| Game Engine: Unity 
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A brief aside: You may notice that I don't use a classification system like ranking games out of 5/10/100/etc. or ranking things like gameplay and graphics. I feel personally that these sorts of rankings enforce a strange formalist mode of thinking about games based on how they function as opposed to how they feel, and so I forego their inclusion. Simply put, any game that winds up here has my personal recommendation as a title worthy of your time.
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GAMES AND COUNTING!
Games By Country
Games by Year
Games by Engine
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: Unity
The date: April 15th, 1917. As the citizens of Verdun-sur-Meuse had believed the fighting along their city had finally waned, the bones of all the fallen soldiers could only look on as a lone Fokker Dr-1 takes flight against a threat too outrageous for words. 1917: The Alien Invasion DX takes place in an alternate WWI where the world is violently beseiged by aliens. You play Dr. Brunhild Stahlmüller, performing an solo act of vernichtungsstrategie against the aliens and flying her 'Red Beezlebub' to the heart of the interplanetery menace. The game has a nod to the developer's earlier title Sturmfront: The Mutant War as the assistant to Dr. Stahlmuller, a Dr. Hartmuth Griesgram, is a key character in Sturmfront. The game functions well as a tate shump with plenty of risks and rewards for good flying. One specific factor in the gameplay loop is the use of a score locking pickup, in which the combo you build from downing enemies increases as long as the combo is unlocked, but can quickly drop if you're not careful. Once the combo is locked by a pickup at the end of the level, the combo can be continued into the next stage, and so on. The Red Beezlebub also come equipped with two different firing modes, a green weapon that does modest damage, and a heavy hitting weapon that pushes back your ship with each shot. Sebastian de Andrade shows their trademark capabilities with pixel art as every portion of the game is lovingly rendered and easy to read. Can you get through all eight levels and defeat the Chessmaster?
| Game Engine: RPG Maker 
As Karbonic was working through high school, they were working on this game to the detriment of their grades, but released this treasure in 2016. You play Nicholas, an unhappy fellow thrust into a dimension rapidly closing in on itself, known as the Garden of Vurrus. From there, he gets roped into a wild story of disparate and anachronistic characters as they attempt to halt the full collapse of the universe. Bracing stuff!
| ESRB Rating: Mature 
| Steam Net Revenue: $44,795.16 44k | Game Engine: Unity
You are the walking apocalypse, an unstoppable killing machine come to destroy the remants of humanity...but humanity's putting up a fight to remember. BUTCHER is a 2d platformer/arena shooter where you face off against fearsome enemies and machinations of death, literally tearing apart your enemies with lead, fire, and shrapnal. It has a lot of similarities in tone and difficulty to Teleglitch but from an android's perspective. A vicious delight.
| Steam Net Revenue: $10,314.68 10k | Game Engine: GameMaker 
Deep within the confines of a foreboding castle lie a cavalcade of enemies, dutifully working on a terrifying device that could alter the path of history as we know it! You play as Moth, a jovial and good-natured sort on an excursion to see just what's happening in Creepy Castle! With an aesthetic sensibility of early side-scrolling games, dopterra was able to secure funding for this game through a Kickstarter back in 2014 with an excess of $2000 USD and would later publish through Nicalis. It's very cute and a lot of fun!
| Net Revenue: $4,073.83 4k
From the mind of Anton Riot comes a world made entirely of plasticine to explore! You play as the newest recruit to get hazed out of a massive Megabomb to blow up the door leading to strange new worlds. The world you come from is strange enough, right? But there's plenty to explore and lots to do. Brew and drink compote, level up weapons, locate books on the other side of the dreaded doors...this is a real diamond in the rough, highly recommended!
| Game Engine: Unity | Part of the Tomato Way series (1st of 3)
Developed in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. An FPS game that follows the tribulations of Tomate, a lone warrior whose had a bounty put on his head amidst the land being taken over by cultists and other rotten fruit. The gameplay loop takes some getting used to, as you have four base weapons, two of which are principally melee, and you reload manually with the right mouse button. The melee weapons also have an alt fire - the sledgehammer can be thrown at enemies while Tomate's signature fork releases an AOE attack at the cost of some health. There's what seems at first like an exacerbating design decision in that your attacks on enemies have no meaningful feedback like blood or hitsparks, but there's a trick to combat - all of your enemies have one or more strange looking 'eyes' embedded in their person, and getting rid of these eyes puts them down for good. This is easier said than done as your enemies are all pretty fast and have odd hitboxes that will hit you multiple times in a single attack animation, so restarting is a fact of life with this game. The game is thematically a samurai story, and the cutscenes are filmed and scored with this in mind, but the plot itself is more akin to 12 oz. Mouse by way of Veggietales. There is something very big and very strange happening in the world Tomate inhabits, and it's hard to discern just what is really going down, but it all points to the lone warrior. This game gained a small but committed fandom over the years, and once you get used to how it works, you might find yourself becoming part of it!
Knock knock, the Health Inspector Cats are here and you are in SOOO much trouble! A short and sweet platformer by Sink, you play as Crow, a crow with a jaunty red kerchief as she putters through her hotel attemping to fix things for the inspectors, battling cockroaches, ghosts, and her own plumbing skills. There's some really creative game mechanics in here as well as an emphasis on using inertia to your advantage. The save points are sign-in sheets which is just a cute detail that other devs might have left on the cutting room floor. Music is provided by captbeardd and kayfaraday giving the whole game a really funky character! There's also a prequel game called Croaktel that you unlock for beating the base game, where you play as Lilly the frog on their morning commute getting bullied by flowers and dealing with the challenges of office life. It's a tiny bit shorter than Crowtel but provides a healthy challenge to people already familiar with Crowtel. Absolutely give this one a shot!
Steam | itch.io | Xbox Store
| Game Engine: Unity
As AI becomes more and more of a permanent fixture of everyday life, it will become critical to have material from before its meteoric effect on the world around us as a means of grounding us in what our fears and hopes were for the future. From Sylvius Fischer, Fumiko is a love story, turned horror story, about an artifical intelligence developed for uncertain reasons and the denizens of the I.M. - human consciousness uploaded to a digital realm and the forces that are gradually driving it to tragedy. Mechanically, Fumiko offers the greatest freedom of movement I've ever seen in a game like this - running and jumping gives way to double jumping, gives way to quadruple jumping, giving way to endless running and jumping which is necessary to navigate the worlds you find yourself in. Visually, the game is remarkably gorgeous especially considering the audicious use of default cubes as architecture, because everything is designed to fit in seemlessly with the extreme digital environment. The story is a truly prescient one and it unravels beautifully. Check this one out!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Unity
It's all a façade. As you gain consciousness, a mysterious woman asks you to help her disperse negative energies in HAPPY WORLD. But something is off, isn't it? What's really going on here? Why are some of these tasks nice and some make you feel repulsive? As you traverse the ZONEs and make people happy, these are the sorts of questions that will bubble to the surface. Made by Jimmy Malaski, HAPPY WORLD is an incredible work about how a jolly atmosphere can disguise and even smother the darker feelings that are a part of human life, and how we find meaning in meaninglessness.
Steam | Playstation | Xbox | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 
| Steam Net Revenue: $6,542.45 6k | Game Engine: Unity
Coming to us from Bony Yousef and originally for the iPhone, this is a platformer that will demand a lot of your logic solving and reflexes! You play a box with a bandana that must traverse a series of platforms and traps to reach a gem. The sparse visuals are an important design decision as the color grading lets you know straightaway which items are safe to touch or not. Wall jumping is a necessity for most puzzles and works in much the same way as Super Meat Boy, and you also have a sprint that activates after moving in a single direction for two seconds, that one's also important to surviving most challenges. There are 155 levels in total, and while most of the levels can be completed in less than 15 seconds, beating one always feels rewarding, especially if you get a 3-star rank. I recommend it!
Steam || Xbox || Nintendo E-shop
| Game Engine: GameMaker | ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $297,055.63 297k | Part of the Existential Dilogy (1st of 2)
We owe an immense debt to The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's meteoric success for giving us the immense body of work from Yeo and their team. You play Ringo Ishikawa, a listless delinquent in their last semester of senior year. All of his friends appear to be moving on, but what is Ringo to do now that school will be a thing of the past? You spend two months worth of time trying to find that answer, the answer only you can find. A truly moving work!
Originally an entry for the 2018 A Game By Its Cover game jam, THE DEVIL HAUNTS ME marks an important point in lum's game dev work as this game would become the template for both PARANOIHELL and Search Party. You play a young person (possibly named Daniel) as they attempt to survive in the wilderness floating in what appears to be a type of purgatory. Many themes and game mechanics in lum's later titles appear here as you chop down trees, collect water, hunt for food, and evade the wrath of the devil while investigating the world around you. An excellent survival horror!
Steam | GOG | Playstation | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $4,879,301.73 4.8m | Game Engine: Unity
Sometimes the net revenue of a game speaks for itself, but DUSK is an incredible FPS game by your friend and mine David Szymanski, and published by New Blood Interactive as their first major get. You play the Dusk Dude, a treasure hunter who narrowly escapes from being mounted on a pair of sickles and ripped apart by cultists. Now is the time to turn the tables! An absolutely outrageous amount of firepower and physics-based platforming co-mingle with David's classic dark sensibilities and storytelling prowess and the incredible musical stylings of Andrew Hulshult and a surprise guest star! Every moment of this game felt like being trapped inside a horror movie in the best way! Absolutely give this one a shot!
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo Switch | Xbox | Playstation
| Game Engine: Construct 2 
| ESRB Rating: Teen 
Look, let's just be straightforward here - if you managed to end up on a Neocities cite run by a furry, you probably have already played Hypnospace Outlaw and don't need me to tell you how great it is. Just in case you haven't, though, here's the rundown: You play the role of an Enforcer, a glorified hall monitor important member of the Merchantsoft™ family whose job it is to narc on innocent people maintain the integrity of Hypnospace. As your role on Hypnospace increases, you become embroiled in a cyber-noir that seemlessly blends the atmosphere of pre-Web 2.0 internet with corporate malefactions and the sorts of behaviors that only come from the truly desperate. The final act of the game's story is one of the most pleasing denounments I've had the pleasure of playing. Please do yourself a favor and check this one out if you haven't already!
Steam || Epic Games Store || Nintendo e-Shop || Playstation || Xbox
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Steam Net Revenue: $529,160.19 529k
In the post-apocalypse, someone has to be the one to tend the fields. In this game, that someone is you! Grow your plants and keep them big and happy while staving off the threat of gun-toting rabbits and other hungry pests. You can spend your days tending the farm while occasionally exploring to get better supplies and increase your crop yield. But beware, as you're far from immortal and being careful is the the only way to survive. Can you make it through the years to keep the homestead fed?
Erica Yu is a bartender at The Only Bar in town. It's early morning, and she's ready to go home to her girlfriend. But her relief is short lived as she finds herself beseiged on all sides by murderous cops, impossible geometry, and strange red mannequins. Death and danger await around every corner, but is death truly the worst you have to worry about in this town? Coming off of the success of THE DEVIL HAUNTS ME 13 months prior, lum creates a delightful atmosphere of torment as you work your way through this survival horror!
| Game Engine: MonoGame 
A demoralized Bimbob's clerk stands over the contents of a busted trash bag, wet with rain and pig blood, and now her tears. Suddenly, a stranger with round glasses and a toothy grin approaches. Thus starts the story of the up-ad-coming street gang known as the Thornz. Star Fetchers is a game currently in production from LKsvavelstickan with a Kickstarter and the pilot available for free off of Steam and releasing in 'episodes'. True to this format, the game is heavily informed by anime with its choice of graphics and gameplay style. Similar in execution to Katana Zero, you use the mouse to swing a sword and defeat enemies, either fighting off sword-wielding gang members or cutting down bullets before they reach you. There's also a heavy undercurrent of the future of the world under AI and consumer culture informing the setting around you. An excellent work!
Steam || Xbox || Nintendo E-shop
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Steam Net Revenue: $21,402.72 21k | Part of the Existential Dilogy (2nd of 2)
While very different from the other work by Yeo, this is an important milestone not only for the amount of influence it would have on games like Fading Afternoon but for helping establish what kind of work he's capable of outside of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's mold. You play an unknown mercernary in France getting contracts to kill people. You don't know their names, or locations. All you know of your player character is they're an expert marksman and they have insomnia. Beyond that, their life is depressingly sparse and bleak in sharp contrast to the dull, brutal beauty around them.
Steam (SUPER METBOY! Ver.) | Nintendo e-Shop (SUPER METBOY! Ver.) | Google Play Store (Freeware Ver.)
| Game Engine: Unity | METBOY! Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
The first self-developed game from Rebuild Games, who mainly do third-party design work on Pokemon games. Metland is being besieged by enemies, and it's up to a crack team of Mets to stop them. SUPER METBOY! has a fascinating control scheme in which the Met you play as bounces around and hops into the air when shooting a projectile. While strange to get used to, the game works beautifully around this mechanic as you use your shots to take out enemies all around the stage and survive waves of enemies. Each wave has a specific number of enemies you need to clear before it ends, and so you have a push-and-pull mechanic in choosing between easier enemies or stronger enemies that offer more money upon defeat. Your choice of Met also impacts gameplay - Metboy himself has a standard straight shot attack, while Metgirl has a heart attack that has homing properties, Metbomber has bombs that move in an arc, and so on. If you manage to complete the game, you get access to a 'special US version' that's harder but offers greater rewards. Those rewards come in the form of Diamonds that can be spent on Chips which alters things like your Attack strength, your HP, and the amount of Gold you get. It's a fantastic game!
Steam | itch.io | Google Play Store
This is another fine solitaire game, albeit one with a lot more bells and whistles than most others. The game looks and sounds like it's running on early equipment, with a bitcrushed announcer saying the name of every card that's produced. This particular game is a random version of 'draw 3' Klondike but with a specific twist on the formula; instead of having to start over when you get deadlocked out of available moves, the game has the option of taking the currently selected card in the deck and 'getting Radical' with it, changing the game into a horizontal breakout clone where the ball hits against the card at the end of the stage and changes it to an available card on the playing field at random. It's a fascinating twist on an old classic, and is worth checking out just for the aesthetics.
Steam | itch.io | Playstation | Xbox Store | Nintendo e-Shop
From Joshua Hollendonner comes a brief but highly replayable rougelike! You play an elderly fellow using their trusty single-shot pistol to escape the grim confines of the Gutwhale. With a myriad of enemies, a bullet replacement system that feels similar to Heavy Bullets, and several hats to change game conditions, this game really has me coming back for more every time!
| Game Engine: Unity
A very pleasant point-and-click adventure game by Rusimitu, you play the treasure hunter Noracam on their quest for the treasure of the ruined city of Macaron. The style is charmingly lo-fi as you guide a clay figurine away from videos of Rusimitu's household pets and solving cryptic puzzles on the hunt for the treasure. It's fun!
Steam | GOG | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $74,202.00 74k | Game Engine: Unity
Having just got a recent sequel, SLUDGE LIFE is the story of a grafitti artist named Ghost living in sludge. It could technically be considered a town but it's really more of a set of pillars and wreckage in a midst of oil like that one level of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Meet weird people, spray some tags, scare off pidgeons, smoke cigarettes, it's all possible in SLUDGE LIFE!
Just a very nice and intricate level! The color lighting and design aesthetics suggest more than a little Quake influence. Every corridor and setting has enough information to make moving through the level without a map intuitive. It is also complimented by music made by the WAD maker herself, which is not common in my experience! I played on Ultraviolence and found to my delight that the difficulty was just right for the amount of challenge you're asked to take on. You're made to work with smaller weapons before even sniffing out the Super Shotgun, but each part of the level is built to accomodate this setup beautifully. I would complain about the trick of teleporting monsters behind you to take you off-guard, but this is also a level where there isn't a single Archvile, not even on UV. What it DOES have is multiple unique enemies that really add some spice to the typical encounters. The Haedexebus, Aracnorb, and Aracnorb Queen are new enemies provided by community members on top of sever other environmental items, and they're a hoot to fight! The Aracnorb is a floating Arachnotron who is far more dangerous than their Arachnotron cousin owing mainly to its mobility; the Haedexebus and Aracnorb Queen both have TWO seperate attacks that behave in ways that make shooting at a distance a major priority, and learning attack animations critical, especially in the last fight in which the arena throws Aracnorb Queen fight one after the other, bolstered by higher ranked enemies than the last wave. It's an delightful time!
Coming to us from Woolie Wool is a pleasant mini-sode of techbase levels! The opening level, Landing Zone, is almost quaint in how easy it goes on the player. Following soon after, however, is a series of claustrophopic hallways packed full to bursting with Pinky demons and only a non-Super shotgun as your main damage dealer for most of the run. As a PK3, there have been modifications to standard gameplay, and the most obvious one is the Watchers. The Watchers are replacement cacodemons, closer in design to their Dungeons and Dragons counterparts. They move faster and their projectiles are much faster too, but they go down with two shotgun blasts compared to the 6-7 needed to take down a cacodemon. They add a much needed wrinkle to the action and mix well with the episode's roster that would otherwise be chaingun fodder. Speaking of, the chaingun has been replaced with a rifle that functions in basically the same way. The levels also boast a points system, in which acquiring pickups (high fantasy themed, such as chalices filled with blood and arcane treasure chests) adds to a point system similar to Wolfenstein 3D. It's good!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Godot 
A duck taking their seat on the porcelian throne / goes and gets themselves flushed into the Toilet Zone! Made by Wolfenrahd for the first Miz Jam hosted by miziziz on itch.io, Toilet Zone is a tough little game where you have to make audicious use of the stream of water escaping from your toilet as a way of accelerating and decelerating within the walls of your confinment, locating the keys that will get you back home!
| Game Engine: Unity
Borislav just lost a flexing competition to decide the mayor of Swoleville for the next year, and only has 24 hours to contest the results! As fate would have it, an explosion far off in the distance and an unconscious man in a nearby clearing herald far more important matters. Heart is Muscle is not only a scientific fact but the game's central thesis as you have to balance your time wisely on the things that actually matter in the grand scheme, or risk misleading Borislav down a darker path. The story is extra sweet and has a delightful aesthetic, though the UI is spotty in places, but is still commendable for the dev's first time working in Unity. I enjoyed it, and I believe you will too!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: PICO-8 
A delightful example of the kind of work the Pico-8 engine is capable of, High Stakes is a fairly straightforward premise: you've had all but 20 mL of your blood stolen by vampires and must play card games to get the blood back. The gameplay loop is similar in card placement to Golf Card, but with the premise that each 9 card layout has eight numbered cards and one face card - the Vampire. Your goal is to turn over as many cards as possible without getting the Vampire per round, and the gameplay is about attempting to use the various tools at your disposal to figure out just where the Vampire is so that you can either avoid or stake them. Play your cards right and you'll be laughing all the way to the blood bank!
| Game Engine: GameMaker Studio
Developed by Wishes Unlimited and published by Klei Publishers, the demo for Beastieball is really cute and sweet and funny - really, I don't have a lot of notes about the core concept of this game, or it's execution. You're out to save your hometown's natural habitat from getting bulldozed for a coliseum that the Beastieball league almost certainly doesn't need, and to get the league's attention, you need to get to the top 50, which means coaching like you've never coached before. In short, I had a really great time with this one, both as a concept of being a coach to your not-Pokemon and the concept of winning a game by virtue of playing well and out-maneuver instead of worrying about hit points. I can also relate to it as an old fella whose gotten burned out on so many things like Pokemon and similar because it all feels like a mad rush to develop the most devestating meta to crush your opponents - "Beastieball used to be fun." I have to say, I'm really looking forward to this coming out next year.
