Gaming

If you're looking for underrated indies, I'd recommend Ctrl Alt Ego, a fantastic attempt at an indie immersive sim in the style of Deus Ex or System Shock, and Worlds, a unique stealth-action-exploration game that feels like something from the early 2000s, though it does require putting up with some ambitious indie jank. I'm not sure which games I would call my favourites, but those are definitely up there.

Just got addicted to Path of Achra. Basically think rogue-lite, old school pixel graphics, and you just build around synergies and you can let your character go auto battle. It's sooooo satisfying when you do a turn and it's just 5-10 seconds of pixels flying everywhere. Path of Achra has a demo, which as I understand it is the full game, just 1 revision behind. So you could play it for hours without buying the actual game.

Also Rogue Legacy 2 is wonderful if you like platformers/rogue-lite games.

Always looking for teammates

If you haven't experienced the sadistic, rage inducing masterpiece known as Jump King I highly recommend it

Gonna have to be Pokemon Eternity https://discord.gg/TZWNXrxK

I really love Monster Sanctuary by Moi Rai Games. So much so that I played it to 100% on Xbox, Steam, Switch, and the Game pass version on Windows, which for whatever reason is different than the Xbox versions.

It's a metroidvania game with Pokemon-style creature collecting and turn based three-on-three battles (or six-on-six with three at a time plus swapping when a monster faints). It's insane how viable every monster can be with the right build.

Several newgame+ modes to enable too!

This is such a difficult question to answer since theres so many ways to categorise your answer. But in terms of sheer time played , Slay the Spire wins out for me. That game just swallows days.

Nothing crazy, but Spelunky 2 kept me entertained for a few solid hours (+40 hours). Simple permadeath platformer with tight controls. Also has coop and multiplayer, altho I recommend not touching multiplayer until you finished the game.

Pathologic. It's not even close, honestly. If you're the sort of person who reads the novels you were assigned in English class and actually goes "fuck yeah this is awesome and I wanna write an essay about it now", Pathologic is that in video game form.

I think my favorites of all time are Slay the Spire and Kingdom: Two Crowns. I've spent hundreds of hours in both and I just can't stop coming back to them all of the time.

I want to promote Monochrome Heights. It's a deceptively simple, kaizo platformer based on color.

https://pdyx.itch.io/black-and-white-game-jam-2022

If you liked playing with toy soldiers as a kid, I'd highly recommend checking out Foxhole.

Oh I'm a huge fan of NGU Idle. It is an obscenely deep idle game, that is fairly unknown outside of idle game fans. Its written with a very self-referencial sense of humor, and I have over 100 hours in it.

Since so many people have already mentioned Stardew Valley, I'll go for some lesser-known ones:

• Zero Ranger (this links to the demo): no joke, probably one of the best shoot 'em ups (or shmups) I've ever played. Sure, there are more challenging ones like DoDonPachi but in terms of visuals, sound, and even story I don't think there's anything that tops it. It's also really weird at times but it's so, so engrossing.
• Death Trash (also has a demo inside): a 2D action RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world full of eldritch horrors. It starts like Fallout but it gets weird fast. The visuals and the overall sound are purposefully harsh and unsettling, the difficulty is...not easy. But if you like something a bit different from the norm, it's, again, pretty engrossing and think you'll love it.

You should check out Inscryption. Deck-builder with amazing story.

Maybe not underrated, but Darkwood blew my mind.

I’ve really enjoyed Slay the Princess. Repeat the same three scenes ad infinitum to get all possible outcomes

• Ship of Fools - if you have a player 2, this game is so much fun and chaos. However, it suffers from a desperate need for optimisation and bug fixing. I have it on Steam, and all I can see when I launch the game is a black screen. I have to join my partner's game to play.

My laptop's about 4 years old and it's not that much of a slouch, so to see so many issues for it is a bit annoying. However, it's a very fun game, and they're coming out with new content, so it's still worth a buy on sale.

• Death's Door - You play as a cute crow that kills things. Bosses are pretty fun. Music is enjoyable. On the switch loading is a bit slow after deaths, but it's a very pretty isometric boss killing game that's not hard for the sake of being hard.

• Oxygen Not Included - If you like building things and keeping people alive, this game is really so much fun. If you enjoy a stylised cartoon aesthetic, a steep learning curve and your duplicants accidentally vomitting in your water source, give this a go.

hyping a local gamedev here- little hellions! it's a "fighter", you don't actually have any punches or kicks, but you do have a big hook that can essentially swap places between you and someone else...