While getting Epic Battle Fantasy 3 ready for its Steam release, I’ve been looking at other free single-player indie games to see what’s on there.

So here’s my favourite free games I’ve found on Steam so far, in no particular order. They’ve all got really good user reviews too, so you don’t have to take my word for it that they’re great.

Also feel free to suggest other free games on Steam. I might do another list like this in the future.

MANDAGON

MANDAGON is a relaxing little atmospheric platformer with an interesting Tibetan theme. It’s a lot like Fez in many ways. It takes less than an hour to beat and it’s quite easy.

Jigoku Kisetsukan: Sense of the Seasons

Jigoku Kisetsukan is a cute and awesome Touhou-style bullet-hell shoot-em-up with a catchy soundtrack. It’s not a long game but the playable characters have very different play styles and each gets slightly different bosses, so there’s a lot of replay value. I ended up playing for 5 hours.

Even easy mode is quite hard though – so some bullet hell experience is recommended.

Pink Hour & Pink Heaven

Pink Hour and Pink Heaven are basically intros for the run-and-gun game Kero Blaster. Each can be beaten in less than half an hour. They’re really cute and if you like them you can check out Kero Blaster and Cave Story for bigger experiences by the same developer. I really love his art and music.

Eternal Senia

Eternal Senia is a surprisingly addictive action RPG. It’s got very simple and stress-free gameplay with fun character upgrading. You hit stuff, dodge attacks, collect items, upgrade, and repeat. There’s also a cliche anime plot which you may or may not care about. It takes about 4 hours to beat.

It’s cool to see that some interesting games are being made in RPG Maker.

Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls

Khimera is basically Shovel Knight with different combat mechanics. The writing and boss characters are great – they’ve all got a lot of personality and memorable designs. I’m glad I played it to the end because the final boss was particularly awesome. Takes around 4 hours to beat.

Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt

Princess Remedy is like a traditional old JRPG but with shoot-em-up battles. It’s bursting with personality and has fantastic writing – talking to NPCs is actually fun!

It takes less than an hour to beat and there’s difficulty options to accommodate all skill levels – I recommend starting on a harder difficulty if you want a challenge.

Super Crate Box

Super Crate Box is a lot of fun if you like replaying the same 3 minutes of twitchy shooting action trying to get a high score. There’s a lot of different guns and a few levels and modes. But it’s a pure skill game and you’ll probably know whether you’ll like it or not in the first 5 minutes of playing. It’s hard.

Here’s another batch of reviews! You can click the images to check out the games on Steam.

Botanicula

Botanicula is now my favorite point-and-click adventure game, because it’s the only one I’ve ever managed to beat without a walkthrough! Well I lie, I had to use a walkthrough ONE time. But yeah, it’s quite easy compared to similar games I’ve played, and as a result, I found it much more enjoyable, because I wasn’t lost all the time.

It’s also made in Flash, and shows that Flash games can look and sound really good. If you like games with unusual art styles, you should check it out.

Wizorb

This is a fun game as far as Breakout-clones go, but I didn’t think it was anything special. I checked it out because some of the animations were done by Paul Robertson, but it wasn’t his usual style, and there wasn’t that much animation either. I guess it would have been more fun if I was into these games, but I found that it quickly got boring for me. I still played it to the end though, but only on easy mode.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

I think this may be the funniest single player game I have ever played. On my first attempt, I was laughing the whole time, up until the point where my last dude was picked up by a tornado and gored by a flying buffalo. The humor is just incredibly over the top and ridiculous, and I recommend NOT watching any gameplay videos before playing, as to not spoil anything.

The game’s really short, but there’s plenty of replay value, so it can keep you busy for a few hours. The music is also incredibly catchy.

Nimble Quest

This was originally a mobile game, and it really shows in the grindy upgrade system. So maybe you should play this on your phone, instead of on Steam. It’s still fun despite that though. It’s basically Snake, but instead of a snake, you control a line of warriors, where each has a unique attack that they spam at enemies. It’s actually quite a fun concept, and I played it longer than I thought I would. It would have been nice if they expanded on the game a bit for the Steam version though, as it really does feel like a mobile game.

Aqua Kitty

Aqua Kitty is a shoot-em-up that’s heavily inspired by the old arcade game Defender, which I’ve played quite a lot. Basically, you shoot down waves of enemies while protecting your kittens from being abducted, while making heavy use of your radar. It’s a fun game, but it feels a bit repetitive. Some more variations between the levels would have been nice. Maybe some more bosses or environmental hazards.

But still, it’s a retro shoot-em-up about cats. That’s enough to check it out.
The survival mode is also quite addictive, and has been keeping me busy.

Puzzle Dimension

Not much to say about this one. It’s kind of a generic puzzle game, I guess. You’ve got to move the ball to the end of the level, while traversing a maze of various traps, like ice, fire, spikes, sand, and all that sort of stuff. I usually like puzzle games at first, but once the difficulty increases, I quickly tire of them. And it was the same with this one.

It’s been a long time since I played a puzzle game that wasn’t a Flash game, so the modern graphics were quite nice. It also gave me a few puzzle ideas that I could perhaps use in some of my future games.

I’m still playing a lot of indie games on Steam, so here’s another batch of quick reviews…

Legend of Dungeon

When I started playing this, I thought that the controls were too simple to make an interesting game. There’s only movement, a jump button, an action button, and a simple inventory system.

But it turns out that there’s such a variety of interesting items to use, that it’s not a simple game at all. You’ve got melee weapons, guns, spell books that can summon monsters, different hats to equip for different abilities, potions with random effects, light sources, item magnets, cats which shoot lasers from their eyes, unicorn shaped shields, and other stuff. And there’s also a massive variety of enemies, which will require different strategies to defeat or avoid.

There’s a lot of interesting ways that the entities in the game can interact with each other. For example: I summon a bunch of skeletons to defeat my foes, one of the skeletons touches a torch and is set on fire, the fire spreads to the other skeletons and eventually to me, and I burn to death.

I should also mention that the lighting effects in Legend of Dungeon are amazing, especially in the dark rooms where you need to carry a light source with you. The game is best played in a dark room, for maximum atmosphere. I found the controls quite hard to master on a keyboard, but they work very well with a controller.

Also, the shield is overpowered. The devs should probably nerf that or make the other melee weapons more useful.

La-Mulana

I tried to like this game. I really did.

Everything about it is great; the humor, the music, the action, the graphic style, etc. But it’s so cryptic that it’s almost unplayable without a walkthrough, and using a walkthrough for the entire game would be boring. I gave up a few hours in, once I could no longer make any progress by myself. La-Mulana gives you almost no instructions or directions at all, just very cryptic hints that are usually impossible to understand. Some of the more annoying puzzles include invisible floors, or breakable walls that look like normal walls.  The world is so massive and has so many path branches that you’ll be backtracking for ages before you figure out what you’ve missed or where to go.

Even very important key items like the map and warp system are fairly well hidden!
I probably wouldn’t have found them for a very long time, but I checked the wiki when I got trapped in a dead-end room. There’s actually traps that force you to load your last saved game! And they don’t even tell you that you’re perma-trapped! So you have to sit there like an idiot for 15 minutes trying to get out.

Ugh. It’s a shame. I really would have liked to finish the game. Cause it would be awesome if it was actually playable. If I wanted pointlessly difficult games, I’d pull out something for the NES.

But who knows, maybe I’ll give it another try someday.

Papers Please

Papers Please is a very unusual game. I’m not even sure how I can describe it effectively.
You play as a dude who checks passports for a fictional communist country. Sounds boring right? But so much drama happens. People try to bribe you, they tell you their sob stories, they try to smuggle weapons and drugs, your superiors are eager to punish you for any mistake you make, terrorists ask you for your help in overthrowing the government (and you can!), and if you mess up, either your family will starve, you’ll be arrested, or you might just die in a terrorist attack. There’s tons of different endings, and all of your actions have far-reaching consequences.

I used a walkthrough, because I didn’t find the gameplay very fun, I just wanted to experience the story. But I think the gameplay is supposed to NOT be fun. It’s supposed to be really stressful, and to put you in the shoes of the character you play. And maybe I cheapened the experience a bit by using that walkthrough. Oh well.

Anyway! The story was intense! It makes you really think about what effect your actions will have on others and yourself.

Intrusion 2

Intrusion 2 is basically Metal Slug with physics. Objects get thrown around, trees bend and wobble, and enemies wave their mechanical tentacles around.

I didn’t really care much for the physics, but I guess that’s what made the gameplay a bit different from similar games. The mech designs were cool and the boss battles were epic. The final battle in particular was one of the most insane boss battles I’ve ever played in a game.

My main criticism about Intrusion 2 is that the levels just dragged on for a bit too long. Enemies and scenery just repeated a few times too many. It took me over two hours to play through the game, while Metal Slug fits the same amount of content into a much shorter game with more replay-value.

It’s also worth noting that it was made in Flash by one guy!

Ballpoint Universe

Don’t know if it was just me, but I really didn’t like the controls in this game. They were just really wonky no matter what settings I used. The gamepad joystick was too sensitive for the shooting parts, but not sensitive enough on the menus. And the mouse controls were horrible for the platforming bits.

The platforming bits seemed unnecessary. Why not just give us a menu-based level hub instead of constantly shifting between two types of gameplay?

The shoot em parts were quite fun, but felt like they could have been done a lot better. The worst part was how often enemies would go off screen. If enemies go off screen in a shooter, they’re not supposed to come back!! But in this game, they do, quite often. Most of the enemy movement patterns depended on your movement, so you often had to move in a way that would keep them on screen. That’s pretty annoying.

Anyway, I played the game for the artstyle, and it surely delivered on unique graphics. The melee weapons on your ship were fun too. But overall I wasn’t too impressed.

Reus

Reus isn’t really my type of game. I just picked it up because it looked interesting, and it was. You play as four giants who terraform the world and make it habitable for humans. Then the humans get greedy and start fighting wars with each other, and eventually they’ll even start attacking your giants. At that point it’s time to destroy their civilization with a single punch.

Fun concept, but it’s not something I can play for more then an hour or two before getting bored.

I also liked that the game looked like it could have been made in Flash. I’m sitting there thinking, “Hey, I could do graphics like that!”.

I picked up a lot of indie games on Steam lately, and here’s my opinions on some of them…

Jamestown

Jamestown is a bullet hell shooter, so that pretty much guaranteed that I would like it. It’s got a very unique setting; it’s set in the 16th century, on Mars! The main character is fleeing from the King of England, and is fighting against the Spanish fleet and a bunch of aliens, with steampunk jetpacks things. That’s kind of cool.

Gameplay-wise the most notable thing is that it’s a widescreen, but scrolls vertically. I’m not used to that, as it means a lot of bullets come from the sides, as opposed to games like Touhou and Dodonpachi. There’s also a pretty big variety of ships, with very different play styles. But I still stick to the Dodonpachi-style ship, cause that’s what I’m good with.

The pixel art is nice, the music is fitting, and the game difficulty is quite reasonable.

 

Spelunky

Spelunky is now my favorite rogue-like game. It’s charming, funny, polished, challenging, and incredibly rewarding when things work out for you. There’s tons of awesome secrets, and lots of hilarious situations that can occur. For example: You pick up a golden idol from a trapped pedestal, and a huge boulder rolls across the screen demolishing everything. You get away safely, but this boulder smashes into an item shop, and so the shopkeeper goes berserk, grabs his shotgun, and chases after you. The boulder also destroyed a nearby temple and pissed off a goddess, who unleashes a horde of spiders on you. All of the different entities in the game have so many ways of interacting with each other that the game never runs out of new experiences.
There’s a good variety of items and powerups, and optional hidden levels, which also make each run very different.

Spelunky does get frustratingly hard at times though. (Damn those spike traps in the jungle area!) If they toned down the difficulty a tiny bit, I think the game would be perfect.

Rogue Legacy

I was kind of let down by this one. It just wasn’t all that much fun after a while.
Having permanent upgrades made it feel like the game was more about grinding for gold than actual skill, like most rogue-likes. But maybe I just sucked at it.
Giving your heroes random disabilities was a fun gimmick, but it got quite annoying once you actually started to play the game seriously.

It also felt kind of cheaply made: Most of the enemies had tons of color variations, big enemies were just stretched little enemies, equips didn’t visually change your character besides the color, the backgrounds were quite bland and repetitive… It was also a bit boring that the bosses were just huge versions of normal enemies (pictured).

Anyway, I beat 3 bosses, and then gave up. Maybe I’ll try again later. I mostly ended up feeling that I’d rather be playing Spelunky.

Thomas Was Alone

This game might not look like much, but it’s got a very good story! The only characters in the game are a bunch of rectangles, but you’ll start to care for them by the end of the game.

The platforming gameplay isn’t anything too special, and is often quite buggy too, but it’s worth playing for the story and atmosphere. It’s also short enough to finish in one sitting (4 hours), if you like short games.

Hammerwatch

This game’s probably a lot more fun with friends, but I played it by myself.
Anyway, I didn’t find anything particularly good about this Hammerwatch. It’s just a very simple dungeon crawler. Too simple and repetitive to stay interesting for long.

I actually gave up because I got lost; I think I forgot to activate a switch somewhere. But the switches aren’t marked on your map, and they’re very bland looking, so they’re very easy to miss. I got fed up with that, and just ragequit forever. Also, the map obstacles like spikes and arrow traps are very frustrating, as they often insta-killed me while I was backtracking and not looking out for them.

The bosses were pretty fun I guess.

Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures

If you’re a fan of frustratingly difficult platformers, crude humor, old NES games, or the AVGN on YouTube, then you should check this game out. It pretty much plays like a NES game, though the graphics and music are *slightly* more modern. It’s hard, but not too hard. It gets easier if you keep practicing, and is very rewarding when you manage to finish a level. There’s also tons of references to NES games, which you’ll probably know from AVGN’s videos, and the music is awesome too.

My only complaint is that it seems to crash quite a lot, especially when I’m near the end of a level. Ugh. I’ve also noticed a lot of the sound effects previously appeared in a Flash game called Tower of Greed, and they just feel out of place since I’m so used to hearing them there.