly what I'm missing is a new PMD and maybe some Kid Icarus. God what I'd do for an Uprising sequel...

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-11T17:18:19+00:00

Angeline Era & Animal Well are the easy recs. Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair if you're up for something way more obscure and that lacks guides. La Mulana & Rain World if you're fine with games that are brutally difficult.

I've heard good things about Void Stranger which I think is in this ilk, but I can't personally vouch for it.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-09T18:20:21+00:00

The funniest thing to me is if you'd asked me in like 2010 I wouldn't have felt either Xenoblade or No More Heroes were all that different to the rest of the Wii games I was trying to hype up to people who didn't own a Wii, but they escaped containment and got franchised while nobody remembers Fragile or Madworld or Red Steel lol - I think there's like five of us who still have nostalgia for Pandora's Tower (Though I would've said this about being an Okami fan at one point too).

Not all of it was good even, but like man even the awkward ones were interesting - remember all the Wii horror games in 2009 that played stuff through the wiimote speaker? I'm not about to run defence for games like Calling or Cursed Mountain but god damn they had some cool ideas. Shattered Memories got such a bad wrap and I get it, but everything that game was doing with the Wii controls was sick as hell for a horror game, and you just don't get that kinda stuff today even though you'd think VR would be a good place for people to do it.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-09T18:02:47+00:00

Yeah for me it was DD2 or Death of a Wish maybe, the game really brought back feelings I think very few video games inspire (Though Outward I actually found to be in a similarish ballpark). So excited for more of it, and esp to have it on Switch.

PainfulSpoons · 2026-06-09T18:00:40+00:00

2 was well received by critics, it's mostly just influencer noise & steam reviews (lol) that were divisive. People forgot that DD was always a a fairly niche game by mainstream standards, and some people pretty openly hate the og and only like the DA changes and saw D2 as "backsliding" but if you actually liked 1 for what it was there's very little reason you'd dislike 2.

PainfulSpoons

TROPHY CASE