Games I Recommend

This is the list of games I've really enjoyed. I like recommending these to others in the hopes they enjoy them too. Be sure to read why I recommend them. I often enjoy games that do one thing really well at the expense of other aspects. I won't add your game to this list, so don't ask. You may notice it doesn't have any "AAA" games from the last decade or so. I don't think marketing budget and publication date are relevant to whether or not a game is worth playing.

Creeper World Series by Knuckle Cracker

Each of the Creeper World games are all essentially different takes on the same core gameplay mechanic, an asymmetric real-time strategy game based on a fluid simulation. When I say different takes, I mean that each game tries to reimagine the core concept under different constraints to add a new layer of creativity to the design. For example, the original Creeper World takes place from the top down, while Creeper World 2 takes place from the side to incorporate gravity and add an anti-creeper mechanic. Creeper World 3 goes back to top-down, brings back the Creeper vs Anti-Creeper mechanic, adds new mobile enemies, and a new type of terrain.

At their core, Knuckle Cracker games are mechanics-driven games. I find them extremely fun. Part puzzle, part power fantasy. While story battles can have all sorts of difficulty curves with sneaky reversals, counters, unique constraints, set piece action scenes, and surprises; the procedurally generated battles emphasize what makes the core gameplay so compelling. Each battle begins with a plan of attack. You try to quickly capture as much territory as you can practically defend, and then you begin to build your strength. You need to upgrade your weapons, build units that produce resources, and watch out for unexpected weaknesses in your defences. When you have enough strength, you begin to slowly creep into enemy territory. As you go, you continue to fortify and build, each piece increasing the pace of your advance until your advance becomes a charge and a fait accompli.

When I say the games are focused on mechanics, I mean there are other elements like music, story, graphics, juice, etc., but they're not what keeps me coming back to play. The story and the writing are more flavour than fibre. Music and sound effects are there, but mostly to fill the silence rather than a focus of the game. If you buy games for thought provoking narrative or stunning visuals, I wouldn't recommend these to scratch that itch.

If you're curious but don't want to commit, the old Flash-based versions of Creeper World are available in the Flashpoint archive. If you've played those and want more, you should definitely consider buying a copy of Creeper World III: Arc Eternal. I've played hundreds of hours on that one with all the community maps available and I think it's the most fleshed out of all four.

If the 2D graphics aren't your thing, Creeper World 4 is a dramatic step up in visuals to the third dimension. It's quite nice compared to the previous instalments and even has some new ideas and changes to keep it fresh. Unfortunately, the underlying grid meant I often positioned the camera directly overhead, recreating a 2D view. It's a lot of fun, but my indifference is probably a product of how much time I've spent with previous titles and how accustomed I've become to reading the depth gauge.

TIS-100 by Zachtronics

TIS-100 is a puzzle game about programming a strange little computer in assembler. You already know if this is something you'd be into. Seriously, if your idea of a good time is opening a real PDF programming manual to learn the instructions this weird little virtual machine can execute to solve programming problems, look no further.

I like programming, and now that I work as a programmer, I have a messed up relationship with the joy I used to find in it. This allowed me to get some of it back. It's a world where programming isn't a trillion dollar industry. You're not just a middleman between a text editor and a search engine or chatbot. You don't have a thousand tools and libraries to haphazardly cobble together. There are no thought leaders espousing their one true religion of development practice. There's no tech debt, no office politics, no deadlines, no compromises, no meetings, nobody else's mistakes to clean up. Just you, the machine, the problem, and the reference manual.

What's more, statistics about your solution, such as how many instructions you used, how many nodes were involved, or how long it took to execute, are collected and compared to everyone else's solutions. Since the solutions are trivially verifiable by the leader board server, there's nobody who's solution runs in 0.1 seconds with 1 instruction. This allows you to challenge yourself, to reconsider your solution and squeeze it to improve.

If you're curious, the TIS-100 Reference Manual is available online at the Zachtronics website. You'll have to read the manual to play the game anyway. Why not read it first to see if it sparks some joy?

Antichamber by Alexander Bruce

Antichamber is a first-person puzzle game. That's not why I recommend it. Instead, the game is a puzzle game in a world that routinely defies the laws of Euclid, stylized with some of the coolest shader art in video games. Kind of like playing The Stanley Parable and Portal at the same time, without a narrator, while the hue and contrast controls freak out in a good way.

There's no plot or story, just a world to explore and experience as you overcome the puzzling obstacles in your path. You just start walking around, and almost immediately the world shows you that every expectation you have about how physical space works doesn't apply in the antichamber. After toying with you the game begins to slowly introduce mechanics. I found that most of the puzzles have that wonderful sense of "Ah, ha!" where once you know the solution, it doesn't drag on unnecessarily. Soon you'll find the manipulation tool that allows you to pick up and place the colourful blocks of the world, and from there you're off on an adventure.

The game has an ending. It's visual and beautiful, but it was also kind of sad. You know it means it's over. You've experienced all the visual delights and wondrous geometry that the game has to offer. This game is an experience. It doesn't try to take hundreds of hours to play, and I'm very grateful for that. I find that too many games drag on until they're no longer fun, and I'm left to either push through with brute force or I just give up. Not this one.

It's a game that really explores the possibilities of video game world design. It clearly shows you that video game worlds don't have to follow the same rules that govern our own. That it's not necessary to push harder and harder for realism and immersion, and that trying to make a video game mimic the real world is but a fraction of what they have to offer.

Evoland by Shiro Games

Ever wanted a crash course through the artistic and mechanical elements of early Zelda and Final Fantasy games and their clones? This game essentially plays out what that looked like, with some flair of its own. I like to think of it as the game design equivalent of Coles Notes. In this case, of course, because it's about games and not books, it's a game and not a book.

If you want a mechanically deep game or a game with a complex narrative, this is not the game for you. It's very one-dimensional. You go on an unspecified adventure until you find out there's a BigBad™. Defeat it and the world is safe. Mechanically, it's all rudimentary versions of the mechanics from the source material it's based on. They could use more polish, but the game is also constantly throwing away art and engine code that any other game would reuse and build upon. I'm not surprised that compromises were made in the feel of something that the player will experience for maybe twenty minutes. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice to have a deeper game, but I still recommend it.

I find this game interesting as a concept. For those who study game design, I think it's a great piece to think about how upgrades in technology often present trade-offs. There will be some upgrades you unlock that you wish you could undo because they take away something you enjoyed. Much like fans who wish the new game didn't remove that thing they enjoyed from the last one. If you engage it critically, it helps you appreciate what you can dissect when you bring so many styles together in one game.

Muse Dash by PeroPeroGames

I don't play a lot of rhythm games, but I really like this one. It has only two controls, just up and down with the left and right set of homerow keys. While seasoned rhythm gamers may find such simplicity too basic, I find it quite nice to relax. Great music, cute anime, over-the-top visuals, quirky levels. It's a balance that makes for a fun game to just jam to.

There are mobile versions, and that helps explain why the controls are so simple on the surface. Underneath, though, the controls expect you to use multiple fingers for each side to hit the fast note sequences and combos when you get to advanced difficulties. Unfortunately, this means that you can go a long way with just two fingers, but at some point, if you want to keep pushing yourself, it'll just be too fast to keep up and you'll have to completely relearn how to play multi-finger. On the other hand, if you're not a speed demon you can enjoy just about any track with just two fingers if you stick to easier difficulties.

I haven't played it on mobile, but on desktop it's sold in two parts. There's the fairly inexpensive base game and then a much more expensive single DLC that bundles all the track packs together. The base game offers a solid set of tracks that ramp up in difficulty, culminating in a sort of hardest of the lot boss-like level. It's a great experience and can be the only thing you play if you want. Every day they also make one of the DLC tracks available for those who only have the base game.

Having a cheap game and single expensive content pack is definitely a choice that can have mixed feelings. Especially if you don't know about it until after you buy the base game. Feels like a bait and switch. So I want to be sure you know about it. I personally love that there's just one big purchase if you decide you want more songs instead of several individual packs dividing up that cost. It feels nice that there's a full purchase price. I'm kind of tired of confusing tiers, pointless cosmetics, and a never ending series of DLC chopping the game up and selling it in pieces.

I also liked being able to pick the base game up for a few bucks. Expensive games you end up not really enjoying aren't fun either. Having played with the expansion for a while now, I think the base game is great all on its own. It does remind you about the expansion in places, but you really don't need it to have a good time. It's just more songs. You aren't missing much.

Terraria by Andrew Spinks

Yes, I have to get the Minecraft comparison out of the way. If you miss Minecraft after it was enshitified under the heel of Microsoft, you'll find joy in Terraria. If you've played Starbound but not Terraria, it's like that, but made with passion instead of grift, so it has an order of magnitude more content for half the price.

Terraria is a game designed and largely built by Andrew "Redigit" Spinks. It still is, over a decade and a half later. I don't want to diminish the work of the many amazing people who work on the game at Re-Logic, or those who started the game. They've helped create something incredible by combining ideas and talents. It's not a solo dev game, but it's a game that's had someone's care and attention all its life.

It's $10, and for that you get a game with hundreds of hours of things to explore and do. Not a procedurally generated roguelike replay loop. Not a sandbox where you try to make your own fun. No, a world filled with a crafted narrative experience based on a progression of events, enemies, and boss fights. Places to explore with surprises to discover. An entire interconnected crafting tree that builds and evolves over the course of the game, allowing you to make weapons that feel fun and exciting to wield, and armour and outfits that look good doing it.

It's a game a mile wide and a dozen leagues deep, with systems that build upon systems. A game where most things that exist have lots of variations so you can pick the ones that fit your style, personality, or mood, but more importantly, many have unique systems or features so they're not just reskins with bigger numbers. Even now, they're working on world generation code to add bazaar new worlds to explore, meaning the system will mix back on the other existing systems to let you discover all sorts of novelties in what's possible.

Explore how? Well, Terraria has one of the rare systems in games where player characters are independent of a game world. You have characters and worlds. You can have your character travel to different game worlds if you want. To join multiplayer games with all the gear and items you bring in your inventory to show off and to bootstrap the party. To take them to worlds of intense difficulty and try to get loot that is exclusive to that level of challenge. I haven't played a game like that since Diablo II. Too many games worry about balance or cheating. Terraria is content to just let you have fun. You're only cheating yourself.

It also gets a lot of things right that its competitors do not. The intended experience is that you only drop half your money when you die and not your whole inventory, making it painful but not frustrating. There are no durability mechanics on tools or weapons that leave you stranded in a fight or pointlessly making a dozen of something to make it last. Its 2D graphics mean you can navigate the world more easily, knowing what's on the other side of a wall, while also making it faster to create new content for the game, spending less time on art and more time on gameplay.

Dark Echo by RAC7

You may have noticed that I love puzzle games. This is an action puzzle game. A game where you have to dodge enemies and avoid traps while finding the way to open locked doors, all without ever seeing any of it. It has the really cool idea to represent instead the sounds that emanate and reflect from the surfaces around you. Using colour to indicate enemies in red, water in blue, and buttons in yellow. It's a fantastic concept and I love every minute of it.

The difficulty of the game is mixed. There are sections that require many attempts to get through. It's not an extremely long experience, but there are a few dozen puzzles to solve. More than enough for the price. I love this game most of all for its originality.

Factorio by Wube Software

I'm a computer programmer. I kind of have to like this game. Not really, of course, but yeah, this game is a ton of fun if you like to automate things. While in many games automating things like getting money or resources is either a dirty secret or an outright cheat, in Factorio it's the intended experience.

What impresses me the most is how the game manages to handle the millions of entities you're moving around without breaking a sweat. I mean, it's possible with a mega factory to push the limits of what your computer can handle, but this game has a level of optimization that few game developers are even capable of (or at least bothering with) anymore. It's really impressive engineering.

If you're not a programmer, but want something that gives you the real experience of having to go back and fix things that turn out to be a problem as you continue to expand and add more and more to your project, this is the game. While other games will teach you algorithmic thinking, Boolean logic, or other software fundamentals, this is the only game that really captures what it's like to work on a long-lived software project.

The modding community for this game is also incredible. The game has an impressive collection of mods that expand the number of recipe chains and toys to play with. I mean, just look at the highlights page. If you manage to launch a rocket, which is no small feat, you can go on to levels of automation that only the truly insane dare to orchestrate.

One of the other interesting things about this game is that it never goes on sale. The game has only gotten more expensive over time as it moved out of early access and gained more features and polish. The developers feel that discounting it would essentially rob those who bought early. It would also be a psychological trick to get you to buy it. They just want an honest deal. I admire that.

Hook by Maciej Targoni

How about a puzzle game that has been beautifully reduced to almost nothing? Hook is a puzzle game designed to look like an electronic circuit diagram. Your job is to pull the hooks and pins apart by sending signals through a mess of tangled wires.

No timers, no scores, and no fancy animations. Just a simple puzzle. Follow the wires, figure out what button connects to what. Figure out where all the dials go. Then push the button and hope you didn't miss anything. It's as beautiful as it is simple. It's just a joy to interact with. The sound design is exquisite, with satisfying buttons and a clunk when you've screwed up that makes you slap your forehead for missing it. The atmosphere is serene.

Fallout: New Vagus by Obsidian Entertainment

If you haven't watched hbomberguy's video essay yet, it's well worth the time. It covers a lot of the reasons why this game is a joy to play and how it can really challenge you to think about things.

It's one of the few games that has ever really forced me to think critically about and defend things I believe in. It does that all the time. Just as an example, I think education is probably the greatest thing humans have ever invented. The ability to pass on what you have learned to others is a true multiplier of human potential. Coupled with the scientific method of arriving at the truth of things, this has really been the driving force of the last couple centuries' gains in human living conditions.

The game has a faction called the Followers of the Apocalypse. An anarcho-humanitarian quasi-religious organization that focuses on science, education, research, and medical services. I don't want to unpack that word soup too much, but basically imagine a group that uses the iconography of religion, but where divinity has been replaced by scientific research and the ideals of faith by thought have been eliminated, leaving only faith by works. Sounds ideal, right? A loose association of people who just want to help educate people as much as possible to make the world a better place. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, meet the Great Khans, a raiding faction known for producing and selling vast amounts of narcotics in the wastelands and directly responsible for supplying the drugged out murderous faction called the Fiends. Guess who they learned their chemistry from.

If you need more, meet Caesar's Legion, one of the game's core factions and one that is attempting to remake civilization in the image of the Roman Empire under fascism by embarking on a military campaign of genocide, enslaving those deemed useful, subjugating young boys impressionable enough for military integration, and gruesomely killing the rest as a warning to any dissenters. Guess where Edward "Caesar" Sallow learned about the Greco-Raman world on which to base his empire. Better yet, he was once a member of the Followers.

Welcome to the dark side of education. If you don't indoctrinate people, they can do morally repugnant things with what you teach them. Does this mean that we should only indoctrinate people? Should we guard knowledge to prevent its misuse? Now just imagine that challenge to your ideals playing out again and again, subject by subject.

Toki Tori 2+ by Two Tribes

You can conquer the entire game from the beginning if you understand how each mechanic works. But you don't, so you have to explore and let the game teach you by observing how everything around you interacts. In Toki Tori 2+ you only have two controls, stomp and chirp. No jumping, no dashing, and no flying. Just stomp and chirp.

The game is very cute and accessible. There's no dialogue or writing, so children and those with limited literacy in any of the supported languages should be able to play comfortably. The music is generally upbeat and happy. It has a lot of Saturday morning cartoon camp. I'd call it a children's puzzle game, but describing media as child-friendly or for children often implies an odour of garbage that this game simply does not have.

Yes, it's another puzzle game. But it's a puzzle game that focuses on your ability to watch and learn, because it follows the best rule in movies and games: "Show! Don't tell."

Vampire Survivors by Luca Galante

If fun were a game, Vampire Survivors would be it. If you boil down everything in video games until just the act of existing is fun, you get this game. You're the epicentre of a bullet hell storm. Hordes of enemies swarm you while your arsenal of weapons cuts through them like hot butter. As you collect experience gems, you level up to add even more weapons and damage to your arsenal. Every also-ran slop shop has put out a clone, so you know it must be good.

You start out dodging and weaving, avoiding enemies as you try to survive with just one or two underpowered weapons. Eventually you get overrun and fail. As you get better and better, learning the best weapon combos and tactics, you eventually manage to hold out until only death itself can take you down. Or can it? In Vampire Survivors, you may even be able to defeat death. No one lives forever, but the truly prepared can fight to the bitter end.

This game is super fun if you love achievement hunting. There are hundreds of them. All of them are reasonable to obtain. It's a lot of fun to work your way through them. For a few bucks, you can see what a game that focuses solely on being fun is like.