One of the best things about a Steam sale is not the fact that you can get packs of high-profile triple-A titles for ludicrous prices (although that’s welcome too) but the fact that you can afford to take risks on obscure indie titles that you may not have thought to investigate in the past.
This has paid off on a number of separate occasions for me in the past, with some real gems coming to my attention purely by virtue of the fact that they were either dirt cheap or bundled with some other titles which had piqued my interest. Some of these have become a little more well known since I first picked them up, others haven’t.
Let’s take a peek at a few of them.
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale
This utterly charming JRPG-cum-light management game is oozing with charm and character, not least from the protagonist Recette and her money-loving fairy companion Tear. The writing (or rather, localisation) of the game is probably the best thing about this game, but it helps that it’s a solid (if slightly repetitive) game. The repetition ceases to matter, though, when the incidental scenes featuring well-defined and well-written characters are so entertaining, and happen just often enough to break up the curious combination of loot-whoring dungeon crawling and shop management.
BIT.TRIP BEAT
I’d never played a BIT.TRIP game prior to this one but was dimly aware of their existence. BEAT is, in simple terms, one-player pong but combined with a rhythm game and the sort of things you’d see if an Atari 2600 took too much LSD. It’s a strange, hypnotic game that turns into you fusing with your mouse in an intricate dance, bouncing back the huge pixels in time with the music and going slightly dizzy in the process.
Hacker Evolution
If you’ve played Uplink, you’d be forgiven for thinking Hacker Evolution was something similar — but it’s actually a bit different. Where Uplink was most akin to something like Elite, only you were travelling around the world’s computer networks rather than the galaxy, Hacker Evolution is more tightly-focused and level-based. It’s also quite unforgiving, and from my experiences so far it appears that there’s relatively few “correct” ways to complete a level — but that gives it something of a puzzle game feeling which isn’t entirely unwelcome. The fact that you interact with the game by typing authentic-looking commands into a text-based console helps with the whole immersion thing, too.
Altitude
If you’ve often thought that Team Fortress 2 would be better if everyone was in aeroplanes and it was in 2D, then Altitude is the game for you. Featuring a wide selection of aircraft, each with special CoD-style perks — unlockable via CoD-style levelling up — and a decent mix of game types and levels, this is a fun multiplayer title, even if you’re shite at it, which I am.
I’d write more but I appear to have developed an absolutely screaming headache. Night all!
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