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Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (2000)
It’s said that there are more terrible RPGMaker games than stars in the visible universe, but Lisa the Painful is proof that infinite G*mers making infinite RPGMaker games will eventually make one of the greatest games of all time.
It’s funny as hell, decently hard, and the gameplay and story integrate seamlessly in a way that most turn-based RPGs completely fail to do. It’s got a dark and memorable story about addiction, violence, and mental illness. It’s even got Terry Hintz (CW: Terry is extremely handsome)!
On the topic of obscurity, RPGmaker games that get a lot of attention like LISA are in that weird place for me like… are they really obscure or not? I say this as the game gets nothing but praise from a lot of people, and is one of those games that people think of when you bring up “good RPGmaker games.” I do know of other RPGmaker games that are a lot more obscure, as people rarely talk about them, if ever.
I liked Jazzpunk (don’t think that counts as all that obscure though, lol). It was pretty funny. Costs money.
There was this game called N about a little ninja running around collecting gold, that was fun. Its free.
Aurora 4x (which is free) was interesting, but I don’t think I ever got into it. If you’re into space strategy sims and don’t care about graphics at all it’s interesting.
Children of A Dead Earth is another space sim, this one focusing on “realistic space combat.” It uses n-body physics, the ships look like long rods, if the enemy ship gets blasted in half they can still fight back, and if you do your orbital maneuvers wrong you’ll probably just slide past the enemy in 15 seconds and have to wait a couple days before engaging again. The developer kind of abandoned it, but it is completely finished. Still costs money, rarely goes on sale.
Shapez io was interesting if you’re into… automating? I don’t know what kind of genre it would fit into, but if you found factorio appealing or making afk minecraft farms you’d probably like shapez.io. Costs money.
Workers & Resources is a city builder with a Soviet republic theme. It’s pretty dope taking this relatively poor and agrarian area and bringing them stronk soviet industry jobs and equitable housing and public services. Costs money.
This is actually obscure, but as a kid I had this game cd with like 200 freeware games on it. One of them was Castle of the Winds. It’s a janky roguelike that is definitely showing its age from 23 years ago, but I like it if only for the nostalgia. 100% free, since 1993 baby.
Killer7 for the gamecube is a completely bizarre on the rails shooter where you have to kill some weird-ass monsters. Also on the gamecube was custom robo which I remember fondly, don’t know if it stands up though.
I haven’t seen many people talking about it, possibly because it’s still in early access, but Grand Tactician: The Civil War is just about the most grognardiest game I’ve ever played, and it’s amazing.
You start off during James Buchanan’s lame duck period, the South is seceding but several forts have refused to surrender their arms. You can raise some militia forces and set a few policies but you can’t do much until Lincoln is inaugurated, and that starts the standoff where the Civil War either starts with you triggering the Militia Act or the South firing on Fort Sumter.
If you’ve ever wanted to play a strategy game where you can track the career of every single one of your army’s officers, where securing proper equipment is done on a per-unit basis (and most of those units have contract lengths that start at a very short three months), where you have imperfect information about enemy movements and unit strengths, where when you issue orders there is a realistic delay representing the time it takes for your orders to travel to the front lines, then this is the game that finally answered my prayers.
The only downside is that actually finishing the campaign takes about as long as the actual Civil War. You’ll need to have a lot of patience for systematically liberating towns, fighting skirmishes, blockading ports/rivers, moving up and keeping your supply lines intact as you go, one mile at a time all the way from Richmond to Atlanta. It’s a very specific kind of satisfying, but it is very satisfying.
I haven’t tried playing as the south yet, because fuck that.
I put almost 100 hours into my summer car. It’s part car mechanic simulator, part survival game. Something about it just keeps drawing me in. Also there’s a sequel coming sometime.
Slime Rancher is really cute and fun if you’ve got $20 to drop. It’s fairly short but you could put some serious time in just vibing.
I don’t know if Oxygen Not Included is considered obscure here, but it’s a base builder popular with the Factorio kind of crowd.
The Long Dark is a fantastic survival game where you crash-land in the Canadian wilderness and play an open ended survival game where the only point is to live as long as possible.
Quadrilateral Cowboy. Just look up the videos. If it looks like you’ll like it, you definitely will. Only took about 5 hours to finish though.
SpaceChem is basically a programming game, lay down complicated paths with operators and decision statements in loops that intertwine to meet the goal of each stage. Never beat it, but its a ton of fun if you’re into that sort of thing.
Syberia is on sale on steam for $2 right now, haven’t played it in at least a decade but it is my most memorable old school point and click adventure game.
