WindowKill - $4.99

The most clever bullet hell I’ve ever played, best experienced on mouse and keyboard.

Windosill - $2.99

More of an interactive art piece. Very short but I still think about it years later. (Some of their other stuff is available online for free and is similarly enjoyable)

Magic Wand - $3.99

Like a surreal, jumbled mess that seems to parody a badly translated JRPG. Another short and sweet experience.

HYPER DEMON - $14.99*

Like a nightmarish fever dream. If you like old school FPS mechanics like rocket jumping and bunnyhopping you’ll feel right at home. This one is a little difficult to show people gameplay of because it looks impossible to decipher, but when you’re actually playing it and really start to get entranced, it’s an experience like nothing else. The way it gives you a 360 fov is an incredible mechanic.
*(It’s also 40% off for ~40 hours as of this comment, making it $8.99)

Chicory: A Colorful Tale - $19.99

My favorite game of all time. Adorable puzzle game where you paint the world, with a story about what makes someone an artist. One thing I really like about this is the open ended way it lets you approach creative tasks; It’s up to you to decide how much you want to invest, there’s no scoring system to gamify the art portions, which is very in-line with the story to me.
Edit: Oh, and a great soundtrack by Lena Raine!

I don’t see it here so I’ll mention Ty the Tasmanian Tiger! Really fun collectathon platformer. Played through the more recent remaster on PC and realized it’s very easy, but I spent a huge amount of time as a kid just running around the maps and hub area.

Tristan Newcomb? I get all my gaming news from him. His Donkey Kong Country review is great.

Transcendental Youth - The Mountain Goats

Title track and closer of one of my all-time favorite albums. The horns are just perfect and the lyrics are beautiful. Makes me think of those little moments of getting lost in something good during bad times, a short escape you know won’t last.

I don’t know if you were around for the launch, but it was a pretty infamously bad because practically none of the promised features were present. Landing on asteroids, fighting space stations, significant factions, big space battles, sand/water planets, complex crafting, creatures affecting the environment, etc.

I think Hello Games has done a great job turning things around, and shown that they do respect their players, but the launch was definitely a disaster.

Pan’s Labyrinth
The way it’s telling this dark fairy tale with the backdrop of fascism in Francoist Spain, combining real world and fantasy, is just so incredibly well done. It also has one of the most memorably evil antagonists of any media I’ve experienced, and some very creepy and beautiful creature designs done with practical effects. Everything just comes together perfectly in this movie.

Warframe. Always coming back to Warframe. It’s just too fun making my murdermachines look pretty, and there’s always something new to work toward. The game also runs incredibly well for how good it looks and how much is going on at once, I should NOT be able to run it at max settings 4k at 60fps with a mid-range gaming PC.
Plus it’s really fun getting those big red damage numbers on enemies with the right builds, and I still haven’t played another game with a movement system as fun as this one.

I’ve also been having fun with Armored Core VI, minus the out of place bosses. They definitely just put them in to be like “Look! We have the FromSoft™ bosses!” I ended up making a cheese build to effectively skip them. The actual mech combat parts are really fun though, and I love trying all the different kinds of loadouts! Runs well on a Steam Deck too which is always good.

Oh they’re really impressive, Overtime is another great one.

Awesome! The AI summarizer is very useful, and it gives quality search results from my experience with the free trial. $10 a month still seems a little high for a search engine, though I’m definitely eyeing it more now…

Hopefully we see more competition in the future with paid search engines, this seems to be new territory where everyone is still pretty unsure of the right pricing. I think $5 a month is going to be the sweet spot for me.

Removed by mod

I hate that it gets dismissed as just being cosmetic. I love making cool looking characters in games, it’s really fun and is part of the content for me, especially if it’s multiplayer.

Their range is so impressive. I especially have been enjoying Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava! One of my favorite albums of the last year, and has some elements of jazz fusion/funk (though I guess you wouldn’t exactly call it a jazz album lol).

For folk I’ve gotta recommend The Mountain Goats! Specifically their earlier stuff, the newer is maybe a little less folk and more just indie rock (but also very good). The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee are what people usually recommend for the first album, but We Shall All Be Healed is my absolute favorite, and what I’m recommending.

This album specifically deals with themes of struggle and addiction. They have this very “everything is fucked but we push through” way about a lot of their songs that I just love. My favorite song off this album is Letter From Belgium. This band is an amazing source of emotional support through hard times and the community is fantastic!

“All of the songs on We Shall All Be Healed are based on people John used to know. Most of them are probably dead or in jail by now.”

You got it!

Yeah!

Nanaaaaa nanananana na naa na