Chroma squad, if you like fire emblem type gameplay this is an hidden gem with geniunely funny dialogue (may be dated since i played it like 6 years ago) and beautiful pixel art.

Its not as obscure as other recommendations but i feel like it didnt get the praise it deserved.

LUNACID: its a dungeon crawler in the vein pf old fromsoft games like kingsfield and shadow tower. It is such a vibe. The soundtrack is amazing, and there are tonnes of areas to explore. Cool npcs, and super relaxing hub area. There is so much to find and see. Also the creator is an enby so thats cool too.

NORTHERN JOURNEY: fps adventure game using medieval weapons where you go on a northern journey to find a maguffin for a mysterious flute player. You go across beautiful (Norway inspired) landscapes while having to fight off massive bugs, spiders, witches, trolls, snakes, and other such beasts. Very beautiful but tense game.

cosmic jam

but thats because its a game I’m making and its not done

Hammer & Sickle, a rather interesting Russian turn-based squad tactics game. It’s sort of a sequel to Silent Storm, and that one seems to be decently well-known, at least among fans of the genre, but H&S is a lot more obscure.

There’s some caveats, namely that the difficulty can get kind of bullshit at times, and the quest design is pretty harsh (with a lot of missions having hidden time limits), but it gets a lot of bonus points in my book for having you play as a communist agent fighting a neo-fascist conspiracy in West Germany, and actually bringing up stuff like Western countries recruiting Nazis for their intelligence services. And the gameplay’s still pretty solid even with the difficulty balancing issues, although the good parts are mostly inherited from Silent Storm.

I also find it really interesting from a game-design perspective, in that it’s a relatively short game (by the standards of the genre at least, it’s still a lot more than, say, a CoD campaign, especially if you spend a bunch of time running around with no idea what you’re supposed to do) but with a ton of reactivity and alternative paths. Yes, there’s hidden failure conditions all over the place, but the game doesn’t actually just end - each one of those is its whole alternate plot branch.