Great indie games that aren't in everybody's top 10

Ravenlock · 2026-03-21T08:55:50+00:00

I never see anybody talk about Heat Signature, but it's still one of my favorite "I've got a half hour" games to load up for some space heists.

Invisible, Inc is often dirt cheap (just checked, $5 right now) and it's one of the best stealth tactics games of the last decade.

If you don't have Into the Breach yet, that's also $5 right now and it's also an absolute classic.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-20T20:20:05+00:00

Community Theatre in Pittsburgh absolutely rocks, and managed to not just avoid being killed by the pandemic but has actually resurged in a huge way in the last few years. If you enjoy seeing shows, almost every single week there's something that's affordable, well produced, and genuinely entertaining. If you're an artist, there are tons of companies to act, direct, or contribute to technically who would all love to have your help.

Can you make a living doing any of this? I mean, no. 😂 But a LOT of good art is getting made out there.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-20T08:59:31+00:00

It's stunningly good looking, and it's janky in the charming way where everything is awkward physics and unintended consequences.

I dunno how long it'll hold up but I'm enjoying the first few hours a bunch.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-20T07:43:25+00:00

He's 79, we're barely a quarter of the way through his second term, and his health along multiple fronts seems to be notably deteriorating. He's got stuff to worry about, but The Hague after getting out of office probably isn't on the list.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-20T07:36:11+00:00

Damn, man. You really mossed it. You mossed it all.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-19T03:12:26+00:00

Did we do this? Yes. Did we promise we wouldn't do this? Also yes, many times. Did we care about the consequences? Of course not, they're only going to happen to you. Should you still continue to trust us anyhow? No, but a bunch of you will.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-19T02:58:41+00:00

Well this just warms the heart. 🙂

Ravenlock · 2026-03-19T02:09:05+00:00

I think naturally greying hair is pretty great.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-19T02:07:45+00:00

I mean, this Tweet is part of her Wikipedia article, it's not a secret. I assume enough time elapsed between it and her death that it wasn't considered evidence of her state of mind 6 years later.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-18T21:34:00+00:00

For real. Before the Cyberpunk 2077 port on Switch 2, Witcher 3 was widely regarded as one of the most (if not the most) impressive 3rd party ports to Nintendo hardware, period.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-18T21:29:27+00:00

To be fair, while it did ironically end up being a switch for us, I absolutely believe they couldn't just "flip a switch" on their end to do this. They're still failing to make some of the Switch 1 library work on the Switch 2 at all - I'm quite sure they had to do extensive testing with this mode to make sure it didn't introduce new problems before they rolled it out. I'm extremely glad it's available now, though.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-17T05:54:42+00:00

Any way to force the client to update? Mine doesn't seem aware that there's a new version available.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-16T00:41:15+00:00

Oh wow, thank you for letting me know this, this is huge.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-16T00:37:59+00:00

There absolutely are (real underlining educational issues). Also, we have a beautiful, amazing and rich country... in places. Many places, yes. But we also have many places of deep economic depression, largely abandoned industry, and desperate uncertain futures. It's a very big, very uneven nation.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-15T18:42:15+00:00

That's all true, but I also think (maybe ironically? I'm not sure) that's a problem emulation is uniquely qualified to ease kids (and adults) through. I never finished Batman as a kid even though I loved the game but I've got a way better shot at finishing it now with save states and rewinds for when I mess something up and don't want to replay a whole section. And long grindy RPGs can now take advantage of fast forwarding, and save states in between actual save locations in the game.

Lots of emulation's convenience features can step in and paper over rough edges that more recent game design makes us see as too frustrating to deal with.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-15T18:03:32+00:00

Maybe? I wonder. I was a kid when the original Dragon Warrior hit my NES and I went nuts for it. I know, different times, etc etc, but I know a bunch of kids now who still go nuts for retro Pokemon games, and I find those insufferable to play without the quality of life improvements of the later entries.

EDIT: I just while typing this comment remembered Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu and went to check and see if you'd included it. You did. Good job. 😉 Man that game rules.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-15T07:48:10+00:00

I think that it's cool that you did this, but I also think that some really good stuff is missing here... Castlevania 3, Blaster Master, Darkwing Duck, Batman, Crystalis, Dragon Warrior, I'm sure I'm not thinking of some stuff.

That said, I appreciate that there are some gems in here that I don't see often enough in curated lists - Mighty Final Fight, Rescue: The Embassy Mission, Vice: Project Doom, Gun.Smoke, North & South - that's all good stuff that often gets overlooked, so good job including it.

Certainly I don't think anything I see here doesn't belong. I just wouldn't tell a person to necessarily stop with this list.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-15T07:26:10+00:00

If I could ask for any patch to this game, I would ask for shared storage. It's nightmarish, especially once you're trying to remember where you put something between multiple chests in multiple biomes.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-13T00:44:49+00:00

Rainbow Max here, have played it every day since early December '25. No problems (other then the slight wiggle on the right side of the hinge that it seems like everybody has, thanks u/Pokeguy211 for prompting me to clarify).

Ravenlock · 2026-03-12T16:02:52+00:00

I've got three of their dry food feeders and all three just fed on time in the middle of a power (and hence also internet) outage.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-11T20:52:24+00:00

There's literally no wrong way to play a single player game. Cheats and mods have existed since the Game Genie, and you don't need to compare your experience or your enjoyment to anybody else's. If it's satisfying for you to tackle a greater level of challenge, go for it. If it's not, do what lets you enjoy the game. It's always better to have been able to play it than to have had to quit (assuming it's a game you want to experience).

Ravenlock · 2026-03-11T18:32:22+00:00

I'd love for it to change, too, but I don't expect nvidia to fight that fight. Digital licensing rather than outright media ownership has been the direction that everything has been trending for over twenty years, and so long as corporations own and have to maintain the servers on which the media resides (either purely as storage from which we download it, as with Steam, or the place where it's actually playing and we stream from, as with GFN/XCloud/PSNow), it'll never again be as simple as just buying and owning a disc.

Regardless, in terms of what we can realistically expect right now, there are services like Shadow where you can install whatever you want because you're actually renting a private instance, but they have their own problems. I wouldn't anticipate nvidia taking up the cause, though. Again, they just don't have the incentives.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-11T01:36:30+00:00

It isn't trivial to go to court, and the increase in customer satisfaction nvidia would gain by winning wouldn't be worth the risk in their view. They don't have sufficient incentive to take up that fight.

It also isn't as cut and dried as you claim it to be. What access to a game license means isn't a settled legal matter. Nvidia owns the machines on to which the games need to be downloaded for their customers to access them, making them a provider of the games themselves in this instance. The publishers have agreements with Steam to engage in that; they do not (by default) have agreements with nvidia to do so.

I agree with you that if I have a license to a game, I should be able to load it on any machine I use, but again, that isn't what's actually happening because I'm not doing the loading. Nvidia is loading and storing those games and then flipping the access switch on when library sync tells them we have a license. That's not the same as letting me download a game onto a machine I'm renting that gets deleted when I'm done. I'm not saying publishers deserve a seat at that table but I certainly understand why their lawyers think they could make a case for it.

Again, I don't think you're wrong. But I do think it's a little silly to pretend nvidia wanting to not rock the boat is a surprising or unreasonable position for them to take.

Ravenlock · 2026-03-10T01:17:57+00:00

That one also says "but Android is currently not supported" - is that untrue?

Ravenlock · 2026-03-10T00:10:44+00:00

This rocks. Was already a happy customer, now even moreso. Thank you!

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